Mourning Dress and Hat – 1870s

(Owned by Obscura Antiques & Oddities of New York City)

via 19th Century Post

I shouldn’t have to blog this, I’ve written it all before, over and over again. Today’s events are everything I’ve continually warned of year in and year out.

NJ-CARE’s short sighted, self absorbed damaging and contorted (lack of) access bill, A1406/1399/S799 passed in the General Assembly this afternoon, thus moving one step closer to sealing records for all NJ kids passing through the so called “safe haven” program once and for all.

The bill now passes on to the Governor’s Desk, where if there is any justice left in this world for Bastards and Abandoned Children it should be promptly vetoed.

Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath.

Baby dump proponents were not strong enough to pass a mandatory sealed records clause as the “Safe haven” legislation passed in New Jersey years ago, but as we saw today, they’ve found themselves a set of dupes,  and/or willing accomplices in NJ-CARE,  Adam Pertman and the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, Jean Strauss and others, each of whom at this point have been more than willing to do their wretched dirty work for them.

I’ve written for years now about the unfolding catastrophe in New Jersey.

Today is but the latest chapter in the ongoing co-optation from without and gutting from what is often mistaken for “within” the movement(s) for the full restoration of adopted people’s full human rights.

I say mistaken for “within” the movement as people like Jean Strauss have plainly admitted that for her, this is not grounded in any notion of rights based work or a restoration of rights, nor to her, is it work pertaining to working to eradicate a deep injustice perpetrated on adopted people and our families (quoting from my partner Mike’s blog):

…Strauss, in the course of organizing that doomed effort, has explicitly denied that open birth certificates are a civil right of adoptees. Regarding the advocacy of her organization in California, she wrote “… this is not an effort to ‘right a wrong’ or ‘a fight for our Constitutional rights.’

Clearly, by her own admission, people like Strauss are not part of the rights based movement.

Organizations such as NJ-CARE who not only bring her in relying upon her (non-rights based) “expertise” (advocating a ’sell some out’ approach) and going so far as to adopt the same model as Strauss’ failed California “CARE” effort, likewise certainly leave themselves open to the question of whether or not they are genuinely part of the human rights based adoptee rights movement either.

NJ-CARE and individuals closely associated with it, have long signaled their willingness to trade away the human rights of adopted people standing next to them, and the access to original birth certificates for the entire class of (mostly yet even unconceived) legally abandoned children (some of whom will in turn, be reprocessed into adoptees.) Their support for and work on behalf of the fatally flawed and corrupted A1406/1399/S799 bore that out. Saying in effect, ‘we want (the possibility of maybe) getting ours, we don’t care who we trade away or trample over in the course of attempting to get that.’

It’s both shameful, and pathetic.

But more to the point, such negates any possibility of being rooted in human or civil rights, as human and civil rights are based in class based solutions. (Not “class” in terms of economic, but “class” in terms of a delineated set of people.)

One cannot “gain” human rights at the direct expense of the person also in your class standing next to you.

Or as I’ve said before ‘adoptee rights cannot be “won” at the direct expense of abandoned children (many of whom will go on to become adoptees themselves.)’

I’ve stated so often rights based solutions must apply to all, otherwise the injustice is merely sustained as the systems of power and control have not yet been dismantled.

The New Jersey bill not only fundamentally maintains the systems of discrimination, it builds new hoops for adoptees and their families to jump through, new bureaucracies, and hands the industry gifts on a silver platter, all at the expense of the human rights of other New Jersey children and eventual adults.

This is no victory, this is unconscionable.

NJ-CARE and its allies lost the ability to speak on behalf of Class Bastard and Class Bastard’s interests the moment it cleaved off other portions of Class Bastard and determined them expendable.

As to who is left speaking on behalf of those fucked over and left behind, the answer is simple enough, those firmly rooted in the human rights based demand for equality for all.

We speak on behalf of those no one else cares about, in part because some of what may come to be their circumstances were once ours.

Let me be perfectly blunt:

You can’t claim to genuinely be for adoptee rights if your strategy involves leaving subsets of adoptees behind.

That’s why I have written so often and so clearly over and over again about how the genuine adoptee rights work is rooted in leaving no one behind. (As but one of many examples, see my post, Bastard Access- either we all go together or we don’t go at all- “Nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten.”)

Let’s be clear,  those  willing to sell out Class Bastard in their personal rush to (possibly) gain access to their own, (provided of course, they don’t find themselves on the receiving end of a contact veto, now repackaged as a “contact preference”- precisely the form of  “contact preference form” creep that again, I’ve warned about for years now) are not part of the genuine adoptee rights movement.

Their willingness to over and over again, attempt to ‘justify’ their hope that (some) records might be restored to their rightful owners by turning to tactics such as the insistence that ‘need for medical history’ as the basis of their call for legislative ….something, (rather than standing firm on the simple demand that equality alone is enough, that all of us must regain that right we once held) has in fact worsened the preexisting quagmire NJ’s adoptees ALREADY find themselves trapped within.

NJ-CARE and its allies through their support of this bill have worked to construct a new system that will compel mothers to turn their otherwise  legally protected personal medical histories over to the state.

As a longtime abortion and women’s reproductive health advocate myself, who understands that many of the modern origins of consent and consent forms as well as personal privacy and freedom from unwarrented governmental intrusion (rooted in Eisenstadt v. Baird, not Roe and Doe) I’m appalled at NJ-CARE’s support for yet FURTHER government intrusion into women’s genuine medical privacy rights.

But obviously, I have many areas of grave concern with the bill.

The substitute bill version that was approved today contains precisely some of the windfalls to industry at the expense of our rights that I warned about, such as a new liability shield, ensuring we will not be able to seek redress in court, even in cases wherein “inaccuracies” are proffered as reality, (such as in the NJ Catholic Charities fraud I blogged here):

7.    (New section)  a. A person, firm, partnership, corporation, association or agency that has placed a child for adoption shall not be liable in any civil or criminal action for damages resulting from information provided by the State Registrar pursuant to this act.

b.    An employee, agent or officer of the Department of Health and Senior Services who is authorized by the Commissioner of Health and Senior Services to disclose information relating to the certification of birth pursuant to this act, shall not be liable for:

(1) disclosing information based on a written, notarized request submitted in accordance with this act; and

(2) any error or inaccuracy in the information that is disclosed after receipt of a written, notarized request submitted in accordance with this act, and any consequence of that error or inaccuracy.

