To Know Your Origins is a Privilege!

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!

februari 27, 2021februari 27, 2021

The Problem of Western Adoption Discourse

by Hilbrand Westra, adopted from South Korea to the Netherlands; founder of Adoptee Foster Coaching (AFC); awarded the Order of Orange-Nassau for his contributions to the Netherlands adoptee community. The original text in Dutch here.

#Adoption is not a universal right, but it is a Western right.

If adoption is really and essentially good, then we must allow adoptions in and from all countries. The principles for adopting children (social, economic, medical, ideological, psychological, (post) Christian, scientific and political motives, etc.,) must then be applicable and legally valid for everyone. Adoption must then become part of a universal right anywhere, and for anyone in the world.

Then all prospective adoptive parents can receive financial and fiscal support from all governments in their countries. As for years the costs of adoption were tax deductible in the Netherlands and in the USA where so-called adoption loans exist. Some in the Netherlands took out a private loan from banks or were financially sponsored by family members to be able to adopt children from mothers who were financially struggling.

Back to the international advice. We can best categorise adoptions as part of foreign relations. We can then finally see adoption as an exclusive form of development cooperation and as an exclusive form of migration, without the children’s parents, of course. Then it can finally be transferred to ministries of foreign affairs, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Maybe a fun fact, adoption in South Korea used to be managed by the Ministry of Commerce. Yes, yes they already knew what it was about then.

OPEN BORDERS

If there is agreement that it is a universal right, then the Netherlands must also open its doors wide to adoptions to other countries from and for less fortunate children in the Netherlands, for example children who cannot find foster care, live below the poverty line, children of single parents, children who do not have health insurance, children of refugees, children who have been expelled from parental authority or children of parents who are in conflict, children who receive a better education elsewhere or opportunities that they would otherwise not get in the Netherlands.

This does mean that we have to accept adoption agencies from the US, Canada, Australia and other European countries, as well as from China, Saudi Arabia, India and Russia and all other countries where the economy is picking up. They should all be entitled to the supply of children in the Netherlands.

INTERNATIONAL TRADE AGREEMENTS

Why not a transatlantic adoption trade deal on this topic. It has already been categorized as a Child Industrial Complex in social science (Cheney et al). Actually, we are not playing the game completely fair now. We do have access to, especially non-Western countries, but not the other way around.

If we really believe that the current pro-adoption arguments are universally legitimate, then we should also be able to apply them to a reciprocal exchange of children with other countries. What we call the in-and-out situation in the adoption jargon as with the USA.

The consequence is that the Hague Adoption Convention must be dropped, not that the Netherlands cares about it at all, even though the permanent office is in the Netherlands, it already ignores the subsidiarity principle (take care of your own children first before you may adopt in and out) . A so-called equal level playing field must then be created. Free play and free choice of children for everyone.

CHINESE PROSPECTIVE PARENTS IN THE NETHERLANDS

I can already picture it, hordes of childless Chinese couples and singles who go to disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague to select children. Or the smartest go into the provinces, looking for young unmarried mothers without family support. These are then entered in a database so that other prospective adoptive parents in China can also choose from the online catalog on age, gender, colour, health, background, DNA value and cost-benefit (starting with €25,000) analysis. Something that is now permitted in non-Western countries.

SILVER AND GOLD MEMBERSHIPS

And there will be a preferred supplier list for the countries that pay the most and have the most political interests. They may choose first! Or what about Islamic countries that use oil money to buy up children to win souls in the bible belt regions. At least the same number of children who have adopted in these regions should then be available on the Netherlands side for Muslim regions. There are several thousand. It seems like a great idea for a solid negotiating basis for peace and trade with Islamic superpowers. The evidence for such trade-offs is already there.

POLITICS AND BUSINESS AS USUAL

What about the adoption of children for political / business services like the former Federal Chancellor Schröder (then 60) who more or less received a child from Putin in 2004. As a token of thanks, a business delegation came to get to know Russia. This entire adoption affair was downplayed and concealed by the German government, but in the meantime German and Russian secret services were ordered to keep the ‘transmission of no 4’ in the right direction.

