by Kali Coultas
Why would anybody who was raised in a loving home be unhappy about being adopted, or opposed to the very nature of adoption?
This was asked to me today in the comments on the “About Me” page I have here. Its a genuine question that I think a lot of people who aren’t effected or maybe even are effected by adoption ask themselves once they come across someone who’s views towards adoption, are similar to mine.
I do not support it. I don’t condone it, nor do I believe in adoption. I have many reasons and I think it will do me some good after this long break to put it into a post and get it into the concrete form of some kind for others to read when wondering why the hell i feel the way I do.
As I have said, i had and still have good parents, adoptive and natural. I wasn’t physically abused, sure my aparents made some mistakes just like all parents do, but nothing to be held by a noose and hung for and not much to blame or hate adoption for.
The little bit being the uneducated state of mind they were encouraged to have and left with after taking me into their care. I don’t support encouraging people experiencing infertility and desperate for a child to adopt. Adoption is not a band-aid for infertility and it never should be. It doesn’t heal someones infertility and putting that responsibility onto a child grieving the loss of their mother is dismissive and not honoring the emotional well being of the child.
When a child is born she/he is attached emotionally and physically to the mother. Everything that child wants, loves and needs is provided for from the mother whom he/she has grown with in utero for 9 months until birth.
Everything should be done to keep these beings together, and poverty although one of the leading factors to surrender, should never be a leading factor to surrender because money never makes someone a good parent.
I don’t believe in adoption because it has become an industry that provides babies to couples willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a child. With no care of the child’s well being they have price tags put onto their heads that differ according to race and age. Priority has been put on getting the commodity to make billions annually off of the couples willing to pay, instead of helping the children stuck in foster care get homes. Foster youth are rotting away because they have become least valuable and marketable and so they have been swept under the rug.
All the while the rights being given to the adoptees are the least of any and all other parties involved in adoption. We do not have our birth certificates although not one single document promising anyone a right to privacy has yet to be found. Study after study fails to find them ( because they don’t exist ) and yet millions of us are being discriminated against daily by the denial of our birth certificates.
Our names are changed without our consent all to help fill the dream of the adoptive parents of having and naming their “own” child.
Too many mothers have been coerced and forced to surrender their children via pressure of society from the social stigma of illegitimate born children, forced into unwed mothers homes and raped of their motherhood and children. Now even today mothers are still being pressured to surrender in different ways through threats of not being able to pursue their dreams or college or never finding someone who would want to care for a woman and her child born to a diff. man. Marketing in every parenting magazine, in doctors’ offices, gynecologists’ offices, high schools, counseling centers and yet the real issues, the complexity of adoption is rarely shown. How is it an informed decision if all angles are not being shown?
Not to mention giving surrendering parents rights to veto and keep our records sealed which is unconstitutional by withholding our vital information from us at their beck and call even though their documents did not say anything about privacy rights is discrimination and a slap in the face from the very industry that makes billions annually from us.
There are many ways to care for children, but i do not support in the ownership of them and that is what adoption is to me. It is buying, selling, renaming and falsifying their documents to make the sale legal. It is exploiting and profiting off of the adoptee with no intention of helping them in any way shape or form.
Adoption isn’t doing anything for humanity. It isn’t helping end third world poverty, it isn’t helping children with AIDS, it isn’t reducing the number of children in orphanages, it isn’t reducing the number of children who are being surrendered, it is only helping the adoptive parents get the child they wanted. It is a consumer driven industry that has been built off of the trauma separation and loss of mother and child and father. It is creating unnecessary loss and separation in thousands of families. It is raping people of their ancestry, culture, history and self. It is violating the sense of family too many are advocating for the preservation of in my state of California right now for diff. reasons, but I’m bitter about that too so I’ll throw in my disgust of proposition 8 in as well.
Non profit adoption agencies are making MILLIONS annually and if you don’t believe me, look at their 990 forms online that are public access. I realize that some mothers can’t, for whatever reasons raise their children, but that is not even close to the level of mothers and fathers losing their children each year around our world to be adopted into the families of American and European and Australians. ( Yes i realize others adopt, but i see these families and countries adopting more than others.)
Adoption should be about the child. Where the child’s rights and feelings are first, are foremost and as the original asker of the question that triggered this post said, should be paramount. But in adoption, of today, it isn’t. The child’s rights and feelings are last. As an adoptee I lost everything and it was never even thought about. I was told to be grateful for it and happy i wasn’t aborted. My loss has been dismissed by society more times than I’d like to remember. The mindset of adoption in this country is unhealthy and frightening, where the leading profit makers in adoption are running the adoption awareness campaigns painting in this beautiful light full of fake love, fake flowers and artificial kindness that is all coming from greed for more money, even if it sacrifices the child’s soul.
It is possible to care for a child without having to rename them, buy them, take away their history, ancestry, records and connection to their family. The “politics” and “industry” of adoption has ruined the very core of why it SHOULD be beautiful. If adoption was for the child, would foster children even be in the system? or would they already have a home? Would they have to be legally adopted and have their rights stripped and taken from them? or would they be allowed to be who they are and honored for exactly that and raised with love and respect for being just them. Is it possible to give a child shelter, safety, love, nourishment, care, food and a home without having to exploit them through the industry of adoption? It should be possible and is possible but rarely happens. It definitely doesn’t happen in adoption. Adoption stopped being about the child long ago.
Copyright © 2008 Kali Coultas. Reprinted with permission.