It’s a gift to the adoption industry. It strips us and our family members of our right to sue.

This bill is not about increasing our rights, it’s about decreasing our rights.

It is not about opening records, so much as it is about sealing records, both through vetoes and for the dumped kids.

I could go on and on, pulling sections of the bill and pointing out over and over again the damage they stand to do to our rights, to our Mothers’ rights, to the rights of children passing through the baby dump program. (Fortunately Bastard Nation has already catalogued many of the bill’s horrors.)

But as I said in New York at the Evan B. Donaldson cheerleading pep rally for the bill (at which Mr. Pertman, the EBD head openly lied about the institute’s support for the bill)

“Have you read the bill?”

It’s all there in black and white.

Those proponents I’ve spoken to about the bill are past the point of listening.

It’s become tribal, an article of “faith” that this bill is a good thing, and any of us who dare stand against it we are being re-categorized as the ENEMY of adoptee rights.

Not surprising, considering it’s precisely what Strauss and her CARE group did in California.

(Never mind the fact that groups with CARE in their name in the adoption realm have yet to ever pass any of their deformer bills and are synonymous with sellling adoptees out and making messes wherever they go, while those they’re busily attacking, like Bastard Nation DO have a track record, and an extensive one at that, of actually getting clean bills passed that genuinely restore access to all.)

I know speaking only for myself personally, I stand on the side of all adopted people receiving equitable treatment under law and deserve to have our records restored to us for no other reason than this is a matter of our basic human rights.

No child should be intentionally stripped of their identity by the state. Certainly not merely for passing through New Jersey’s legalized child abandonment child laundering system, and all the more so those who were never at any risk, who were born in hospitals to identified Mothers only to have that information stripped from them after the fact.

No adoptee should be left behind by a “contact preference” creeped contact veto. No Mother should be forced by the state to hand over her personal and legally protected private medical history year in and year out so that yet another state bureaucracy can be constructed rather than simply restoring class Bastard’s basic equality.

Yet this is the very damage ACS 1406 stands poised to unleash.

Our genuine “birthright” is that of equal treatment under law.

This legislation fails that most basic test.

For those who care about the real rights of Bastards and those legally abandoned in New Jersey, all I can say is the clock’s ticking. If this damnedable bill gets signed into law, it’s those with the least voice, the least political power, and precious few advocates indeed who will be forced to pay the price.

Not that NJ-CARE cares.

human rights, pl.n. The basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled…

There’s that word in the middle: “all.” Human rights, if they are rights, apply to all people. A simple concept, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, when it comes to the world of adoption, various camps – primarily, the institutions that make up the adoption industry itself – have a lot to gain from complicating the simple things.

Let’s take Adam Pertman as today’s rather timely example. Pertman is the Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Institute, which I’ll call “EBD” for short. What is this “Institute?” Take a look at their own website, and you’ll see what spawned it – an adoption agency, Spence-Chapin. Heck, the “Institute” is even named for the onetime president of this adoption agency:

The Adoption Institute was established in 1996 through the initiative of the Board of Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children, which saw a need for an independent and unbiased adoption research and policy organization. Evan B. Donaldson was a member of the Spence-Chapin Board of Directors continuously from 1977 on, serving as president from 1986 until her death in 1994.

I think it’s quite appropriate to laugh at those words, “independent and unbiased.” The EBD’s sole business is the promotion of adoption, providing backing for adoption agencies in general, while Spence-Chapin is still featured prominently on the front page of the EBD website as an “organizational partner.”

As for Adam Pertman, his book and his rhetoric hammer the same themes over and over, that the practice of adoption “for growing a family” must be somehow considered completely normal, societally normalized. His function is that of advocacy from the point of view of the satisfied customer. The problem with this is that such advocate-customers often seek to validate their past decisions by preserving and promoting the business that supplied them with a product or service. It is secondary to advocate-customers if the business is found to be doing harm in the process of providing that service, or is detrimental to the people who are integral to that product, only that the business continue to function to serve even more customers just like Pertman. Such advocate-customers can also be completely without a clue about details that are vitally important to others affected by such a business – in this case, Pertman ignores the actual details and history of the process of actually opening birth certificates to adoptees through legislation.

That the “product” here involves real live human children should in itself raise a few red flags. That Adam Pertman, an adopter and adoption promoter, is barging in and opportunistically seizing upon the language of adoptee rights that has historically been primarily the domain of adopted people themselves, crafted by the adoptee rights movement, should also raise some red flags, particularly among exactly those adoptees.

Adam Pertman has had a decade or so to appropriate the language of adoptee  rights for his own uses, making some inroads among some adoptees and adoption-related groups who are, inexplicably, supporting the latest spectacle created by Pertman and the EBD, including the AAC and CUB. Problem is, every time Pertman opens his mouth, he takes a simple issue – access to birth certificates for all adopted people, no exceptions – and complicates it beyond all recognition, subverting it so that, in practice adoptees end up being left behind. Pertman does not act as if he was concerned with a matter of gaining civil rights for each and every member of an affected group, which is not resolvable through legislation that makes that civil right conditional on the permission of others.

His lack of concern for actual rights is necessitated by his role as a marketer. His role is to promote the EBD and adoption through a number of methods. The promotional method that most clearly hampers adoptee rights is through EBD’s repeated practice of submitting and presenting testimony to state legislatures whenever legislation involving access to birth certificates is being considered.  Unfortunately, Pertman and EBD never address the merits or faults of the particular proposed legislation, but have merely carried and repeated from state to state the same canned presentation for the past five years or more. Testimony by Adam Pertman does not accomplish the actual work of convincing legislators to open birth certificates for all, but is primarily to raise his image and that of the EBD as “experts,” as providers of marketing-survey-based position papers that uniformly prop up adoption, which he repeatedly calls a “wondrous institution.”

