Being adopted is the same as being raised in a biological family?

I’m not a fan of numerical lists of sound bite messages about complicated subjects like adoption.  It doesn’t educate anyone, it just provides fodder for stereotypes and misunderstandings.  The article below has two sound bite messages about the adoptee experience, written by a non-adopted person.  Why down play that every adoptee has to process added challenges at one or many points in their life, simply, because they are adopted?  Why write something so simplistic and dismissive.  The writer is correct that every adoptee is unique, I’ll give her credit for that.  I still think she is also wrong, and potentially hurting adoptees growing up now, and in the future because some adoptive parents will listen to her instead of the experts.

 

Not puppets to be used for your cause

Despite that abortion is a pregnancy decision, and adoption is a parenting decision, it seems that in the minds of people, they are indelibly linked, intertwined, if you will.  The rhetoric keeps ramping up trying to make the one adopted, the poster child to stop abortion.  Just the mere thought sends chills down my spine, to be used for a cause, when you are still a child.  This post is about abortion…

 

Will they ever learn?

Seems like I’ve written a lot of posts to adoptive parents lately.  I had high hopes for real changes to happen in adoption, everyone always states how different adoption is today, how much better it is.  I’m losing hope that those statements will actually become reality any time soon when I see what happens on a regular basis, some adoptive parents decide adoption is so beautiful that they just need to share, and the post goes viral, or they write a tell all book.  And they do it without a thought of protecting their child’s story, the story that the parents are supposed to guard, instead, they give it away, despite being educated, warned, that the story belongs to the child, that they are just the gatekeepers.  Other adoptive parents add to the problem by sharing it, commenting on it, continuing the over-sharing.

 

The Art of Dismissing the adoptee’s voice…

This old post showed up in my stats so I went to see what it said, sadly, it’s still relevant today 5 years later, so I’m posting it again with just a few minor word changes.