WHAT DEFENCE IS NOT GOOD FOR

And what about Belgian MPs who used Belgian military aircraft to hold private adoptions behind the scenes or to cooperate in large-scale ‘evacuations’ of so-called defenceless children from Congo. How do we know this again? Oh, the Babylift operations in Vietnam by USA’s airforce.

In other words, there is good business to be done with and for children, certainly internationally.

A condition is that there cannot be a covert first choice for well-to-do Netherland’s middle class to adopt domestically. After all, the Dutch children’s group will then suddenly become part of the international children’s market (M. Riben).

EQUAL WISHES EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

What do you think of the above proposal?

Netherland’s prospective adoptive parents are given free rein and are allowed to choose what they want (they are just like animals that children, as adoptive mother Karen Gregory describes in her words in the newspaper Trouw) but other non-Western aspiring adoptive parents can also pick and deliver in the same way as is done in the Netherlands. Sounds like a great plan considering that it will offer equal opportunities for everyone.

Oh yeah. Perhaps an opportunity for companies such as Thuisbezorgd and Deliveroo to tap into a new and international market? The profit margin is enormous. In the peak times, an average of $ 2.5 billion a year was spent in international adoption.

If this open market is there, it is only a matter of time that an American movie star or celebrity files a lawsuit against the Netherlands for not getting what she ordered …

And there is a good chance that foreign multi-millionaires will come up with certain subsidies on projects so that they can buy and buy off the preferred supply for years. All seems like a good plan now that the Dutch economy can use a boost in this COVID time.

FALLING MARKET VALUE

Unfortunately, the above plan does not actually have any impact in the long run. It is being taken over by a new market. Namely that of commercial surrogacy and designer babies that you can put together yourself with the DNA material as you wish. Who then wants a second-hand child?

NEW TREATIES WITH THE SAME LOOPHOLES

But as it now seems, that market has discovered the loopholes of international adoption and wants a similar treaty as the Hague Adoption Convention. We already discussed this internationally in 2016. The smart ones among the lawyers, many white young women who say they care about other women in the world (or what matters to them, the control of surrogate mothers for a healthy gestation period) saw their chance. Solidarity with other women suddenly ceases when it comes to children. Then the ‘animal instincts’ are released, to use Gregory’s words again.

After all, it seems to be all ethically regulated on paper, but everything underhanded is possible because as soon as there is a treaty, nobody can and does not need to check each other anymore, and everything is possible. Long live international treaty laws.

SCHIZOPHRENE CONSUMERS

In the meantime, more than 9,000 signatures have been collected to lift the temporary stop on international adoption in the Netherlands. However, this petition group does not want to delve into the backgrounds of the subject that they are committed to as consumers. Perhaps Benjamin Barber is right in his book, The Infantile Consumer.

He introduces what he calls the ‘infantilist ethos’: the capitalist ideology that reduces responsible citizens to docile consumers and replaces the public good with private property. Barber shows how adult consumers infantilise in a global economy that generates massive overproduction of goods and focuses primarily on the child as a consumer. He keenly analyses the consequences of this development for our children, our freedom, citizenship and democracy.con

HEDONISM 2021

A long time ago, when I read Aldous Huxley’s book, ‘A Brave New World’, I had the creeps that this could be true. And lo and behold, it is already here. If this is correct, then Hannah Arendt’s theorem is also true. Even worse, history has already shown it. The human monster turns out to have an ordinary face of a ‘normal man or woman’ that is not served by a No. It seeks immediate satisfaction of individual needs and enjoyment. Possibly at the expense of others. This is called hedonism.

END OF FEMINISM 3.0

Feminism also appears to stop at the borders of the western world, and women of colour appear to remain anxiously silent on this subject. After all, they want everything that the dominant white women also have: freedom, beauty, power, prestige and also children of another, if it is convenient. Even if it costs an existential loss for those directly involved; parents and children.

THE HOLLYWOOD SAGA

In the meantime, Hollywood and Walt Disney take the subject of orphan and adoption as a present and no longer questions the suffering of Dombo, Bambi, Superman and many other examples. After all, people mainly remember the happy ending of Annie (The Musical), for example, but not what preceded it. After all, the consumer wants the end product but not the responsibility of the process in advance.

ADOPTION PORN

Since then, something like #adoptionporn seems to exist. Hordes of Dutch people sit in front of the TV every week with tissues ready to do themselves well with the program ‘as Spoorloos ed. indirectly permits this way. The price? National exposure of suffering.