The restoration of rights to adoptees is unrelated to this kind of glowing, and unwarranted, description of the adoption industry. Instead, it’s that kind of exaggerated language, the vague promise that adoptees might know the facts of their origins, and the outright confusion of birth certificates with seldom-specified “medical records” that complicate, if not sabotage, the relatively simple matter of restoring a basic civil right and equal protection under the law to adoptees. No one should be compelled to disclose personal medical information to others, even family members – in fact, it’s against the law – but the repeated, and completely irrelevant, pounding on the availability of medical histories is not germane to restoring the basic civil rights of all adoptees by restoring access to original birth certificates.

What, then, is Adam Pertman actually doing? Having been exposed to his empty rhetoric for years now, and his most recent endorsement of legislation (”we urge swift passage”) such as that now under consideration in New Jersey (A1406) which would permanently create sealed birth certificates for some individuals (link from June 2010), I’d say that Pertman isn’t interested in “rights” at all. What he’s pushing is what I’ve come to call openness™ in adoption, which is, first and foremost, a marketing position taken by the adoption industry, which is why I sarcastically add the italics and trademark to the word.

openness™ is not focused on individuals, so it actually doesn’t take the fact that individuals have rights that apply to everyone as a fundamental basis for policy. openness™ is, instead, primarily about preserving and growing the institution of adoption, through rehabilitating the public perception of adoption through marketing the idea that everyone involved in adoption will come to feel good about it, and about each other. It is about the relationships among the people involved with adoption, mediated, if not being the outright puppets of, the state and the institutions of adoption, including agencies and attorneys involved with adoption. All of this is to grease the rails so that more and “better” adoptions occur: parents, particularly mothers, must give up their children and their privacy of medical information, adopters get assurances that they’re receiving a quality product, and adoptees… well, if everyone else thinks it’s okay, they might get access to, perhaps, some portion of an official record of their origin, to which they have, under the openness™ model, no absolute right, merely the possibility of an arbitrary privilege of access.

It’s not surprising that self-described “Bastards,” with knowledge of history and experience with adoption politics, have a problem with this. Members of Bastard Nation, the adoptee rights organization, have successfully worked to open birth certificates to all adoptees in several states including Oregon in 2000. Recently BN helped hold the line against proposed legislation in Oregon that would have reversed that ten-year-old victory, limiting birth certificate access only to those adoptees “whose birth parent has filed a Consent to Release of Original Birth Certificate,” to quote from the proposed legislation. It is this kind of threat to the fundamental rights of adoptees that is enabled by the openness™ regime; when the right to access is not taken as absolute and inviolable, virtually any trivial objection by anyone else who was involved with or once participated in an adoption may be allowed to take precedence over that right.

This week, Adam Pertman and the EBD will be hosting an event in New York that they call “For The Records.” As with Pertman’s other activities, from reading the invitation on the EBD website, it’s not altogether clear how anything about this event will actually support advocacy of legislation that opens birth certificates for all adoptees. It’s more about the vague language of openness™, which is all about marketing the institution of adoption, not the reality of effective advocacy for open records legislation. And since it’s all about the marketing of openness™ and promotion of the institution of adoption as clean, wholesome and desirable, the event takes on the form of some kind of bizarre corporate promotion, complete with musical and comedic entertainment:

• Oprah Winfrey, who is not going to be present, nor, as far as I know, is in any way substantially connected with Pertman or EBD, is named on the invite through reference to an “Oprah Winfrey Reunion Story” that we’re all supposed to already be familiar with. Those of us who aren’t completely transfixed by celebrities or who consider following the details of Oprah Winfrey’s life a waste of time might find this reference a bit mystifying, but I suppose such contortions on the part of this event’s promoters are absolutely necessary, lest they miss the opportunity to associate their brand with a public figure loved and followed by millions.
• Appearances by two celebrities, rapper Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and Zara Phillips
• The “world premier” [sic] of the two-year-old music video featuring McDaniels and Phillips that’s all about openness™ but that fails to convey the basic fact that opening birth certificates is a matter between adopted individuals and the state, not between them and their parents
• Book signings of allegedly “just published” books by Adam Pertman  and Zara Phillips. Pertman’s book is a “revised and updated” edition of his “Adoption Nation” from 2000, Phillips’ is the US edition of her 2008 UK release. Like any other marketing-focused event, there are books and videos to be promoted.
• A video by comedienne Alison Larkin, who likewise has a book to promote and a career to keep afloat.
• Video from, and appearance of, filmmaker Jean Strauss, who is best known among some for her involvement with California CARE, and an abortive effort to introduce a bill there that would have taken a bad situation for adoptees in California, and made it much worse.  Strauss, author of a “guide to search and reunion,” likewise has a  number of DVD’s and books for sale on her website.

So if you’re keeping score, you’d know by now that of all the announced guests, only one has been involved with spearheading an organized legislative effort: Jean Strauss. But Strauss, in the course of organizing that doomed effort, has explicitly denied that open birth certificates are a civil right of adoptees. Regarding the advocacy of her organization in California, she wrote,  “… this is not an effort to ‘right a wrong’ or a ‘fight for our Constitutional rights’.” This exactly matches the model of openness™ which likewise deliberately evades the fact that individuals have rights with respect to the state, that should apply to everyone. In the same letter, Strauss threw some unknown number of adoptees overboard, announcing that their goal was only “of providing access to original birth records for as many California adult adoptees 18 and older as possible.” From the looks of the proposed legislation, that would have been very few California adoptees indeed.

Adoptee rights activists who have successfully organized legislative efforts in states like Alabama, New Hampshire, and Oregon – where birth certificates are open without conditions – are nowhere to be found on this stage. That is as it should be, because what this event is about is marketing of everything else about adoption, particularly the mystique – to those who aren’t adopted –  of search and reunion necessitated by sealed records. The substance of equal rights for adoptees cannot be found amidst all the pontificating about how wonderful adoption is, and the selling of products. The language of equal rights may appear there, but only in service to the industry, and to the marketing: of videos, of books, of celebrities and their careers, of the position papers and testimony offered by Adam Pertman and his organization.

