Thread by @ssteingraber1

Most of my followers here work on #climate. Also my life’s work. Or are part of the #LGBTQ STEM community. Where I also reside.

More recently, I tweet about adoption.

To mark the end of National Adoption Awareness Month #NAAM, I made a thread for all of you.

#adopteevoices

I want my climate activist friends and my LGBTQ brothers and sisters to know that it’s not okay to say you’ll “just adopt” if you want kids. Adoption is a corrupt industry that preys on poor women denied reproductive justice and denies basic civil rights to adoptees.

Among these are our right to our birth certificates. If you assume sealed records are not a thing anymore, you’re wrong. Good thread about the systemic harms of the adoption industry and the enduring falsifications/secrecies that are its hallmark features:

https://twitter.com/corsent/status/1464719835867267074?s=21

https://twitter.com/corsent/status/1464719835867267074

I feel that the justice-oriented climate movement and the LGBTQ community should easily be able to see past the soothing, apolitical propaganda about the universal benevolence of adoption and confront its exploitive, racist, misogynistic roots. Can you?

Repudiating adoption requires you to question powerful, normative cultural myths. I especially feel that the LGBTQ community is well positioned for this task. I invite you to be our allies. I ask you not to create more demand for adoptable infants.

https://twitter.com/ssteingraber1/status/1464993251593576448

No wealthy white women surrender babies for adoption.

Why is that?

And why is adopting out called “surrender” in the first place? It’s kind of a tell, right?

In my birth records—obtained via deceit bc adoptees are typically denied these documents—it says INFANT SURRENDERED

The entire adoption industry depends on convincing a woman to surrender. Hinting she is unfit to parent, denying her other options, and separating her from her child rather than finding ways to help both of them stay together.

And then shrouding the whole act in legal secrecy.

The typical price to adopt an infant is $45,000 in “fees.”

Thought exercise: would you be willing to host a Go Fund Me to help a mother keep her baby rather than transfer it to Hopeful Adoptive Parent?

What if all she needs is childcare or housing to make a different choice?

Do you see the saviorism at play?

You think you know that oodles of abandoned kids are languishing out there in the human version of puppy mills, waiting for their forever home.

Who made you believe this? Why?

In fact there is one infant for every 45 Hopeful Adoptive Parents.

That kind of supply -constrained market breeds deceit, secrecy, and trafficking.

bbc.com/news/world-eur…

The climate crisis is great for adoption because it creates the social upheaval, conflict, and desperation that the industry needs to separate infants from families, rebrand them as abandoned and spirit them away.

Do you know about the 30,000 Guatemalan babies brought to the US?

“Individuals with connections to the Guatemalan government had been using the legal adoption system to profit from stealing and selling children internationally since at least the 1980s.”

“The country's fraudulent adoption scandal goes back to the country's civil war and the subsequent genocide of mainly indigenous groups.”

nbcnews.com/news/latino/pa…

Climate activists, in whose interest is it to have you believe the world is full of orphans that you could save?

Remember those immigrant kids rounded up on NYC streets and sent west on the orphan trains? They had parents. A lot of their moms worked in sweatshops w no childcare

But marketing them as orphans for Protestant farm families attracted philanthropic dollars from the wealthy. The orphan trains, run by the Children’s Aid Society, became the prototype for the US foster care system. Which is now inextricably tied to the carceral system.

Adoption is trauma. Many of us adoptees avoid discussing our personal traumas because it’s an invitation for others to call us ungrateful, dismiss our larger human rights critique, say they’re sorry about our “bad experience” and tell us they have an adopted friend who is fine.

That some of us have achieved happiness in spite of complex trauma does not negate the injustices and exploitations of a system that profits from family separation. Also, your friend may not be as fine you think.

I myself have served as the example of the adoptee who is “just fine” by my many cousins and various friends.

I wear my adoptive dad’s name proudly (he fought Nazis at age 18), and majored in biology like my adoptive mom.

I had a PhD and 2 masters degrees by age 29.

I also banged my head on the crib to self soothe and had a severe anxiety disorder by age 7. I was prescribed Dilantin for an “immature vagus nerve.” I had “emotional storms” so severe by age 4 that I was drugged with Thorazine. Hospitalized for suicidal depression in my 20s.

Tell me again about your adopted friend who’s fine. You sure?

Adoptees are over-represented in stats on suicide, substance abuse, and psychiatric diagnoses. Adopted girls have significantly earlier pubertal onset, a risk factor for a host of problems.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

The problem with adoptees revealing to you our lifelong struggle w belonging, identity, attachment, is that our birth mothers—already erased—are blamed, rather than the trauma of adoption itself. The trope suddenly flips to the adoptee as “bad seed” or “damaged goods.”

Do you think adoption no longer wears the dehumanizing taint of eugenics or has evolved past the commodification of adopted infants as private property? If so, please read the story of the adoptive mother in England who just sent her adoptive son into foster care after 8 years…

…and blamed the child’s birth mother for presumed bad prenatal habits that must be responsible for her kids’ inexplicable gambling addiction and behavioral problems.

Return to sender. We all know this does not happen to kept children.

google.com/amp/s/www.dail…

Perversely, this story made me feel momentarily grateful to my adoptive mom for drugging me into a stupor instead of giving me back.

I ask you to consider what it feels like to grow up under the constant fear of being UNCHOSEN and w constant social pressure to signal gratitude.

Meanwhile, the feel-good stories of kept children who receive unconditional love from their parents when they develop intractable addictions win awards and by Timothee Chalamet and Steve Carell are cast to play the leads.

We adoptees see the two different story lines.

2021 adoption challenge: If you’re really sure you are entitled to raise someone else’s child and love makes a family then stop finding meaning in your own ancestry. Tell Harry Potter he’s a muggle and belongs to the Dursley family. Go tell Moses the Pharaoh is his real dad.

Replies are open for questions and queries. Fellow adoptees especially invited to share knowledge and stories. I’m in awe of all you and don’t pretend to represent fostered adoptees or transracial and transnational adoptees. Bring your voices.

#adoptee
#adopteetwitter

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