FINALLY

But who actually pays for that suffering? Usually not the consumers. They are just end users.

I end with a quote from Dr. Jordan Peterson.

“Your rights, become my responsibility.”

In other words, your right becomes my responsibility. What you claim as a right must then be provided and protected by others. The question is and remains, at what price?

januari 13, 2021februari 12, 2021

Restore Haitian Adoptee Connection to their Biological Parents

by Sabine Isabelle adopted from Haiti to Canada.

Restore the links between adoptees from Haiti born as unknown parents and their biological parents.

The dark side

Before April 1, 2014: date of the signing of the Hague Convention in Haiti. Thousands adopted without identity were adopted internationally with a mention born of an unknown mother and father or sometimes the first name of ‘only one parent. Among her children, several were unfortunately entrusted to non-full adoption through human trafficking of all kinds. Some children simply want to find their biological family because they feel they do not have access to their medical history, their legitimate identity.

Studies have shown that many children from adoptions live with traumas with psychological impacts ranging from suicide to neurodevelopmental effects that are due to their adoption. Several have been entrusted to benevolent adoptive families but ill prepared to welcome a child weakened by the injury of abandonment, moreover many of these have experienced a double abandonment of their adoptive parents by being placed in a reception center or a second adoptive family.

A tiny fraction of biological parents are slowly starting to find their biological children. Some testify that they did not knowingly give their children for adoption, but may rather have confided the assets temporarily and that on their return to the orphanage the child had been given up for adoption without their consent and without any possibility of information to find contact with this children in other cases of biological parents were told that the biological parent was dead when it is false and so many other situations not to all named. This is a child who was adopted said without real identities and / or without identities of their 2 biological parents was not beyond a reasonable doubt, adoptable. Surveys, theses, and numerous testimonies also show that only 10% of these children were in fact really orphans. Since some of us are now old enough to take steps to find our biological families, we are amazed to witness all these hidden defects.

Another problem is on the horizon: failures to be helped by the various establishments such as: orphanage, hospital that asks us to donate sums of money to obtain our legitimate information … So here we are newly confronted with so-called Good Samaritans who offer us to carry out our research for them also a sum of money, a unstructured and corrupt circle that continues. It’s a call to villainy. How do you distinguish the good from the bad foreign Samaritan? We have and will leave an empty legacy of identity that we will leave to our children and our future generations. As the pioneers of this experimental generation on international adoption in Haiti we ask for your support in all its forms in order to restore the balance.

Original submission in French

Rétablissont les liens entre les adoptés d’Haïti nés sous l’appellation de parents inconnus et leurs parents biologiques.

Le côté sombre

Avant le 1^er avril 2014 : date de la signature de la convention de La Haye en Haïti .Des milliers adoptés sans identité ont été adoptés à l’international avec une mention nées d’une mère et d’un père inconnu ou parfois le prénom d’un seul parent . Parmi ses enfants, plusieurs ont été confié malheureusement à l’adoption non plénière à travers un trafic d’humain de tout genre. Certains enfants veulent tout simplement retrouver leur famille biologique puisqu’ils estiment ne pas avoir accès à leur antécédents médicaux, leur identité légitime.

Les études ont démontrés que plusieurs enfants issues de c’est adoptions vivent avec des traumatismes ayant des impacts psychologique allant du suicide aux effets neuro développementaux qui sont due à leur adoption. Plusieurs ont été confiés à des familles adoptives bienveillantes mais mal préparées à accueillir un enfant fragilisé par la blessure d’abandon, d’ailleurs nombreux de ceux-ci ont vécu un double abandon de leur parents adoptif en étant placé dans un centre accueille ou une deuxième famille adoptive.

