Thread by @ssteingraber1

Thread for the non-adopted:

Like every #adoptee I’m still thinking about this week’s NYT exposé and want to offer historical, intersectional context for widespread belief that adoption is benevolent.

Stolen at Birth, Chilean Adoptees Uncover their Past

nytimes.com/2021/12/17/wor…

First, the Chilean baby-trafficking operation, which apparently brought thousands of infants to the US for adoption by white couples in the 1970s-80s, is not exceptional. It’s an old script first drafted during the Greek civil war in 1946 when conflict, chaos, and oppression…

…created a political smokescreen that allowed adoption networks to airlift and adopt out 3,000+ Greek infants/kids to US couples. This became the blueprint for large-scale, trans-national adoption to the US during the Cold War.

The kids were “orphanized” and their US adoptive parents painted as saviors. The political agenda was anti-communism. Many of those trafficked Greek adoptees are still trying to find out their identities. Story told by historian Gonda Van Steen in this book from Univ MI Press:

What followed:

In 1950s Korea, a “humanitarian mission” to “save the war orphans” and then… Vietnam, Guatemala, China, Romania, Ethiopia, Uganda et al.

US evangelical churches played leading roles as documented by journalist @kathrynajoyce

“Conservative Christians preside over a spiraling boom-bust adoption market in countries where people are poor, regulations weak, and hefty adoption fees provide incentive to increase the supply of adoptable children, recruiting ‘orphans’ from intact but vulnerable families.”

So there are separate but interlocking social engineering goals by nation states (in the case of Chile, a dictator who made adopting out children a method of controlling poverty and the political dissent that arises from it) and by US conservative churches w saviorist ideologies

These churches still control the adoption industry and still believe they have a mandate to evangelize the nations. Again see Kathryn Joyce on the “Great Commission”and “orphan theology," which erases the families these "orphans" already have and manufactures abandonment.

So the same headlines roll in over the decades; only the place names change.

Korea:

apnews.com/article/adopti…

Guatemala:

nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1…

Uganda:

thenation.com/article/archiv…

Sri Lanka:

reuters.com/business/media…

Haiti has taken “orphanization” to a whole new level. In 2017, About 30,000 kids lived in orphanages in Haiti, even though 80% of them have at least one living parent. The chaos of the 2010 earthquake created perfect cover for trafficking via adoption.

amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/11/20…

I’m a domestic adoptee and I would never represent or try to explain the particular traumas experienced by my transnational and transracial adoptee brothers and sisters. But I do want to emphasize that domestic adoption has parallel historical, ideological roots.

My adoption agency, @TheBabyFold in central Illinois got its start as a whistle stop for the “orphan trains” of 1850-1920s, a vast social engineering project that relocated 250,000 destitute, immigrant kids from eastern cities to rural farms. They were mostly not orphans either.

They were called orphans to attract philanthropic donations. The openly stated purpose was to provide labor to Midwestern Protestant farm families while solving the problem of east coast poverty—not by providing services to families working in sweatshops but by taking their kids.

The official name for this radical project, was “placing out,” and it was the brainchild of a wealthy minister, Charles Loring Brace, who thought it his Christian duty to “tap the rural demand for labor as a solution for urban problems”

Here’s a page from the 1992 Univ of Nebraska Press book:

After newspaper exposés in the 1920s revealed the systemic abuses of the orphan train adoptions and the program ceased, my adoption agency, part of the Methodist Church, turned to local unmarried women to keep supplying infants for adoption.

In 1959 when I was born, we were still all kept for the first 3 months in an orphanage-like institutional setting. As with the orphan train kids, records of these transactions were obscured. Our birth records were sealed and falsified birth certificates replaced our original ones

My adoption decree that ordered the sealing of these records also notes that my birthmother’s parental rights were severed by a court order. Which is also sealed. I have no access to it. I have idea what happened.

These practices have not changed. Secrecy, deception, and sealed records are still the standard of practice in US adoptions, even the so-called open ones. Really. Please take that fact in and ask why.

So I feel myself part of a long history of child trafficking that is called adoption. I ask my progressive friends to cultivate a spirit of curiosity about all this and question what’s behind the “I’ll just adopt!” impulse that makes you feel like a good and altruistic person.

Question for your consideration: Why does a policy of family separation still persist as a solution to poverty after 100 years of continuous revelation about the manufacturing of “orphans,” both in the US and around the world?

And I invite other adoptees to add their own insights and knowledge to this thread. I am uncomfortable representing the experiences of others even as I want to paint with a broad brush a picture of adoption’s long-standing, systemic problems. #adopteevoices #adopteetwitter