There’s a hint of where this leads, right there in the description of the event on EBD’s page, where they claim the event is about “the need for states to restore adult adoptees’ access to their original birth certificates” (my emphasis). This language is disingenuous with respect to human rights, as it points out a need for justice, but is not attached to an exact definition, a concrete plan,  demonstrated actions, or an organizational history that shows how those rights might uniformly be gained for all people. A perpetual need, never fulfilled, for such access may well fill a particular marketing niche among the promoters of the institution of adoption; it provides a subject to talk about, to gain entry into the halls of legislatures as well as the media, through a never-ending series of search-and-possibly-reunion stories made possible by the inaccessibility of birth certificates that document the historical fact of one’s birth. openness™, and its cousin, conditional access legislation, might grant birth certificate access to only a very privileged few adoptees. The passage of conditional access legislation is the legacy of EBD’s vague, unfocused advocacy and self-promotion.

A genuine initiative that actually worked to grant open birth certificates to all adoptees, across the board, would speak with clarity to act as a civil rights movement for adoptees. (Such a movement has long existed, but it won’t be participating in EBD’s spectacles.)  The vagueness and ineffectiveness of openness™, with much obfuscating talk of search, reunion and medical histories, builds upon ongoing, continued injustice, and mere talk of rectification, as a framework for perpetual marketing of the institution of adoption.  That is why Adam Pertman’s adoption marketing poses an ongoing threat to human rights.

Advances in artificial procreation have outpaced Canada’s fertility laws. The result? A field of medicine that has been compared to the “Wild West,” where there are virtually no rules governing what’s legally or morally acceptable.

There have been a number of articles in the aftermath of the decision and I strongly urge readers to continue to research these developments beyond what little I’m going to focus on in this post.

For the purposes of this post, though, I’m going to draw on two articles, both published over the weekend.

First up is Fertile ground: The business of baby-making from the Ottawa Citizen.

Both of these pieces are crucial reads, I’m merely going to pull a few sections. Starting with this overview of the existing reproductive climate. (Emphasis added.)

As more Canadians are turning to science to help start a family, the country’s fertility laws have fallen behind the times, with few rules governing what’s legal or morally acceptable when it comes to artificially making babies — and what’s not.

Some fertility doctors are still routinely implanting three or more embryos into women, increasing the risk of twins, triplets or quadruplets, as well as the risk of fatal outcomes or lifelong complications among the babies that survive.

The RCMP is investigating at least two cases of alleged buying and selling of human reproductive material — sperm or eggs cells, or surrogate wombs. And women in India are bearing babies for infertile Canadian couples who are travelling abroad to circumvent the criminal ban against the hiring of surrogates in this ­country.

An Ottawa doctor and Order of Canada recipient, Dr. Norman Barwin, is also facing two civil lawsuits alleging he inseminated two women with the wrong sperm, allegations he denies; the families are seeking a court order requiring the doctor be tested “to conclusively rule out the possibility that he is the donor whose sperm was used.”

Fertility doctors are offering women the chance to bank their frozen eggs for “reproductive safekeeping,” even though many members of their own profession say egg freezing for fertility preservation is experimental and unproven.

The list of controversies continues to grow.

A sperm-injecting technique that allows once-infertile men to father a child is increasingly being used despite concerns over its safety. The adult children who were born decades ago to anonymous sperm donors are going to court to find out who their fathers are. And alarms are being raised about the growing and aggres­sive use of drugs that stimulate a woman’s ovaries to churn out more eggs than she could ever produce on her own.

The article also goes into the lack of national standards or regulation over much of the growing field. (Again emphasis added.)

As pressure mounts on the provinces to follow Quebec’s lead to fund assisted reproduction technologies, as demand for IVF grows and as couples wait longer before trying to have a family, assisted reproduction is poised to move from a niche to a mass market in Canada.

But, three days before Christmas, the country’s highest court ruled key sections of the nation’s fertility law unconstitutional — throwing efforts to regulate Canada’s fertility industry back nearly two decades. The Supreme Court of Canada ruling places much of the industry under provincial jurisdiction and control, effectively killing a scheme to regulate assisted reproduction on a national level. Critics say the absence of federal standards for clinics will lead to a patchwork approach across Canada.

Seventeen years ago, the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies pressed for legislation to govern the business of artificial conception. Seventeen years later, there are still virtually no national standards or policies to oversee a field of medicine that critics say, despite its altruistic veneer, is ultimately about the commercialization of the creation of life.

Assisted procreation “is aimed at a take-home baby. That’s what everyone is in this for,” says Margaret Somerville, founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. “But ultimately, this is a new human being. And what we have not done in any of this is put that new human being at the centre of our decision-making.”

I have written here a number of times about IVF and the growing movement of donor conceived (dc) individuals and their efforts to gain their fundamental human right of biologically based identity, such as Canadian Olivia Pratten’s lawsuit. (see Olivia Pratten’s suit to end second class citizenship for Canadian donor conceived individuals.)

(As always, I strongly urge those interested in the first hand perspectives of donor conceived people and their human rights work to begin with the Confessions of a Cryokid blog and links as an important jumping off point.)

The driving engine, of course, remains, whatever money can buy.

Despite the money changing hands, many in the field deny that they’re engaged in commercial transactions.

“In the reproductive business — which is a business — you have this very strange denial of the commercial aspect of what people are doing,” says Debora Spar, author of The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.

“I get it, I understand it. I think because reproductive technologies are so new people still have this knee-jerk reaction against them — they get very scared when the words ‘baby’ or ‘reproduction’ occur in the same sentence as money,” says Spar, a former professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and current president of Barnard College in New York City.

“The truth of the matter is that there is commerce going on — and it’s pretty expensive and high-priced commerce going on.”

In the U.S., “you can buy sperm, you can buy eggs — that’s really the market that has exploded — you can rent wombs and you can increasingly put together these complicated package deals, where you buy the sperm from one source, the egg from another and the surrogate mother.”

Canada’s Supreme Court left in place prohibitions against paying for sperm or egg donors or surrogacy services — outlawed activities that carry fines of up to $500,000 or 10 years in prison. But many Canadians are simply buying and importing donor sperm and eggs from the U.S. — often with the help of Canadian fertility clinics — or traveling abroad for surrogates.

