Schlagwort: rights of the child in adoption

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India Abandoned Me

von Kris Rao, adopted from India to the USA, recently discovered their adoption as a Late Discovery adoptee.

I came across an Indian based podcast called The Filter Koffee Podcast hosted by Karthik Nagarajan. He sits with a guest and as he describes it, has a conversation. “The kind that leaves you richer. The kind that only coffee can bring out.”



Most recently in January of 2022, he sat down with Poulomi Pavini Shukla, a supreme court lawyer, and spoke about orphans in India. This particular episode was titled Why India’s orphans are twice abandoned?

Without getting into too many details of the podcast, here are a few key topics they went over:

  • The different schemes that have been put in place for children in need of care.
    (Government Schemes in India are launched by the government to address the social and economic welfare of its citizens)
  • The money/budget put towards orphans. Which equates to less than 1 rupee per day per child.
  • The estimated number of orphans in India as reported by UNICEF.
  • How orphanages are run and how many should be set up in each district.
  • What happens to abandoned children and their lives as orphans.
  • The differences between female and male orphans.

One of the things that struck me was the estimated number of orphans in India. According to UNICEF, there are 29.6 million orphans in India, approximately 30 million.

And as an adoptee, as one of these so-called social orphans, all I could think of while listening to this podcast was:

Why does India have 30 million orphans in the first place?

What is my country doing that is creating this problem?

What is my country doing to prevent this?

To me, it seems the biggest problem isn’t just that we have 30 million orphans in need of care, it’s that we have 60 million parents that gave up and abandoned their children. And it’s still happening. These numbers are still growing.

Where’s that conversation?

Is it because of religion, caste? What other factors are in play here?

What about reproductive justice?

I am one of the millions of social orphans to have come out of India. And it leads me to ask, is it because my existence brings “shame” upon my family the reason I am an orphan? Does my existence sully the family name?

Was my conception so problematic in the eyes of India’s society and culture that my mother felt compelled to abandon me?

I once wrote the only reason I was adopted is because society somehow failed my mother and forced her to make a decision she shouldn’t have had to in the first place.

What are we doing to change that?

From listening to the podcast, I understand helping orphans in India is vital and needs attention. Having lived in India for 11 years myself, and visited orphanages, yes, I get it.

I think it’s important that every child is taken care of. But why does that include separating them from their families? Why should a child lose all legal ties to their first and biological parents and families (including extended kin) in order to simply be taken care of?

And most importantly, what are we doing for the “social orphans” who are now adults that wish to know their true roots? Access to our ancestry, history, etc.

How can we remove this stigma and taboo I keep hearing about adoption in India?

As indicated by the title, Poulomi says that orphans from India are orphaned twice. “Once by being orphans of their parents and once by being orphans of the state or orphans of the law.”

For international adoptees like myself, it feels as though India abandoned me a third time when it sent me off to be another country’s problem.

The unfortunate and unwarranted circumstances that made me one of India’s “social orphans” put me on a path of being adopted.

And by being adopted not only did it take away my choices but it also took away my chances of finding my roots. 

For more from Kris, check out their latest blog: Kris Shares about Adoptee Anger

Follow Kris at:
Kris-404:RootsNotFound
Twitter @adoptedindian
Instagram @indianlatediscoveryadoptee

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Stimmen gegen illegale Adoptionen sprechen bei den Vereinten Nationen

On 10 March 2022, I was honoured to present in English a short 10 minute presentation representing our coalition Voices Against Illegal Adoption (VAIA) to the United Nations.

The meeting was attended by:
The Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED)
the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC)
the Human Rights Committee (CCPR)
the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-recurrence
the Special Rapporteur on the Sale and Sexual Exploitation of Children including child prostitution, child pornography and other child sexual abuse material
the Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, especially women and children,
and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

Due to the work of Racines Perdues Raíces Perdidas Und Zurück zu den Wurzeln, our coalition VAIA has been privy to the joint work being done by these UN Committee members who are working on a Joint Statement about illegal intercountry adoptions.

This is what I shared in my statement:

Good day, good evening to you all!

My name is Lynelle Long and I am an intercountry adoptee residing in Australia, proxy adopted via a private lawyer, out of the Vietnam War in the early 70s.

