Interactive map of all 50 US states showing which ones permit, restrict, or prohibit #adoptees from obtaining our original, unfalsified birth certificates. Thx, ⁦@adopteelaw⁩! and hat tip to ⁦@naturenurture5⁩ for bringing this to our attention adopteerightslaw.com/maps/
As of 3/22, just 10 states grant #adoptees the right to apply for and obtain their original unredacted birth certificate w/o restriction. In 16 states + DC, adoptee access to OBC is prohibited outright. In 24 “compromise” states, access is restricted or conditioned in some way.
Would love to hear more from fellow #adoptees born in the 24 compromise states.

I’m from IL which, since 2011, gives birth parents veto power over adoptee requests for identifying documents. Making the request for one’s own OBC a lady-or-the-tiger dilemma since what you get…
…back from the state is an envelope that will contain either

1) your OBC with the names or your parents

OR

2) a letter stating YOUR REQUEST FOR YOUR PAPERS WAS VETOED BY PEOPLE WHOSE NAMES WE WILL NOT DISCLOSE

It’s infantilizing and humiliating—also arbitrary and capricious
So-called birth parent privacy—invoking the spectre of the predatory adoptee showing up unbidden on proverbial doorsteps—is how the law was explained to me. But I’ve seen nothing written about the psychologically impossible choice that adoptees face in parental veto states…
…where our rights to our own legal documents are sublimated to the feelings of others and, just in the asking, we risk a second rejection.

I needed 10 years of personal discernment plus therapy and support groups before I finally mailed my OBC request to the state of Illinois.
And I consider myself a pretty brave person in other circumstances.

I do have my OBC now. But the the PROCESS of getting it has had continuing mental health consequences for me.
Appearing as a beggarly supplicant before state agencies is not how I conduct public affairs.
So although the act of asking for my own birth certificate gave me an identity—and also revealed that I was not born in the city I’d been told was my birthplace—it also took away part of my sense of self.

Namely it stripped from me political agency and my identity as someone…
…who goes before the state to testify, advocate, provide information for pending legislation. Someone with knowledge who brings comms skills and is in possession of tactics and strategies and truth-to-power oratory.
As a biologist in the public interest, I provide facts and tell my government what to do. I don’t beg for facts. And I don’t go in blinded to outcomes.

The act of asking for my OBC in a compromise state is the opposite of all that. @adopteelaw

#adopteetwitter #adopteevoices

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More from @ssteingraber1

Jun 25
Yes what’s required now is forceful political response.

I’ll get there. Please know that we #adoptees—institutionalized as infants, denied our vital records as adults, culturally viewed as “bad seeds”—are now seeing ourselves turned into a twisted rationale for inflicting harm.
This is massively traumatizing. I am NOT OK. Also please remember that the women who raised us suffered, by definition, from infertility and often repeated miscarriages. In many cases our adoptive mothers’ lives were saved by medical procedures now banned in many states.
My own adoptive mom, married and pregnant at 26, bled out and almost died from an ectopic pregnancy. When she woke up after emergency surgery she learned she’d had a partial hysterectomy and WASN’T PREGNANT ANYMORE. But she was alive. And it was a miracle.
Read 7 tweets
Jun 14
Important AP investigative story on the int’l adoption system that separated Korean kids from their families “as part of a lucrative business under the military governments that ruled South Korea from the 1960s to the late 1980s.” #adopteetwitter seattletimes.com/nation-world/s…
“Adoptions were a way to remove the socially undesirable, including children from unwed mothers or poor families, and to reduce the number of mouths to feed.
About 200,000 Korean children were adopted by families in the West in the past six decades, including 7,924 in 1984.”
“Roots are often untraceable because most of the children were listed as abandoned, even when they had known relatives, WHICH MADE THEM EASILY ADOPTABLE.”

This is how orphans are manufactured.
Read 4 tweets
Jun 13
🏳️‍🌈Happy Pride! Being gay + being adopted are two big parts of my identity. Years of secrecy obscured them both. Ergo I’m thrilled to be part of this ⁦@AdopteesUnited⁩ conversation by and about LGBTQIA+ adoptees. Join me! #adopteevoices
#twicequeer 🌈 adopteesunited.org/rainbow-adopte…
PS a third, very public part of my identity is as a biologist in service to the climate movement. Close observers have noticed I’m part of this film screening event on the same evening.

Yes I’m doing both. It all matters, and it’s all connected by the word DISPOSSESSION.
In sum, you’ll have to choose between the two events. I am in the film, am screening it early, and am able to do both events so no one needs to worry that I messed up my schedule. Which would not be out of character but in this case, I’m got executive functioning on my side. 😁
Read 4 tweets
Feb 11
Heads up, CO friends: Coloradans for Energy Access is actually the gas industry + real estate dudes trying to stop the renewable energy transition or what they call—wait for it—“forced electrification.” CEA is a fossil fuel wolf in grassroots clothing. desmog.com/2022/02/10/gas…
“Xcel Energy, a Minnesota-based electric and gas utility, is among the ranks of Coloradans for Energy Access. The investor-owned utility has assets across eight Midwestern and Western states, with a particularly large presence in Colorado.”
CO does not have laws prohibiting gas hook ups in new buildings, which is what we are fighting for in NYS but the CO Public Utilities Commission is considering new rules “that would put the cost of a gas hook up onto the homeowner or business.”
Read 6 tweets
Feb 10
NEW RESEARCH: #Fracking in PA contaminates drinking water where pregnant women live and harms their infants.

So, here's a link to the goddamn abstract and bc I have a PhD and a full-text pre-proof, I'll do an whole thread but as a mom: THIS IS ENOUGH
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
This a first-of-its-kind study that uses exact locations of mothers' residences, gas wells, and public drinking water sources and combines them with dates of infant births, measurements of water contaminants, and timing of drilling and fracking activities. It's big data.
Results showed that prenatal exposure to a fracking well drilled within 1 km (.62 miles) of water sources, together with drilling near a mother's home, raises risks for both preterm birth and low birthweight. Study methods adroitly controlled for confounding factors.
Read 9 tweets
Dec 19, 2021
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.
Read 25 tweets

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