Adoption means being gaslit every fucking day of your life.

🥚

Y'all think it's the same thing because you can't imagine what it's like to not be biologically related to anyone in your family. I always knew something wasn't right. It took me almost 50 years to finally figure it out thanks to the connections I've made with other #adoptees.

I still think it's wild that the one thing in my life people told me didn't matter is absolutely the single thing that impacted every aspect of my life. I grew up believing my struggles were my fault because everyone told me being #adopted was just the same as being biological. It isn't!

"But what about the children languishing in orphanages!" they exclaim.

Here's a different way to think about them and their families. Give your money here instead.

www.hopeandhomes.org/what-we-do/

Majority of "orphans" around the world have at least one living parent. They all have extended family. We love the story of the rescued child because it makes us feel important when in reality we are no better than thieves who steal children from their families, cultures, and very identities. 🥚

Stunning insight from the Intersex Society of North America about adoptees and intersex kids: "...the central mistake made in adoption over the last many years is the same mistake made in cases of intersex: an assumption that children would be better off if they didn’t know the truth." 🥚

There's a case right now of Korean adoptees who are suing the Danish government for violation of their basic human rights. I hope they win and set a precedent for other countries.

wild how many stories of orphan rescue turn out to involve no actual orphans 🥚

people will in effect tell me “You need to let us buy other people’s children and rewrite their identities to let us pretend they are our offspring, or else those children will end up dying in dumpsters.”

And *I* am alleged to be the one holding “bad opinions.” 🥚

When I learn something about a marginalized group’s experience that may be different than I perceived, my initial thought isn’t to talk at said group and tell them why they are wrong.

I recognize it’s not my wheelhouse and try to learn from them.

Some of yall need to shutup and learn.

🥚

I have soooo many thoughts about anonymous gamete “donation.” But above all I find there to be a
*tremendous* moral irony in the situation of obtaining a genealogical connection to a child exactly BY denying that child access to their own genealogical connections. 🥚

Yep. And Kerry ain’t alone.

Also on “Finding Your Roots”, Laurence Fishburne learned his father wasn’t his biological father at the big age of 49.

LL Cool J learned his mom was adopted (she didn’t know either).

Joe Madison learned that the man he thought was his biological father wasn’t related to him at all. He learned this at age 70.

All on “Finding Your Roots”.

On “Finding Your Roots”, Kerry Washington learned that her biological dad is actually a sperm donor and not the man she knew as her dad for 41 years. Her parents were married and had fertility issues. She found out when they hesitated to give DNA samples to production.

People be LYING.

This article is a startlingly thorough presentation of the historical and political underpinnings and meanings of #adoption in the US. I have never seen an article in a mainstream magazine like it.

It’s something like a capsule statement of the small, but growing, adoption abolition movement.

“there must have been a good reason why the child was removed from that family.”

Yep. Want to know the biggest reason for private adoptions of infants?

Money. In our society it is the primary index of who deserves to be a parent. 🥚

It's my daily reminder not to argue with strangers on the internet 😂

!!!!!! Another (not) fun fact.

Did yall know that ppl do not have to tell adoptees we were adopted? Like EVER.

Can yall imagine how many ppl have passed on or are still living and have no idea?

🥚

The fact that no one is legally required to ever tell adoptees they are adopted should tell us everything we need to know about the hidden agenda at the core of adoption.

I'm done talking to you because you refuse to listen. Adoption is traumatic no matter what kind of experience an adoptee has throughout their lives. The act of being permanently severed from all family is the trauma.

Adoption is the permanent, legal separation from family. It's always traumatic. Always! Nothing needs to be distinguished here.

The *similarly big* evidence is present and glaring. Peer-reviewed research has been done. Lived experiences have been shared. Adoptees have been yelling about this for decades. And frankly, adoptees are tired of guiding ppl to the water just to have goal posts moved, as you’ve done here.

first rule of talking at me about #adoption:
Know what you’re talking about.
Try harder.

You realize you're asking adoptees to give you free labor about our lived experiences, right? You can Google adoption trauma and learn a few things. The separation itself is an actual trauma.

I also wanna say this is also a domestic issue. There are plenty of US-born plenary adoptees who have been taken under false pretenses AND blatantly lied to about their birth families.

When adoptees speak, listen. And believe them. 🥚

Burn. It. Down. 🔥

We can care for kids without permanately severing them from all family!

Yes, like most humans, children have entire families.

Families!

Let's keep them together.

This meant the US was getting into manufacturing orphans overseas now, which later ballooned into a massive transnational adoption system rife with fraud, taking advantage of wars or poverty, and relying on coercion or, in many cases, outright child abduction to reach its ends. For the Americans, rescuing these "orphans" did several things at once: It met the market demand for children domestically, bolstered the image of the US by justifying the righteousness of its foreign policy objectives, and served as a tool of imperial dominance and population management abroad.

“And with the onset of the Cold War, the US exported its Indian Wars around the world.” …

#Adoption isn't a choice if there are no other options. That's why only certain people are targeted by adoption agencies. It's easier to manipulate a vulnerable person.

When I met my birth parents, the first thing they each separately said to me was that they had no choice but to relinquish me.

Through gut-wrenching interviews with relinquishing mothers, Sisson details the billion-dollar adoption industry's exhaustive efforts to source infants for adoption, from aggressive marketing campaigns that target poor women in crisis to post-birth coercive practices that aim to quickly finalize adoptions before a mother can change her mind. That such extensive efforts are necessary to convince people to relinquish their children casts serious doubt on the narrative that it is a decision made voluntarily—it often looks more like surrender under the weight of combined pressures.

“That such extensive efforts are necessary to convince people to relinquish their children casts serious doubt on the narrative that it is a decision made voluntarily—it often looks more like surrender under the weight of combined pressures.”