I would like to thank you all for the honour of being here and for including our voices for this most important occasion. I was delighted to read the draft text that you have all contributed to. It reflects many of the points we covered in our lived experience perspective paper that I presented to The Hague 2019 Working Group on Preventing and Addressing Illicit Practices in Intercountry Adoption. It warms my heart to know that so many of you are our allies, to help and encourage States to respond in the right and ethical ways to our illegal and illicit adoptions. Thank you!

The message that the draft text conveys is absolutely aligned with what we also seek. Your action from this meeting and if this text gets published, gives us a ray of hope in what has often felt like a never ending sea of dismay and loss as we’ve spent years fighting and advocating for ourselves. It is wonderful to no longer feel alone but to know we have strong allies who also advocate for us. We are the children for whom intercountry adoption is all about. We don’t remain “children” forever. We grow up to have our own voice and we want to speak out and ensure the lessons of the past are learned and that practices and legislation are changed to prevent the same wrongs from happening to others, and to address and rectify the wrongs done to us.

Today I introduce myself to you as a Representative for the Voices Against Illegal Adoptions coalition (VAIA)

Our coalition was created by associations that campaign for the recognition of illegal adoptions, our right to origins, for much need legal changes to support us as victims, and requesting institutional, state, diplomatic and consular assistance to rectify the wrongs done to us.

We officially present ourselves today to the United Nations as a coalition of organizations forming a civil society campaign, it’s an initiative led by adoptees with lived experience expertise.

We are non-governmental and non funded organizations, associations, foundations and collectives made up of adopted persons, biological families and adoptive families.

Together we have launched a civil society campaign to defend our rights and it is in this way, that we are presenting ourselves to you, the United Nations.

Our goals are:

– to demand the recognition of illegal adoptions and their recognition as a crime against humanity when they follow the abduction, sale or trafficking of children and there is sufficient evidence to show that they took place as part of a generalised or systematic attack against the civilian population.

– to present the political and legal actions taken by each organisation around the world.

– to call on States to engage in a dialogue with us on the recognition of responsibility for what has happened and to obtain redress.

Today, we would like to inform the different working groups, the High Commissions, the special reporters, the diplomatic missions and the experts of the different committees, in particular the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Committee on Enforced Disappearances as well as the Human Rights Committee, of the international situation regarding illegal adoptions in connection with human trafficking.

We feel it is essential that there is uniformity in responses following the occurrence of illegal adoptions.

We believe it is also abnormal that depending on the country in which the adopted person resides, that we are not recognised as victims.

We also want to draw attention to the fact that legal proceedings for illegal adoptions are confronted most of the time with problems that prevent us from seeking justice and reparation. For example the statute of limitations, also the difficulty to establish the facts of what happened in our cases when records are kept from us or have been destroyed.

We would like our input and experiences to be considered by the United Nations.

We look forward to seeing your final statement and will do our best to make ourselves available to work with all stakeholders to see its implementation.

Thank you very much for your time, for listening to us and for allowing us to participate.

Together with Racines Perdues Raíces Perdidas we will keep you informed of the progress of our work at the UN.

Here is the list of organisations who make up Voices Against Illegal Adoption (VAIA):

Foundation Racines Perdues
Chilenische Adoptierte weltweit (CAW)
Collectif Adoptie Schakel
InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV)
Association Reconnaissance Adoptions Illégales à l’International en France (RAÏF)
Empreintes Vivantes
Engel planen
Collectif des adoptés français du Mali
Collectif des parents adoptifs du Sri Lanka
Rwanda en Zoveel meer
Association DNA Inde
Zurück zu den Wurzeln
Collectif des adoptés du Sri-Lanka
Identitätsschutz von Kindern

Resource:

ICAV Perspective Paper: Lived Experience Suggestions for Responses to Illicit Adoptions (in French or English)

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What I Lost When I Was Adopted

I look around me today and I have no family in sight. I was torn at the roots when I was born in the Philippines in destitute poverty in 1985, orphaned at birth and adopted in 1987.

Dually, my intercountry adoption process had systematically erased my entire heritage and knowledge of my ancestors. While also permanently bonding me to people that had no interest in preserving or keeping in tact my birth nationality and culture.

I don’t know why that had to happen in the adoption process.

Why the past needed to be so efficiently erased as if it never existed.

Why did any of this have to be erased?

The narratives of my grandparents, the narratives of my great grandparents, the voices of all the flesh and blood and bones that made my DNA today.

Why did their stories have to leave me?