As the article points out, whatever Canadians can’t get domestically, they can buy in the United States or abroad.

Protecting the identity rights of those produced by these processes likewise, remains just another regulatory hole. (Emphasis added.)

Spar and others say more needs to be done to track any long-term health risks to babies born after assisted conception, and to the women who receive large amounts of hormones as part of their treatments. They say permanent donor records need to be kept to allow children born from sperm or egg donation to trace their genetic parents, should they wish to do so.

“We do that now for adoption after making mistakes for decades. We’re making the same mistakes with assisted reproduction in presuming that children have no interest in their genetic heritage,” Spar says.

The quote, despite bringing up the interests of donor conceived individuals still shows how little their circumstances are understood.

Beyond mere curiosity or interest in one’s genetic heritage, the ability to trace authentic identity and one’s own origins, as well as ethnicity, nationality, family, etc. is firmly in the realms of human rights. When donor conceived individuals are intentionally deprived of such, they are denied their most basic human rights.

Laskin says the “outliers” are small and the vast majority of doctors working in the country’s private fertility facilities are practising at a high standard.

But those watching say the need for oversight and regulation has never been greater.

“Otherwise you are saying to any person with a private interest in making humans, go out there and set up a business,” says Françoise Baylis, Canada research chair in bioethics and philosophy at Halifax’s Dalhousie University.

Which is globally, precisely what has already happened.

Which leads us to the second article, this one about a key technological leap in terms of human egg freezing and defrosting, as well as the pressures driving women to freeze eggs, ideally in their 20’s.

See Human-egg banking raises sticky social questions from the Vancouver Sun.

The article points out how these technologies were originally developed in the medical realm, to help women facing threats to their reproductive capacity retain the ability to bear children at a later date, yet they are now shifting towards the consumer marketplace in a broader climate of little to no regulation.

Egg freezing was born from a goal of rescuing the fertility of women undergoing treatment for cancer or other diseases that can destroy immature eggs in the ovaries and plunge women into premature menopause.

As there is little to no long term health monitoring both of the effects of the practices on the resultant offspring and on the women themselves, much of this reproductive marketplace and its long term effects exists firmly in the realm of “we don’t know.”

Tan agrees with critics that centres introducing egg freezing should initially only do it in the context of a clinical trial, and under research ethics supervision, until they can obtain “consistently good results,” and preferably publish those results in a peer-reviewed journal.

But critics also charge that the long-term effects on the eggs and resulting embryos are unknown. “The consensus of opinion is that if an egg fertilizes and it develops to an early embryo and we implant it into a uterus and it grows, everything is pretty much OK,” says Dr. Roger Pierson, a past president of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Saskatchewan. “But we don’t know how that is going to affect their long-term development. There are things that we just can’t test in animal models.” There’s also no guarantee of a baby in the end, he says.

Women need to be told what the realistic outcomes would be, Pierson says. “The reality is, we just don’t know what that is.”

“I would hate to see it used as a marketing tool, saying, ‘100 per cent of the time when we freeze your eggs you’re going to get a baby at the end of the day.’ ”

All of this, once again, raises the ongoing questions pertaining to stored genetic material and those vying for ‘ownership’/ability to utilize such years later.

While frozen unfertilized eggs are obviously different from frozen fertilized eggs, a careful study of how those pushing embryo transference (what is sold as “embryo adoption” here in the States,)  particularly those in the christian evangelical subcultures, and how they have come to view genetic material in long term storage as more a national resource than under individual ownership may over time become increasingly pertinent.

Here in the States, in Louisiana for example, they have worked to ensure that frozen embryos can legally only be thawed for purposes of implantation and potential pregnancy. They have a definite preferred outcome for the embryos and it precludes other means of disposal or donation for medical research purposes. See my previous posts In-Vitro Fertilization, “Snowflakes,” and the growing Christian Eugenic movement and Stem-Cell Veto, Snowflake kids, and Christian Eugenics.

Whether or not they would extend their religiously based objections and demand the stored material be essentially hijacked/commandeered from those who were originally the sources of the genetic material beyond fertilized eggs on into any stored material that could be utilized to produce pregnancies is an unanswered question.

The article also points out the fundamental lack of basic physiological and biological education.

Clearly, far beyond sex ed, people need a crash course in the reproductive realities of their own bodies. This lack of basic understanding of the reproductive limitations women face over the course of their reproductive lifetimes is common across many cultures and nations.

Women are born with a finite number of eggs. At birth a woman’s ovaries contain approximately one to two million oocytes — immature eggs; by puberty, the count drops to 400,000. During each menstrual cycle, about 1,000 oocytes begin to develop but only one becomes a mature egg. The others left behind die. Not only does the supply shrink but egg quality decreases over time as well, since the best eggs are used up when young, so that each egg now offers less chance of pregnancy and a higher risk of miscarriage.

By the time a woman reaches age 39, “there aren’t many (follicles) left that have got enough strength to raise their hand,” says Dr. Al Yuzpe, co-founder and co-director of the Genesis Fertility Centre of Vancouver.

“My usual response is, ‘You may not look 40, you may not feel 40 but your ovaries don’t know it,’ ” Yuzpe says. He frequently encounters women who had no idea of the limits of their fertility. “They’re not only shocked, they’re tearful, they’re angry. ‘Nobody told me that I wasn’t going to be able to get pregnant at 48.’

But when women don’t understand something as basic as pregnancy at 48 isn’t “normalcy” is it then any wonder that somewhere between adoption and reproductive technologies the unending quest for a child plays out against the backdrop of a consumer marketplace catering to precisely those consumer demands?

As for the kids produced or purchased, they’re lucky at this point, to even get a couple sentences worth of mentions even in thoughtful articles such as these.

That’s part of the problem.

Now as earlier generations of donor conceived individuals (and adoptees) reach adulthood and find their voices politically, those in any position to regulate this “wild west” would do well to listen.

It’s (the industry declared) “National Adoption Awareness Month” again.

