AdopTalk

Why are you wasting your time and energy blasting a good organization? What kind of vendetta are you into? Sorry, Mirah, old girl, but you are going to have to share this world and the arena of the Internet and more with us nasty old "anti-adoptionists" who know that the more things change, the more they stay the same. They must make you feel really threatened if you feel you have to blast them in this way with out of context and specious reasoning.
 

New to your blog.

What is your beef with OUSA?

You go on about them alot. Just curious. If you dont suppor them, why do you give them so much PR in your blog? Why waste your energy? Why not keep to causes you support?
 

Mirah, you spend more time dissing OUSA than anything else, lately! Talk about devisive. And who are you to tell people they can't discuss whatever aspect of their adoption experience they choose? You're really sounding desperate and threatened and certainly more concerned about creating chaos than being any kind of team player - unless of course you're in charge of the team.

Why would anyone wish to follow the advice of someone so embittered that all they can do is denigrate the good work others are doing? Is it bothering you that we're getting so much attention? You should be pleased, instead all you do is grouse.

And by the way - CUB doesn't have an agenda any longer for parents of adoption loss. They claim to speak for *the triad* which is fine and dandy, but they don't speak for most mothers of adoption loss. They've sold out and it sounds like so have you. If I want to be in a Triad group, it would be one much bigger and more proactive than CUB has turned out to be - the AAC at least trys to be what it says it is. It hasn't gone unnoticed that CUB is only happy if the mothers placate the adopters and act like happy little beemommies who made the right choice. Well some of us don't agree. Get over it.

You need to face the truth. Some very thoughtful, smart and savvy mothers do not wish to go in the direction you are suggesting. Or even if they agree that there's validity in some of what YOU choose to work on, we wish to work on other issues like redress for the past. So be it. Why belittle people and insist that it's your way or the highway?

Play nice Mirah. Your recent rants and behaviors have become a wee bit tawdry, IMO.
 

I don't know where you're from but where I come from the pain of past mothers was not caused by the SECRECY of closed adoptions. It was caused by the actual loss of their own babies.

The loss to both mother and child, and the psychological injury caused by adoption separation has been fully acknowledged in other parts of the world.

That knowledge is the reason why adoption is no longer promoted in my country, save in exceptional cases.

BTW, were you aware that unmarried mothers almost worldwide had the same legal rights and entitlements as that of married fathers back then? Did you now that we were the sole legal guardians of our children by virtue of birth? And yet many of us were'nt even allowed to see, let alone to have unrestricted access to our own children. Nor were we made aware of the support provisions that were legally available to us to enable us to make a free and informed decision about keeping or surrendering our babies for adoption.

You really do need to get with the program, Mirah. You're lagging way behind the rest of the world in matters of adoption and its illegal history.
 

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Thank you.
 

Anonymous post Augsut 14:

"The loss to both mother and child, and the psychological injury caused by adoption separation has been fully acknowledged in other parts of the world."

THANK YOU for an intellegent and quite CORRECT comment. I agree totally. Losses were exacerbated by scerecy, not caused by them. I mispoke and stand corrected about that.

I am not sure I understand:

"unmarried mothers almost worldwide had the same legal rights and entitlements as that of married fathers back then?"

when? in the 50's and 70's? any different than now? i'm not sure I understand your point...or, "we were the sole legal guardians of our children by virtue of birth?"

were? we are not still?

and yet we still lost ciustody in adoption..so what is your point???

Please explain.

Thank you. again, for the correction(s).

Would you care to address the point of the post you commented to:
How does OriginsUSA's inquiry contribute to family preservation?

P.S. I am from the US, and you?
 

""How does OriginsUSA's inquiry contribute to family preservation?""

I would ask you Mirah...Why do you care about 'OriginsUSA's inquiry'?

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Answering a question with a question is a very good avoidance technique.

That aside, I have an OBVIOUS interest in all adoption issues. That is why this blog is called AdopTalk - it is a place to talk about and discuss adoption issues.

Why do I CARE? I have devoted 30 years of my LIFE to adoption issues because I care deeply about adoption and how it is practiced.

That is half of my ENTIRE life.

I care about every aspect of adoption. Yes, OriginsUSA has every RIGHT to do whatever they see fit to do. I respect that right and I am sure they are doing what they are doing because they believe it is right and will help.