Une infime partie de parents biologiques commencent tranquillement à retrouver leur enfants biologique. Certain témoignent ne pas avoir données leur enfants à l’adoption en tout connaissance de cause mai plutôt les avoirs confiés temporairement et qu’à leur retour à l’orphelinat l’enfant avait été donné en adoption sans leur consentement et sans aucune possibilité d’information pour retrouver le contact avec cette enfants dans d’autres cas des parents biologiques se sont fait dires que le parent biologique était mort alors que c’est faux et tant d’autres situation pour ne pas tous les nommés. C’est enfant qui ont été adoptés dit sans réel identités et/ou sans identités de leurs 2 parents biologiques n’était pas hors de doute raisonnable, adoptable. Des enquêtes, thèse, et nombreux témoignages présentent également que seulement 10 % de ces enfants étaient en fait réellement orphelins. Puisque certain de nous sommes maintenant assez âgés pour entreprendre des démarches de recherche pour retrouver leur famille biologique, nous assistons avec stupéfaction à tous ces vices cachés.

Un autre problème est à horizon ; fautes de se faire aider par les diverses établissement tel que ; orphelinat, hôpital qui nous demande de donné des des sommes d’argent pour obtenir nos renseignements légitime… Nous voilà donc nouvellement confronté à de soi-disant bon samaritains qui nous offre d`effectuer nos recherche moyennant eux aussi une somme d’argent, un cercle sans structure et corrompus qui se perpétue. C’est un appel à la villigence .Comment distinguer le bon du mauvais samaritain étrangé ? Nous avons et nous laisseront un héritage identitaire vide que nous laisserons à nos enfants et nos futures générations. En tant que pionniers de cette génération expérimentale sur l’adoption internationale sur Haïti nous demandons votre soutien sous toutes ses formes afin de rétablir l’équilibre.

november 22, 2020februari 12, 2021

Distorted Priorities

Not being granted Citizenship as an adoptee is like having a False Positive.

It has come to my attention that the US Senate and Congress members have recently been sending letters to push for their agenda in intercountry adoption. The first I attach here to Assistant Secretary Carl Risch requesting attention to recommit to one of the purposes of the Intercountry Adoption Act, “to improve the ability of the Federal Government to assist” families seeking to adopt children from other countries.

The second I attach here to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo requesting resources and focus to address the waiting families wanting to bring home their children with COVID restrictions.

While I appreciate the Senate and Congress members sentiments to get involved and highlight the importance of these issues, it frustrates me that on the one hand these letters are written, using all of the power between them as a collective, yet I have not seen such a letter to push for the Adoptee Citizenship Act 2019 (ACA). For the past 5 years, I know our dedicated intercountry adoptee leaders – Joy Alessi from Adoptee Rights Campaign and Kristopher Larsen at Adoptees For Justice and their teams have been working tirelessly, trying to get Senators and Congress people to support the much needed and overdue Adoptee Citizenship Act 2019 (ACA). We need enough Senators and Congress members to support the Adoptee Citizenship Act 2019 because there are gaps left from the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 that resulted in intercountry adoptees prior to 1983 being left without automatic citizenship.

I gotta ask the obvious question here: why won’t American politicians get behind the Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) yet they will use their political force to push for more adoptions? It is the very same Intercountry Adoption Act 2000 that’s cited by them to get support amongst the Federal Government to assist newly desiring adoptive families to build their families, but yet – for the historic families who once sought to adopt children, who find themselves decades later, without citizenship for their children (now adults) – there is no permanence and no political leadership to address the problem. Isn’t it rather distorted that the powers to be will focus more attention on getting new children in without having made sure the ones already here, have stability, permanence and citizenship? What is adoption if it isn’t to ensure permanence, which is fundamentally about citizenship in intercountry adoption? Let’s also not forget every beneficiary of the Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) was already vetted at entry and promised citizenship. The Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) seeks to cover adoptees who entered on adoption purposed visas (IR4) otherwise known as legal permanent residents.

I feel for my adoptee colleagues who work tirelessly, pushing what feels like an uphill battle to gain the support needed to address this long overdue issue. Why aren’t letters like this being written to ICE or USCIS and to all the top level government officials including the President, who have the connections to influence these important decisions?

I don’t have the answers to my questions, I simply ask them because I hope others are too. We need Senators and Congress members to take leadership on the issue of automatic citizenship for the thousands of intercountry adoptees, now adults, who are living in suspended animation. These adoptees have been asking American leaders to represent their cause and help them overcome what feels like an insurmountable barrier – to be considered rightful citizens of their adoptive country. This right seems to be obtainable in every other adopting country – except the United States of America!

augustus 8, 2020oktober 28, 2020

Lived Experience Suggestions for Responses to Illicit Adoptions

On 8-10 July, ICAV was invited as an Observer at the HCCH Working Group on Preventing and Addressing Illicit Practices in Intercountry Adoption.