We Bastards and (original) families have little choice but to be “aware” of adoption and our adopted status every day of the year,  but it’s long overdue we bring some of our kind of “awareness” to the industry’s adoption marketing attempts.

Thus for the month of November, those of us writing about some of the cold hard realities of adoption will be pulling together pieces of OUR broader narrative over the course of the month.

Consider it a sane alternative to the cotton candy, rainbows, and unicorns the industry will be shoveling down every media pipe they can get their talking heads into all month long.

Plenty of us will be pointing at one another’s important work and writings throughout the month, some featuring guest bloggers, others using their blogs to link across to solid pieces by other adoption reality supportive writers.

On twitter, a number of us will be gathering our posts together under a single hashtag, by adding #NAdoptAM to some of our posts.

(Hint- keep an eye on the #NAdoptAM search results over the course of the month to read some of the body of work produced.)

Along those lines, I’ve added and will be adding a #NAdoptAM tag to all my posts this month to gather them together in a single place.

Leaving it to the adoption industry or even adopters to dictate the terms adoption is discussed in is unconscionable.

We are adoption.

We live adoption every day of our lives.

Those willing to look beyond the industry’s teddy bears, balloons, and gotcha day videos will find some of the more unpleasant adoption realities in places such as #NAdoptAM.

By way of a few very basic suggestions of what you can do this month to serve as a counterpoint to the sealed records status quo:

1. Start by getting well grounded in terms of your own thinking.

Bastard Nation’s booklet, The Basic Bastard, while a bit dated in some places, still contains the core arguments of the Bastard civil and human rights politic. Also see the BN FAQ, particularly in relation to the important distinctions between search and reunion and unconditional records access restoration.

If you’re not confident or well grounded in some of these nuances, and prepared to refute some of the typical nonsense flung at us when we do speak out, maybe November for you is more about setting aside some time to delve into an education process or making personal connections with others who have been in these battles before, who demand nothing less than full equality.

2. For others who are ready, November is a time to speak and act.

A few possible suggestions, in no particular order:

• Write letters to the editor
• comment on articles
• blog
• read and educate yourself
• tweet
• tag and hashtag it
• get your voice and perspective into the broader conversation across the net and in person, particularly with those in your social circles
• consciousness raise
• work with others locally, and globally but be sure such efforts are grounded in a position or document similar to CALOPEN’s No Veto Resolution from the get go
• educate
• do radio and television interviews
• help bring foster kids’ voices and experiences to the fore
• meet with your representatives, work with them to introduce and pass pure unrestricted restoration of access to our records bills

November is no time to stay silent and let the industry control all discourse on the subject..

Let your words and actions speak loud and clear this November.

If people want to talk adoption, they need to start at the demand for nothing less than the restoration of full human/civil/identity rights of all adopted people.

Let your voice be heard.

Use it or lose it.

Adoption UK, a group run by and for adopters has released a new report out today concerning the state of adoption in Wales.

I strongly oppose a number of the recommendations in the report relating to the the attempt to slide attachment quackery (also be sure to see A search for survivors)  into basic qualifications as I view the attachment industry and personalities inherent to it as nothing less than human rights violations, an ongoing hazard to Bastards’ life and health. Many of these so called “therapists” are simply criminals and child torturers with nothing short of an adoptee body count to show for their vile “work.”

But I did want to highlight two aspects of the report that Americans may not otherwise hear about, the massive failure rate (often marked by returning the child to public care) of the adoptions in the study and the basic lack of services, particularly mental health services to adoptees themselves (as well as their adopters.)

By Adoption UK’s tabulations, at least 1 in 5 adoptions eventually “breakdown,” though the actual numbers may be much higher:

Wales manager Ann Bell, who is both an adoptee and an adoptive parent, said the number of adoptive family break-ups could be as high as one-in-three but statistics kept by Wales’ 22 councils were not collated by the assembly government.

She said: “We feel that the assembly government needs to be pulling that data together and really learning from that data.

Let that really sink in, this is a report and comment to the BBC by adopters themselves, stating plainly that perhaps as many as one third of these adoptions will come to a quiet end within a matter of years.

These less than stellar “adoption outcomes” are being swept under the rug as no one is even tasked with tracking them.

In the U.K. just as the U.S., we are left with a fundamental lack of data collection and tabulation (emphasis mine):

The charity Adoption UK said care professionals were not learning from the “unacceptable” level of breakdowns because no overall record was kept.

Once the fuss and hubbub of “gotcha day” has passed, there is little to no tracking on what happens years down the line.

All of which is set against the backdrop of of an increasing number of adoptions in Wales:

Adoption UK said its report comes as the number of adoptions in Wales rose from 212 in 2008 to 256 in 2009.

As no one is formally tasked with tracking the failure rate, let alone what happens to the kids after an adoption “breakdown,” the popular perception remains that of the nonstop drumbeat for ever more adoptions, families traveling abroad to collect their purchases, all teddy bears and smiles, with any failures quietly sliding out the back door un-noted and unnoticed.

This article, Adoption services failing vulnerable children, approaches the same report from a perspective more rooted in the needs of the kids themselves:

Services for adopted children are not supporting them properly, according to a report out today.

it continues:

The study found that some local authorities are failing to respond to the needs of adopted children, and that schools’ attitudes can be dismissive.

Essential services are also limited – in one case a family was told to wait five years before requesting help from Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

The full Adoption UK report can be found here, Support Needs of Adoptive Families in Wales.

Just bear in mind as you read it, attachment quackery junk “therapies” are front and center in the core recommendations, such “therapies” represent nothing less than violations of adoptee’s human rights and should be opposed by all who genuinely care about the well being, human rights, and political realities of adopted people.

Now that Illinois’ disastrous HB 5428 has been signed into law, (it’s now known as PA 96-0895) simply by looking at the new law it becomes clear, some untold number of adoptees will have their requests for their original birth certificates, or attempts to register with the registry rejected by the state. Yet the state appears to have no interest in hearing from or about those so intentionally left behind.

No provision has been made to track those rejections nor build statistics how many requests are being turned down. (Let alone offer those rejected any form of redress.)

Until now.