Was it because I was brown?

Was it because I was born from the Philippines, which in history has always been a developing, marginalized country with a colonized past?

Was it because I was a vulnerable child who didn’t have a say or rights to my own life at that time? Was it because my memories and my identity didn’t matter?

Did I have to be separated from my own birth country and my own birth country’s mother tongue to be saved by a more privileged family?    

And why was the remaining biographical information so unbelievably useless and irrelevant? And why did I have to wait until I was 18 to receive even that information, which parts of it, I later found out from a reunion with my birth mother—was not even true.

Am I complaining because I was orphaned?

Or am I complaining because there were parts of this adoption process that was systemically inhuman including adopting me to a Midwestern Caucasian couple that had shown no interest in preserving my cultural heritage or keeping myself connected to my own birth country’s language. As it shows, even in that adoption documentation, they had no interest in my heritage.

Little did I know—that if I had kept this connection when I was a vulnerable brown child and basically purchased by a privileged white family, I would have been able to return to the Philippines in my adulthood, my birth country, and I would have been able to speak fluently, which would have given me a much easier pathway in reclaiming my citizenship.

Even my birth name, why did my adoptive parents who never met me, suddenly have the right to change my birth name when they adopted/purchased me?

Why kind of rights had been given to them?

What rights were taken away from me in this dual process?

Where did my citizenship in my birth country go when I was adopted?

Why did any of this have to leave me—when I was adopted?

You can read Desiree’s article: On the Road to Recovery, follow her at Weebly or Instagram @starwoodletters.

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To Know Your Origins is a Privilege!

Who am I? by Morgan Rose

To know your parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents …

To know your medical history; whether your mother died of cancer, your father suffered heart problems, whether your grandmother had diabetes …

To know who you look like, where your traits come from, whether your face in the mirror is a reflection of someone else ..

To know your birth story, date, time, season of the year, what hospital you were born in …

To know your country of birth, culture, heritage, language, customs, religion …

To be surrounded by people who look like you racially …

To know your origins is a privilege!

These are the things I don’t take for granted because I didn’t have any of these whilst growing up. I was born in one country, adopted to another, by a family of different race. I’m a transracial intercountry adoptee. I’ve spent a huge portion of my life wondering, searching, trying to learn about my origins.

In my community of intercountry adoptees – to know your origins is definitely a privilege!

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Implications of China’s One Child Policy Expansion

von Hannah, adopted from China to Canada.

Guizhou province—”Humans have only one earth, we must control population growth!” (Adam Century)

Born in China

I was born in China. That’s it, end of origin story. That’s all I know. I was probably born in Jiangsu Province, but even that’s not certain. The earliest known record of my existence is a medical examination when I was estimated to be 20 days old. Many of my friends know where they were born, what hospital, what day, some even know the time down to the second as well as how long it took. I know none of that. They know who was present at the time they were born, what family members they met first. I know none of that. My legal birth date is estimated from when I was found, I have no original birth registration. My name was given to me by orphanage officials. I don’t know what my name was or if my biological parents had even bothered to give me a name. The record of where I was found and when have been lost or forgotten. My (adoptive) mother wrote in a scrapbook which county they were told I was found in. There are no records of it, I have no abandonment certificate like some Chinese adoptees do and I have no recorded finding ad. For many intents and purposes, my life began when I was adopted by a white Canadian couple when I was under a year old. I am one of thousands of Chinese children adopted by foreigners after China opened its doors to intercountry adoption in 1991.

Like most Chinese adoptees, I was adopted under the shadow of the One Child Policy, first introduced in 1979. The One Child Policy (the unofficial name for the birth restriction policy) dictated that couples were only allowed to have one child. There were exceptions for rural families and ethnic minorities, but the policy was implemented and unequally enforced across the country, with varying levels of violence. The cultural preference for sons is well-publicized and is believed to be the reason behind why the majority of Chinese adoptions under the One Child Policy were girls. It is widely known and accepted among the Chinese adoptee community, the majority of us who were born female, that we were relinquished (or stolen) because of our sex at birth.

