What's the matter with closed adoption? EVERYTHING

Lorraine

Sometimes it is necessary to remind new readers that adoption--particularly closed adoption--is far from the altruistic institution that society and, typically, as a reflection of society, how the media portrays it. Today's post explores that thought and was triggered by a comment FMF received recently at a 2009 blog, Why Is Adoption Like Slavery?

Making the comparison, despite how it is framed, usually draws a number of comments from people unhappy with the comparison; yet at its core, the contracts of adoption still drawn up today in states where birth certificates are altered and thus, original ties are obliterated, result in social engineering as wrong as slavery was; the contracts involving adoption also treat the individual as a legal res to be handed over to another party, without input from said individual, at the time of delivery, and into the unending future.  As the late Cyril Means wrote: "Apart from slavery there is no other instance in our laws, or in any other jurisprudence in civilized system of jurisprudence, in which a contract made among adults, in respect of an infant, can bind that child once he reaches his majority."

Broken Bonds: The undeniable connection between slavery and adoption

Heather Andrea Williams

Though some find it jarring to see "slavery" and "adoption" in the same sentence, the indisputable connection is the contract at the heart of each institution. Both bind individuals to a lifelong covenant between other persons and the state, without ever giving the individual so bound a say in such a contact. Because slavery elicits so many awful images of cruelty and bondage, the connection is often inflammatory. Yet it remains.

A remarkable book, Help Me To Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery makes the similarities ever more clear. Author Heather Andrea Williams, a historian and associate professor at the University of North Carolina, has amassed a rich collection of newspaper advertisements, letters, diaries, and written narratives attesting to the worst legacy of slavery: the separation of families, and the lifelong search for reunion. "Babies were snatched from their mothers' breasts and sold to speculators. Children was separated from sisters and brothers

Were any of the children killed in Newtown adopted?

Lorraine

We have been silent for the last few days because we were stunned by the senseless death of 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, and the invariable hand-wringing over the lack of better, stronger gun controls here in the United States. It appears that now after this tragedy--after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, and now Newtown--we may actually find the political willpower to beat back the National Rifle Association's insistence on Guns for Everyone! Any Kind of Guns! and pass serious gun legislation.

Australia and South Africa previously had gun-filled cultures such as ours, but national tragedies finally pushed them to seriously restrict the ease by which anyone can purchase guns and bullets designed for war. And you know what?

Illegal Immigrant Fights for Custody of Young Son

David Stonner/Joplin Globe

Encarnacion Bail Romero confers with attorney Omar Riojas during a custody hearing

One of the nightmare custody battles got underway today--mother loses custody of her baby, another couple is allowed to adopt him, but mother wants her child, now five, back.

Guatemalan-born Encarnacion Bail Romero, who came to the U.S. illegally in 2006 while pregnant was working at a poultry processing plant  in Missouri in 2007 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers conducted a raid looking for illegals. Along with about 100 other undocumented