Mary Lynn Fuller (of Illinois Open) is beginning to compile some of the stories of those the state of Illinois is rejecting access to their Original Birth Certificates (OBCs) to or refusing to register in the IARMIE (Illinois Adoption Registry and Medical Information Exchange.) She’s attempting to build some basic statistics on just how many are being turned away and what their circumstances are.

She can be contacted via email- mlfuller65@comcast.net.

If you can help spread the word about Mary Lynn’s effort to do this basic data collection, please share her effort far and wide within your social networks.

This is terribly important work, as many legislators believe they just ‘restored’ adoptees civil rights and believe the new law has ‘fixed’ the situation. Tragically, nothing could be farther from the truth. But without the data to show what those turned away are experiencing, those rejected will be left to suffer this injustice as if it were nothing more than a ‘personal problem’.

These rejections are not ‘personal problems.’  They are the result of a systemic flaw, inherently built into the new law, and precisely what many of us who have been blogging about the legislative wrangling in Illinois for years now warned was about to happen before the law passed.

Bastardette has added her take on Mary Lynn’s effort here:

Attention Illinois Original Birth Certificate Rejects! Act Now!

As Bastardette put it:

You can read Mary’s latest blog about Illinois here. Note that although Mary is a grandmother, and her first mother is dead, she is not yet old enough and thus responsible enough to qualify for her own birth certificate–despite what Feigenholtz says to to the contrary on her own webpage.

Representative Sara Feigenholtz, who sponsored and pushed the bill can say  “Today, we’re opening a new chapter in adoption history in Illinois where we can finally say that all families are created equal” ’til she’s blue in the face.

Even the most straightforward reading of the law makes it clear enough, today Illinois families and adoptees remain locked behind multiple doors of state constructed unequal treatment.

What’s important at this point, is to bring together and compile the stories of those who AS A CLASS OF PEOPLE are left to endure that inequality, and bring their plight to light.

Rather than remaining voiceless, each trapped by the legislation’s fatal flaw, adoptee rights advocates both in Illinois and across the country are trying to ensure that PA 96-0895 is not the end of the road in Illinois as this new law merely creates a whole new set of problems, problems we warned were inherent to it before it passed. None of us are giving up.

We don’t view this latest version of the mess in Illinois as any kind of “end point” nor do we consider the matter “settled.” If anything, we foresee that for a class of adoptees and their families, this is merely another chapter, and the problems therein are only just beginning.

Proving that, though, becomes a matter of individuals being willing to speak out. Of data collection. And of not giving up.

We recognize there’s a long haul ahead of us, all the more so in that once legislators pass a bill, they use their work on it as an excuse to refuse to revisit the “issue” for years to come.

As they refuse to track the consequences of the law, it falls to the directly affected to do so.

With the evidence of PA 96-0895’s failures in hand, we will continue to push for nothing less than genuine equality for adopted people and their families in Illinois.

Because when it comes to genuinely restoring human, civil, and identity rights, no one should be left behind or forgotten.

Illinois Adoptees with One Foot in the Grave. Hark! Your Original Birth Certificate is on its Way.

I have no real time to write about it all at the moment, so instead, I’m going to pull a variety of quotes out of some of the articles from the past day or so to lay out the outlines of what has just taken place.

The ruling comes in a case brought by Arun Dohle of Against Child Trafficking or ACT (which has long been listed in my links list.  They have been doing critically important human rights work for both adopted people and their families.)

Please note that while the news reports are dismissive of Dohle’s “lineage plea,” what the court actually ruled was that he would still be able to file a suit for seeking relief.

Certainly not a full victory by any means, ( at least not yet,)  but when it comes to establishing the absolute right of Indian adoptees to their documentation, the high court finally gave over full access, rebuffing arguments by the agency/NGO claiming adoptees have no right to such or that their files should be covered by “confidentiality”or “mother’s privacy.”

The judges flatly dismissed such arguments, ruling:

• it is not a national secret that will cause a `maha yudh’, adding that “nothing is private here”
• “Show it to him. He is entitled to it”
• “No national secret is involved in it and the days of privileged documents are over.”

and then handing over the adoption file to him.

So on to the articles themselves.

Quoting from ‘I won’t be satisfied till I find my birth mother’:

An adopted Indian’s 17-year search for his biological parents has resulted in a landmark judgment which will fundamentally change adoption rules of the country.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed Arun Dohle, 37, to access his adoption records, which was illegal until now.

Dohle was two months old when a German couple, Michael and Gertrude Dohle, adopted him in 1973 from Kusumbai Motichand Mahila Seva Gram (KMMSG), an adoption centre in Pune. Dohle has been seeking adoption records from the centre since 1993.

“The court’s decision is a landmark one as it establishes that adopted children have a right to know about their biological parents after attaining maturity,” Dohle told DNA.

This  Times of India article, ‘I am not interested in my biological father’ contains many more details:

His habeas corpus plea to have his biological mother produced in court was dismissed by the apex court. But 17 years of legal struggle after he first made the innocuous request to Mahila Seva Gram to be shown his adoption file, his wish was finally granted by the Supreme Court on Monday. He now knows that his mother was a 20-year-old Hindu Maratha, a Std X graduate who resided at the agency during her pregnancy after her “friend’s brother” refused to marry her.

The adoption file was slim, just a few handwritten pages, which the bench headed by Justice Markandey Katju handed over to Dohle’s counsel and him in court to read without hurrying them up. According to the judges, it is not a national secret that will cause a `maha yudh’, adding that “nothing is private here” when the agency tried to prevent showing of the file citing “mother’s privacy”.

Dohle is married and runs an NGO called Against Child Trafficking in Germany, which he says aims at “tackling a money-and-demand-driven market in adoption of children that should be labelled as child-trafficking.” His battle may bring hope to many other children given up for inter-country adoption, who once they grow up, wish to find out the identity of their biological parents.

“The “child record” that the adoption agency maintains may contain information about the biological parents if their identities are known,” said advocate Jamshed Mistry, one of the counsels for Dohle in SC. He added that Monday’s order will now ensure that adoption agencies will maintain authentic records as mandated by law in case of foreign adoption and by the landmark SC verdict of 1984, in the case of Laxmi Kant Pandey.