China’s changing birth restrictions

On May 31, 2021, I checked the news and saw a CBC article that said China had eased its birth restrictions and would now allow couples to have up to three children, instead of the previous two, which was implemented in 2016. I remember reading a similar news article in 2015 when it was announced that China was relaxing the One Child Policy for the first time in decades to allow for two children per couple. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, I was happy that the restrictions were loosened and sad that they were still policing reproductive rights. And yet, this morning when seeing the news, I felt much more strongly. Perhaps it is because during the pandemic, I made an effort to connect to the adoptee community, through joining online Facebook groups, run by adoptees for adoptees. I started trying to (re)learn Mandarin, which I had long since forgotten, despite being put in Mandarin lessons when I was little. Maybe it’s because of the spotlight put on anti-Black and anti-Asian racism due to the multiple high-profile police killings of Black people, the surge in Asian hate crimes due to the racist rhetoric about the origin of the pandemic, that’s forced me to more closely examine my own racial and cultural identity as a Canadian, transracial, Chinese, intercountry adoptee. But perhaps most of all, it’s because I have two sisters, also adopted from China, something that wasn’t allowed in China for most families until now.  

Mixed Emotions

For many reasons, reading the news article on China’s new relaxed policy, gave me many more mixed feelings. Again, the happiness at a relaxed policy and the sadness and disappointment at the continued policing of women’s bodies and reproductive rights. But this time, it came with another feeling: anger. I am angry. It feels like a slap to the face for all Chinese adoptees and their biological families who were (forcefully) separated under the One Child Policy. It feels like it was for nothing, even more than before. What was the point of my biological parents relinquishing me (if that’s what happened) if they were just going to change the policy later? What was the point in creating the policy when the birth rate was already falling, as it does when women are given greater access to education, careers and contraceptives, and now they want to increase the birth rate again? What was the point of stripping me of my name, my birthday, my culture, when the driving force behind my abandonment has been (semi-)reversed? If Chinese couples are now allowed to have three children (the same number as my sisters and I), then what was the point of the policy which drove thousands of children, mostly girls, to be abandoned, aborted and trafficked?

Mixed Emotions by KwangHo Shin

Now the policy has been changed and so what? I’m still a Chinese adoptee, living thousands of kilometres from my birth country, with no easy way to connect to any living blood relatives, unless I want to attempt a search. I’m still a Chinese adoptee who doesn’t know my birth name, birthday or birthplace. South Korean adoptees fought for and successfully lobbied the South Korean government for recognition and (limited) reparations. They have been given a way to recover their South Korean citizenship and are now eligible to apply for the F-4 (Korean Heritage) Visa. During the pandemic, the South Korean government sent free face masks for Korean adoptees. China does not acknowledge dual citizenship, nor does it provide adoptees with a special visa that would allow them an easier way return to their birth country. China does not acknowledge intercountry adoptees or how the thousands of children who were adopted internationally were direct consequences of the One Child Policy. The policy has been loosened and now Chinese couples can have up to three children, like my family in Canada. The policy that likely drove my adoption has been loosened and yet nothing has changed for me, and the Chinese government moves on.

What If’s

I don’t like thinking of the what-ifs and what-could-be’s. I don’t like imagining what my life could have been if I was never relinquished (or stolen), if I was never adopted, if I was adopted by a Chinese couple instead etc. But this recent announcement has forced me to think about the what-ifs. Specifically, “What if my birth family had been able to keep me because they weren’t restricted by the One Child Policy?” I’m happy and satisfied with my current life. Despite the occasional hiccups, racist micro-aggressions and identity struggles, I wouldn’t change anything. That doesn’t mean I can’t and won’t mourn the life that was taken from me due to the One Child Policy. I mourn that I don’t know what my biological parents named me (if they did). I mourn that I don’t know the date, time and location where I was born. I mourn that I don’t know, and may never know, if I look like any of my biological relatives. I mourn that I will likely never know the full story behind my adoption. I mourn that as a Canadian, I will never feel fully comfortable in China and that as a Chinese adoptee, I will never be seen as fully Canadian. And I’m angry that for the Chinese government, they can change the One Child Policy and move on, while I and thousands of others will bear the consequences for the rest of our lives.

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I Want My Brothers Back

von Erika Fonticoli, born in Colombia adopted to Italy.

What are brothers and sisters? For me, they are small or big allies of all or no battle. In the course of my life I realised that a brother or a sister can be the winning weapon against every obstacle that presents itself and, at the same time, that comforting closeness that we feel even when there is no battle to fight. A parent can do a lot for their children: give love, support, protection, but there are things we would never tell a parent. And… what about a brother? There are things in my life I’ve never been able to tell anyone, and although I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my sister since childhood, there’s nothing of me that she doesn’t know about.

