Death By Adoption: Joss Shawyer (1979)

If you ever get a chance to read this book, get it. Out of print now, it woke up a lot of people when it was first published (1979) and it is just as true today as it was then. This is the opening paragraph of the first chapter:

"Adoption is a violent act, a political act of aggression towards a woman who has supposedly offended the sexual mores by committing the unforgivable act of not suppressing her sexuality, and therefore not keeping it for trading purposes through traditional marriage. The crime is a grave one, for she threatens the very fabric of our society. The penalty is severe. She is stripped of her child by a variety of subtle and not so subtle manoeuvres and then brutally abandoned." - Joss Shawyer, Death by Adoption, Cicada Press (1979)

Your opinions

Not that i don't care, gentle readers, that you are probably reading this blog and have opinions on it. I'm not just here to argue them with you. Feel free to discuss this blog elsewhere. Link to it, bring up the topic on your discussion boards and email groups. Go right ahead. Discuss away! But no, I actually won't be reading your emails, and nor will I be switching the setting so you can comment.

If you are a natural parent or adopted person who needs emotional support, who is suffering adoption-separation trauma, disembabyment, the theft of your identity, the search for your lost family member(s), then I definitely recommend you visit MSN Adoptese, a great board run by a great therapist, Joe Soll. Buy his two books on Adoption Healing, and you won't regret it.

I admire bloggers such as Claudia who don't mind arguments and debates breaking out in her blog. More power to her! But I just don't have the time in my life to address all your comments, questions, opinions, etc. -- house, job, school, my children (3 of whom have learning disabilities), a disabled elderly mother, and a disabled neice that I try to help as much as I can. It all takes time. Nevermind my own PTSD, unresolved grief, and depression that I struggle with every day. So, please feel free to discuss this blog, find a nice place and a cup of tea and go right ahead. It just won't be in a "comments" section here.

International Adoption: Same game, different name

On another blog, someone pointed out to me that indeed infant adoptions do happen freqently in Australia, they are just of babies poached internationally. Quite right, i should have said that of "domestic infant adoptions," very few occur in Australia (will cover this in another blog entry). Yes, Australians are plundering poorer nations at the same rate as do other wealthy whites ... Canadians, Americans, Swedes, Brits, Germans ... just like through colonization we exploited Third World nations' resources and their labor, we now take their babies. It is sad. Adoption is the exploitation of those who don't have the power to keep their babies in the face of human rights abuses.

And the real oxymoron is that people who are aware of human rights abuses and exploitation, who are aware of how much damage the last 4 centuries of colonization has done to non-white nations, are oblivious to how they are carrying on the same pattern, the same exploitation. Happily bringing home that African, Korean, or Guatamalan baby, they forget entirely about the family whose only way of feeding their baby was to bring it to the American-funded orphanage ... The cost of an international adoption can be tens of thousands of dollars paid to lawyers, baby-brokers, "donations" to the orphanage, etc. This money, if given to the natural family, would prevent their dismemberment in the first place!

Many mothers visit their children in these orphanages when they are allowed to, heart-broken about having to put them there in the first place. A REAL orphan has NO living family! No mother or father, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles. No-one. A child with family living, family who have been denied their basic human rights, is not an "orphan" and does not need another substitute family. They need their own family, and nowhere does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights state that a child is not a human and does not deserve the same rights.

You'll still have to wait ....

Not much activity here on the blog. I admit it. Want to know nose-to-the-grindstone studying? Take a master's degree. So, you'll have to wait until the end of classes until I get back to writing more. Until then, I'd like to post a quote from the site "Transracial Abductees" :

"Abduction is the word we like better than adoption. "Adoption" conceals the unequal power between abductors and abductees, and in the abduction industry in general."