But I have an equal right to CARE about and discuss what ANYONE or any organization does regarding adoption. I care what the NFCA does about adoption.

I also care about and honor honesty greatly. And I care about the integrity of approach.


Good night...
 

I'm sorry my post was somewhat ambiguous in part. What I meant by "unmarried mothers almost worldwide had the same legal rights and entitlements as that of married fathers back then" is that we had the same lagal rights as a married father. If it was a crime to take a married man's child from him or his wife, it was also illegal to do the same to us.

If it was illegal to use coercion, undue influence, duress, or any other form of improper means to encourage a married man to sign a consent to adoption, it was illegal to do the same to us.

And yet unmarried mothers, generally, were made to feel, not only disentitled to their own children, but were made to believe they had no rights at all and most stll do not realised what was done to them was illegal. For instance not allowing a mother access to her own child, or restricting that access before she had signed any form of consent to VOLUNTARILY surrender her parental rights was, as it turns out, illegal. Few mothers even today realise that what was done to them under the guise of 'past adoption practices' was in breach of their parental rights, in breach of the Adoption statute, in breach of the laws of Contract, and constituted the unauthorised taking of her child -which of course falls under the catagory of the criminal offence of abduction of a child under the age of 12 years - if the mother had not given her permission to have her child withheld from her prior to signing a consent to adoption, or if she was only allowed to see her child after she signed the consent.

If she was not advised of her options or if she was not warned of the known psychological implications of permanent separation from her child, then her consent was an uninformed one, and an informed consent was and still is a legal requirment to establish the vaildity of any consent under the laws of contract. Including Adoption Statutes.

In short, adoption practices carried out in hospitals prior to consent taking, ignored the mothers comon law rights as parents.

As for OUSA working towards an inquiry into past adoption practices in the US, it cannot come soon enough for my liking. I am from Australia and in fact called for our own Parliamentary Inquiry into those same adoption practices in NSW. The Inquiry Committee deemed those hospital procedures to have been illegal. For the same reasons as listed above.

It was only by formally addressing and exposing those past illegal proceures through a Parliamentary inquiry did we, not only manage to dispel the damaging adoption myths and propaganda that was rife in our country (is still rife on your own country) which allowed society as a whole, including adptees, to beleive we willingly gave away our own newborn babies, but it also allowed many Psychiatrists and others in the mental health profession to finally understand that adoption creates a lifelong trauma in both mother and child...resulting more often in PTSD etc.

Until the way in which our babies were taken from us became public knowledge, the medical profession refused to acknowledge that adoption separation had any affect on either mother or child. The reason they didn't believe adoption separation created any negative implications is due to the fact that they believed the mother didn't want her baby and so adoption was seen by them as the solution to her problems, instead of the being cause of them.

Addressing those past practices, as painful as it is to go back there and relive it all, and exposing them for what they were, was how we forced the adoption profession in our country to begin complying with the laws that had always been in place, but had gone ignored for over 40 years as a result of the systems indifference to us as human beings and its contumelous disregard for our rights.

Until the Final Report of the Inquiry was published, adoptees generally believed they were unwanted by their own mothers and had been willing given away. That is no longer the case. They now understand that they were not as willingly "given away" as they had been led to believe.

An inquiry cannot take away the pain of the past of course, nothing can do that. But it certainly sets the historical record straight. And that blows all the myths, lies, and propaganda which have been the foundation of adoption propaganda, out of the water.

I hope one day you might also recogise the importance an inquiry such as ours, and how validating it would be for those millions of mothers who did not make informed decisions and who were essentailly harvested of their children. For our children's sake the propaganda have to go.

I will leave you with a quote I found from 1971 in Australia. it say's much the same thing.


" Man has the capacity to pass on from generation to generation the wrongs that he has suffered whether
they are overt or covert wrongs. And there is a whole generation of people who have suffered from the
inhumanity of our social service system because they were poor, because they were helpless,because theywere young, because they had no advocates, because they were treated unjustly, because they were treated as though they had wronged people by having a child.

We now have to call those social service systems to task."

Family Involvement `Editorial' John L. Brown No 5 (1977):1

www.adoptionaustralia.net
 

What happened to my post?