At the worst moment of my life, when I was so hurt and I started to be afraid to trust the world, she was the hand I grabbed among a thousand others. We are two totally different people, maybe we have only playfulness and DNA in common, but she still remains the person from whom I feel more understood and supported. I love my adoptive parents, I love my friends, but she, she’s the other part of me. Sometimes we are convinced that the power of a relationship depends on the duration of it or the amount of experiences lived together. Yeah, well.. I did not share many moments with my sister, it was not an easy relationship ours, but every time I needed it she was always at my side. I didn’t have to say anything or ask for help, she heard it and ran to me.

And the brothers found as adults? Can we say that they are worth less? I was adopted at the age of 5, with my sister who was 7 yo. For 24 years I believed I had only one other version of myself, her. Then, during the search of my origins, I discovered that I had two other brothers, little younger than me. My first reaction was shock, confusion, denial. Emotion, surprise and joy followed. Finally, to these emotions were added bewilderment and fear of being rejected by them. After all, they didn’t even know we existed, my big sister and I were strangers for them. So… how could I possibly introduce myself? I asked myself that question at least a hundred times until, immersed in a rich soup of emotions, I decided to jump. I felt within myself the irrepressible need to know them, to see them, to speak to them. It was perhaps the most absurd thing I’ve ever experienced. “Hello, nice to meet you, I’m your sister!”, I wrote to them.

Thinking about it now makes me laugh, and yet at the time I thought it was such a nice way to know each other. My younger sister, just as I feared, rejected me, or perhaps rejected the idea of having two more sisters that she had never heard of. The first few months with her were terrible, hard and full of swinging emotions, driven both by her desire to have other sisters and by her distrust of believing that it was real. It wasn’t easy, for her I was a complete stranger and yet she had the inexplicable feeling of being tied to me, the feeling of wanting me in her life without even knowing who I was. She was rejecting me and yet she wasn’t be able to not look for me, she’d look at me like I was something to study, because she was shocked that she looked so much like someone else she had never seen for 23 years.

With my brother it was totally different, he called me “sister” right away. We talked incessantly from the start, sleepless nights to tell each other, discovering little by little to be two drops of water. He was my brother from the first moment. But how is possible? I don’t know. When I set off to meet them, headed to the other side of the world, it all seemed so crazy to me. I kept telling myself: “What if they don’t like me?”, and I wondered what it would feel like to find myself face to face with them. The answer? For me, it was not a knowing each other for the first time, it was a seeing them again. Like when you move away and you don’t see your family for a long time, then when you come home to see them again
you feel moved and run to hug them. This was my first moment with them! A moment of tears, an endless embrace, followed by a quick return playful and affectionate as if life had never separated us even for a day.

So… are they worth less? Is my relationship with them less intense and authentic than that with my sister, with whom I grew up? No. I thought I had another half of me, now I feel like I have three. I see one of them every day, I constantly hear the other two for messages or video calls. There are things in my life that I can’t tell anyone, things that only my three brothers know, and in the hardest moments of my life now I have three hands that I would grab without thinking about it. I love my family, my adoptive parents and my biological mom, but my siblings are the part of my heart I couldn’t live without. Having them in my life fills me with joy, but having two of them so far from me digs a chasm inside me that often turns into a cry of lack and nostalgia. Tears behind which lie the desire to share with them all the years that have been taken from us, experiences and fraternal moments that I have lived with them for only twenty days in Colombia.

As I said earlier, in my opinion, it doesn’t matter the duration of a relationship nor the amount of experiences lived together but the quality… that said, even those rare moments to us seem a dream still unrealisable. In the most important and delicate periods of our lives we often feel overwhelmed by helplessness and the impossibility of supporting each other, because unfortunately a word of comfort is not always enough. We can write to each other, call each other, but nothing will ever replace the warmth of a hug when you feel that your heart is suffering.