Attached is our latest Perspective Paper that provides our lived experience input on suggestions for How Authorities and Bodies could Respond to Illicit Adoptions in English and French.

Huge thanks to all our 60+ participating adoptees and adoptee organisations, 10 adoptive parents & adoptive parent organisations, and first family representation!

Extra special thanks and mention to two amazing people:
Nicholas Beaufour who gave a huge amount of time to translate the entire English document into French!
Coline Fanon who assisted our one and only first family member to contribute! We so need to hear more often from the voices of our first families!

juni 29, 2020november 17, 2020

Bitten and Suffering

by Lily Valentino, Colombian adoptee raised in the USA.

We adoptees are absolute masters at compartmentalizing, I am no different. I can go on my way, not acknowledging, ignoring and stuffing my shit in the back of the closet. But it never fails that eventually something will trigger me into facing my feelings, and downward I usually go for a few days, and sometimes weeks and months.

Yesterday was one of those days, it was like walking through a field and getting bitten by a snake! It happened fast, yet while it was happening it was playing out in slow motion. But now it is nearly 24 hours later and I can quite sharply feel those words coursing through my veins like the poison of a snake.

“….they were brought to this country, were stripped of their names, language, culture, religion, god and taken totally away from the history of themselves”

These were words I heard in passing yesterday, that were the initial sting, bite, if you will, which left me literally stunned. These words came out of Luis Farrakhan, and as I was listening to him speak them, it hit me, he was talking about the slaves brought to America and I too, I too, was sold and brought to this country away from my birth land, for money.

As these words slipped down my throat, I thought of being minority, being Hispanic and how my white adoptive mother pushed and tried to get me to date white guys. How she often spoke about how she wanted me to marry an Italian man. This thought always makes me sick and the term, “whitewash” comes to mind as being her motive. Memories of how she spoke of Hispanics by referring to them using the racial slur, “spics” rush to the forefront of my mind.

It left me shrinking into my seat for the rest of the day. Choking on thoughts of all that I have lost and continue to lose, my culture, my language, my native food, my name, my family and mi tierra (my land). Thinking of how my world is literally cut in half (because I have my birth family that live in Colombia and my husband and kids here in the US), how true happiness of having my world combined will never be had, true belonging is a shadow that I’m forever chasing just like time lost.

I sit here uneasy, fighting the tears from filling my eyes. I’ve been in deep thought about this sudden cry for human rights that does not seem to include adoptees, yet we are walking a near similar path to the slaves of 300 years ago. The difference, we were not bought to fulfill physical labor but to fulfill an emotional position for many white families. Some of us were treated well, part of the family like nothing “less than” while others remained outsiders, forced to fit into a world not our own and punished emotionally and physically when we could not meet their needs. When we stood up for ourselves and decided that we no longer wanted to fulfill that emotional roll to another human for which we had been bought or withstand the abuse, we have been cast out and off of the plantation and told never to return.

The crazy thing is that it is 2020 and my basic human rights to know my name, to know my culture, to grow up in the land that I was born in, to speak my native language, though violated mean nothing, as nobody other than other adoptees are concerned, or have a sense of urgency about this violation.

mei 24, 2020mei 22, 2020

Wearing Your Fate

by Bina Mirjam de Boer adopted from India to the Netherlands, adoption and foster care coach @ Bina Coaching.

Recently it was announced there is a surrogate company in Ukraine which will remain with hundreds of ordered but undelivered babies due to the coronavirus. They can’t be picked up during the lockdown by their foreign parents. In RTL 4 news post we see upset nurses and hear the lawyer of the adoption company talking about the importance of these babies going to their foreign parents as soon as possible.

The bizarre thing is that by commissioning the surrogacy and / or the adoption company, these babies are taken from their mother, their origins and their birth country and end up in a family in which one, or none, of the parents are genetically their parent.