In the most painful and traumatic phase of my younger sister’s life, when she started to be afraid of the world, when she thought she deserved only kicks and insults, when she thought she had no one, I wrote to her. I wrote to her every day, worried and sorrowful, and as much as I tried to pass on my love and closeness to her, I felt I couldn’t do enough. I felt helpless and useless, I felt that there was nothing I could do for her, because when I felt crushed by life it was my older sister’s embrace that made me feel protected. And that’s what my little sister wanted at that moment, a hug from me, something so small and
simple that I couldn’t give it to her because the distance prevented me from do it. And neither could our brother because he also grew up far away, in another family. I didn’t know what to do, how I could help her, she was scared and hurt. I wanted her to come live with me, her and my little nephew, so I could take care of them and help them in the most difficult moment of their lives. I’ve been looking into it for months, search after search, and then finding out that despite the DNA test recognised that we’re sisters, the world didn’t.

Legally, we were still a complete strangers, just like when we first spoke.

I would like the law to give the possibility to siblings separated from adoption to be reunited if this is the desire of both, that the law allows us to enjoy those rights that only a familial bond offers. We didn’t decide to split up, it was chosen for us, but we don’t want to blame anyone for it. We just wish we had a chance to spend the rest of our lives as a family, a sentimental and legal family for all intents and purposes. It must not be an obligation for everyone, but an opportunity for those biological brothers whose bond has survived. A chance for us perfect strangers who, in spite of everything, call ourselves family. Maybe someone will find themselves in what I felt and I’m still feeling, maybe someone else won’t, but precisely because every story is different I think there should be a chance of a happy ending for everyone. Mine would be to have my brothers back.

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The Right to Identity

by Maria Diemar, born in Chile raised in Sweden. You can access her blog at I Own My Story Maria Diemar where she published this on Aug 23.

The right to one’s identity,
is it a human right?
Is it a human right for everyone?

Where you belong,
the circumstances you come from,
is this important to know?

Is it possible to delete a person’s background?
Would you consider deleting another person’s background?

What is illegal?
What is unethical?
What are irregularities?

In last few years, I have discovered more and more of my history.
From discovering that I am Ingegerd Maria Olsson in the registers in Chile,
to realise that I can vote,
and renew my passport from 1975,
to understanding that it seems like I never left Chile the country where I was born.

According to my Chilean passport,
I live on a street in a business district in Rancagua.
According to other documents,
I live with a social assistant in Santiago.
We are probably more than 400 children living at that address:
Monseñor Müller 38.

I “live” in Chile, and I live in the United States.
I am in the electoral register in Chile,
and in Sweden I have a Swedish passport and can pick up a Chilean passport when I like.

My birth was never registered at the hospital where I was born.
I’m a child of no-one.
Instead of a birth certificate,
a protocol was written in which strangers testified that I was born on my birthday.

In Chile, I am registered as an orphan
because a Swedish woman, Anna Maria Elmgren, arranged and enrolled me in the register in Chile.
I have a Swedish name in the Chilean register.
I’m Ingegerd Maria Olsson in Chile.

I am a orphan
but I have a mother in the documents from the court in Temuco.
In the documents from the court, I have a mother.
A mother who gives me away.

I was 44 years old when I did a DNA test,
then I realised that I’m Mapuche.
I’m from an indigenous people.

To be a child of Indigenous people,
this detail is something that someone forgot to mention.
A detail that isn’t too important.
Or is it?

Is the right to one’s identity a right for everyone?
Who decides this?

#adoptee #adopted #stolen #Ilegal #adoption #Chile #victim #trafficking #Sverige #Adoptionscentrum #Sverige #adopterad #chileadoption #nomassilencio #humanrights #justice #mapuche #Wallmapu

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Orphan Bennie

This editioned set of 50 silkscreened prints by Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez responds to the UN’s Resolution on the Rights of The Child (12/18/19) by remixing the Little Orphan Annie comics with transnational adoptee self-portraiture. Inspired by commentary by Patricia Fronek (@triciafronek) and others on Twitter, it celebrates the UN’s call for the end of orphanages, while expressing skepticism towards what such a resolution will look like in practice. How might systems of adoption and foster-care (evoked here by “Señora Hannigan”) morph as we strive towards abolition? 

Signed, dated, and numbered prints cost $7 (USD) and can be ordered by e-mailing benjofaman@gmail.com. Funds will support future adoption abolition art and agitprop. For more of my work, visit jointhebenjam.org

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NAAM 2019 AdopteeVoices #10

At ICAV, we invited members to share during National Adoption Awareness Month what they would like the public to know. Here’s another of what some of our members are happy to share.

I believe that the world needs to know that adoption occurs because society is broken and from this broken world comes the NEED for adoption. If only we could remove the need for adoption, we would fix a lot of the world’s problems. 

The only way to stop adoption is to remove the NEED for adoption and address the causes such as help single mothers financially to be able to raise their child.

Some mothers are not well enough to raise their child and there are many more causes that create a need for adoption.

von Tim Kim

Families who come together through adoption deserve the same rights, privileges, and security as biological families including citizenship and nationality, which are the fundamental human rights of all individuals.

Citizenship is critical to economic stability, family preservation, and social legitimacy.

Legislation is needed to ensure that citizenship rights are equally applied to all children of American citizens.

Adoptees who join American families as children, grow up with American values and contribute to our nation’s communities in every way.

Equal citizenship rights will also strengthen our national values by empowering adoptees to fully participate in American democracy.

von Joy Alessi, Co-director of Kampagne für die Rechte von Adoptierten

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Adoption: Sauber & ordentlich? Nicht so viel!

Hello everyone. My name is Jessica Davis. My husband and I adopted from Uganda in 2015.  I would like to share my thoughts regarding a memory that appeared on my facebook timeline.

If you are at all familiar with timehop on facebook you know that almost daily either a photo, video or post from your past will show up on your timeline giving you the opportunity to reflect and share.  Well, today this is the photo that popped up for me.

Four years ago today, we found out Namata’s visa was approved to come to America with us. As westerners, we tend to love pictures like this when it comes to adoption and in some ways that is understandable. If Namata had actually needed to be adopted, it would’ve definitely been a photo worth getting excited over!

The problem is that all too often, we want things to be just like this picture. Everyone smiling and things wrapped up neat and tidy. But real life, even in this moment pictured here, things aren’t always as they seem. Adam and I were definitely happy in this moment and ready to be home and begin our life together, and on the outside Namata was too. But on the inside, she was about to leave everything and everyone familiar to her, for reasons she was too overwhelmed by to even question. Thankfully, over the next year she was able to express to Adam and I her questions about how she ended up being adopted. Thankfully, Adam and I didn’t go looking for the answers we wanted to hear. We chose a road that was definitely filled with uncertainty, but one we hoped would lead us to the truth. Namata deserved that!

Intercountry adoption should never be about doing a good deed in the world or becoming a mom or dad. Yes, those reasons are normal and usually are the basis for beginning the process, but at the point when one begins the process to adopt, we need to recognize that those feelings are all about the adoptive parents and not the child or children we are hoping to adopt. Adoption for them stems from a complete loss of everything and everyone familiar to them. Recognizing this is vital to a healthy adoption process. I’m convinced we, as a society, have made adoption all about becoming a family. When we do this we tend to see adoption in this happy light that doesn’t allow the adoptee the freedom to express what adoption actually is for them — loss. There should be absolutely no focus on becoming “mom” or “dad”. While I do believe it can become a natural outcome through a healthy adoption scenario, I believe it needs to come when, and only if, the child feels that connection.

I often get asked how Adam and I did what we did when we chose to reunite Namata with her family in Uganda. While there are several factors that contributed to being able to do this, the main reason was that Adam and I had both committed to meeting the needs of Namata. Finding out that she had a loving mother and family that she was unlawfully taken from, made the decision for us. As a parent I could never have lived with myself knowing I was contributing to the Ugandan sized hole in Namata’s heart. Her family and culture should never have been taken away from her in the first place. I’m eternally grateful now looking back that even in the midst of our heartache in losing one of the most amazing little girls I’ve ever met, we were given the opportunity to make things right!

Currently, there is no legal precedent for situations like ours. There are kids here in America that have been kidnapped, their families lied to, and their adoptions produced from bribes and manipulation. There are families in Uganda, and all over the world that hope daily, just see their children, siblings, grandchildren, nieces and nephews.One way to address this madness is by fighting for intercountry adoption laws to be reformed. Another way is to help change the narrative behind intercountry adoption. Within our churches, social circles and places of business, we need to recognize that intercountry adoption has become infiltrated with money and greed. When we read the statistics that say 80-90% of children in orphanages overseas have families, we need to be doing more to ensure we aren’t contributing to a system that is actually tearing families apart. There are many Facebook groups and websites that delve into the intricacies behind intercountry adoption. Join these groups and visit these pages to learn. Appeal to legislators for change and become a person that stands up against these horrible miscarriages of justice.

Um Jessica

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