On Monday 18 May, the lawsuit by adoptee from Sri Lanka, Dilani Butink was aired whereby she is suing the adoption organization / permit provider Stichting Kind en Future and the Dutch State. Her case shall hold both parties liable for her fraudulent adoption. This is because the Dutch state and adoption organisations and / or licensing holders, have known about the fraudulent practices and trafficking of children from the sending countries for many years. Nevertheless, thousands of children have been legally adopted (and without agreement) from their motherland to the Netherlands after discovering the trafficking. Yet we are still focusing on putting the wish for a child first.

Currently, the Dutch government is working on adjusting the law for surrogacy. Under its guise and around the wild growth of baby farms, the surrogate and child need to be provided protection from surrogacy abroad, but Ukraine does not offer this. It is pretty weird because the cause of this law ie., creating children in a “non-natural” way affects this child’s right to exist. Whoever reads this bill soon sees that the child’s rights and safety of the mother is not sufficiently protected and / or respected. The reason for this law is that we still have international adoption and conception of children through a donor surrogate mother and it is not a fairy tale or an altruistic thought.

Thinking about what my adoptive parents used to say when asked if I was grateful to them for my new life, namely they answered that I didn’t have to be thankful. This is because they wanted a child so badly and were so selfish, they let me come from abroad.

In most cases, the wish for a child is not a wish to make a child part of your life but a biologically driven desire to reproduce or to have a child of your own. If it were really only about the child, the thousands of forgotten children who live in children’s homes would be collected by childless couples. That we live in a world where the wish of having our “own made” child is exalted above the child’s wishes and health, ensures the financially driven market continues to function that dominates the adoption, donor and surrogacy world.

To realize this wish for a child at all costs, ways are being used that cannot be done without medical or legal surgery. Overseas mothers are helped to give up their child instead of breaking taboos or helping the mother raise the child herself, or leaving the legal family ties intact, which is best for the child. The influence of distance (legal parenting to be elevated above genetic parenting) on a human life is still compartmentalised, denied and ignored, with all the consequences.

Despite all the stories of adult adoptees and adult donor children about the influence of distance and a (partly) hidden past or the low performance rates of composite families, the wish for a child remains elevated above the child’s wishes.

In 2020, we are apparently still not aware that these actions not only relieve wishful parents of the unbearable fate of a childless existence, but also dismiss them from their responsibility to carry their own destiny. At the same time, we ensure that these children are burdened unsolicited, with an unbearable fate. Namely, a life with a hidden and a made identity. I don’t want to say that a childless couple has no right to a child in their lives but there are other ways to let a child be part of their lives without giving a mother and child an unbearable fate.

Adoptees often don’t know who they are, when they were born, what their age or birth name is, which family systems they originated from or what their operative story is. They are raised with the idea that they belong to a different family from which they originated genetically. However, this legal disinheritance does not cut the adopted from his original family system (that is impossible) but they have to discover in their adult lives that the foundation on which their lives was built is not the right one. Donor children are looking for the father and find out that they have dozens of (half) sisters and brothers or that they are twins but come from different donor fathers. Both times, it’s a question of demand for a child and making it available.

Many adopted people come to the discovery at some point in their lives that they live with an unbearable fate, they live in a surreal story that they missed the essence of but experience their emotions in their bodies. This also makes you hear adoptees often say they feel like they have to survive instead of thriving.

I hope that the legal trial of Sri Lankan adoptee Dilani Butink will contribute to an increasing awareness and cessation of child trafficking in any way and that we leave fate and responsibility where it belongs. As a Korean adoptee once said, “Do you prefer to die of hunger, or death from sadness?” .. a sentence that I still regularly observe during group meetings with adoptees.

I am aware that not being able to have children is an unbearable fate while at the same time I notice and work daily with the effects of the consequences of distance and adoption. And this is also unbearable for many, unfortunately we adoptees and donor children cannot put away our fate and the responsibilities we have received and this is a burden that we must bear unwanted as a life sentence.

I also hope that the legal trial will contribute to getting assistance. In 2020, governments still do not take full responsibility for looking away from these forms of child trafficking in intercountry adoption and its consequences. In the end, in my opinion, the question remains: do you dare to take responsibility and carry the fate you received? It is a choice to live without “homemade” children or you charge another person with the fate to live without his or her original identity, family and culture.

Please let’s learn from history and not use children as enlightenment of fate but carry our own destiny.

januari 10, 2020april 16, 2020

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