The particulars of Dohle’s case also raise important questions.

The case, took a controversial turn, when he said that former Maharashtra chief Minister Sharad Pawar’s brother might be linked to his birth. The police report, however, categorically denied any links to the Pawar family. But as Dohle pointed out, Pratap Pawar in October 1973, while recommending the Dohles as adoptive parents had written: I am a member of Association of Friends of Germany and Mr & Mrs Dohle are friends…They stayed with us and selected Arun Swanand as their adopted son.”

From Can’t find your mum through writ, says Supreme Court (Emphasis added by me):

Shooting down the objections raised by advocate Neela Gokhle representing the Kusumbai Motichand Mahila Seva Gram (KMMSG) where Dohle was reportedly “abandoned” by his biological mother, the court said, “No national secret is involved in it and the days of privileged documents are over.”

Advocate Jamshed Mistry who was part of the legal team representing Dohle said: “The court’s direction reaffirms the Supreme Court guidelines as stated in 1984 and also the Hague convention to which India is a signatory.”

However, while dismissing Dohle’s appeal, justices Markandey Katju and TS Thakur said he could file a suit for seeking relief.

Dohle was two months old when a German couple, Michael and Gertrude Dohle, adopted him in 1973. He contested that he was abandoned by his mother and was given in adoption without her consent. He alleged that his adoptive parents were helped by union minister and NCP leader Sharad Pawar’s brother Pratap Pawar.

from SC comes to aid of ‘adopted’ man:

The SC order, granting him access in open court to study the original file, translates into good news for all adopted children who want to access information on their origins, said his lawyers. Dohle’s case is particularly controversial as he claims to be the biological son of the elder brother of union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, Appasaheb. He had produced a DNA report of a German agency, with a sample of hair along with the root from Pawar’s nephew, to indicate that there was 96% likelihood of them “being related.”

Dohle-a slim, bespectacled and soft-spoken man who lives and works in Germany- said he wanted to know if his biological mother was well taken care of and he planned to help her if she was not.

In court, on Monday, when Dohle’s case came up for hearing again with senior counsel Shekhar Naphade arguing that the German couple was helped and “recommended by Pawar’s brother for the adoption,” the bench headed by Justice Markandeya Katju asked the agency why it was unwilling to show the files to Dohle. The judge asked for the files and then handed them to Dohle’s lawyers.

Activist Anjali Kate, who was helping Dohle in the matter along with Mumbai-based lawyer Pradeep Havnur, said the file contained details of the mother, which would now have to be verified.

from SC dismisses German national’s Pawar lineage plea:

The apex court, however, permitted Arun to peruse in the court the records of the NGO Kusumbai Motichand Mahila Seva Gram (KMMSG) to trace out the address given by his biological mother at the time of relinquishing him for adoption by a German couple in 1973.

It rejected the argument of the NGO that Dohle could not peruse the documents as it was a confidential matter.

“Show it to him. He is entitled to it,” the bench said.

Earlier, the Maharashtra government had informed the court that there was no truth in the claim of the man that he was related to the family of Sharad Pawar through one of his brothers and submitted a police report in this regard.

According to Arun, he was born on July 31, 1973, at Sassoon Hospital in Pune. A German couple, Michael and Gertrude Dohle, had adopted him four weeks later from the NGO after his mother reportedly abandoned him. He claimed to be the son of the brother of the Union Minister.

He settled in Germany but later came back to India to locate his biological mother.

The German national said he suspected the institution had kidnapped him as a baby and separated him from his mother.

He submitted that he also suspected that the abandonment theory was a ploy to facilitate his adoption.

Arun, through counsel Senthil Jagadeesan, alleged in the apex court that for the past eight years, he has been rebuffed by the NGO which was refusing to reveal her identity.

The Mumbai police too refused to help him in tracing his biological mother, he alleged.

The Bombay High Court had in 2005 dismissed his plea, following which he appealed in the apex court.

In 2005, the apex court had asked the Maharashtra Director General of Police to place in a sealed cover a report on Arun’s biological connection.

While I thrilled beyond words for all Indian adoptees, tonight, my thoughts are still with Arun Dohle whose real life, and real family lies at the core of this partial victory.

“Justice delayed is justice denied.”

NEW JERSEY: ANYTHING TO GET A BILL PASSED. WE LEAVE EVERYBODY BEHIND!

BASTARD NATION’S LETTER TO NJ HOUSE SPEAKER JOSEPH ROBERTS, JR–PLEASE OPPOSE A 752. ADOPTEE DESERVE RIGHTS NOT FAVORS!

NEW JERSEY: MY CAUSE IS BETTER THAN YOURS. ADOPTEES V GAYS

The core of it all is of course, yet another broken bill, designed to leave some behind, constructed upon the false notion of parental vetoes that does real damage to existing adoptee rights.

One either excepts the basic premise that adopted people should receive equal treatment under law to non-adopted people, or they don’t. Sadly, the proposed legislation in New Jersey is predicated upon the notion that we are somehow ‘different’ and thus deserving of ‘different’ treatment.

The New Jersey bill, A752, has opened the door to complete non-sequiturs like “parental medical information” which simply have nothing to do with a genuine effort to restore Bastard access to our Original Birth Certificates (OBCs). Bastards regaining access to our OBCs doesn’t grant us access to parental medical histories, it merely restores to us access to our own documentation that the State had allowed access to originally, only to later confiscate and refuse us access to.

Just as non-adopted people get no family medical history when they request a copy of their Original Birth Certificates, neither should such be falsely folded in to concepts of adopted people’s restored access to ours. Doing so only attempts to conflate search and reunion issues into the genuine civil rights issue of records access.

Restored records access is what Bastards demand of the State. We demand such based on the premise that adopted people should be treated equally under law to non-adopted people.

Family medical histories are what some of us MAY ask of our relatives. Such requests may be granted or denied. Under law we have no “right” to be granted a medical history. Sharing such is at the discretion of our relations. Just as non-adopted people likewise have no inherent legal “right” to be granted such by their families.

Ethically, of course, sharing what information is available is likely morally preferable, but such interpersonal relationships and what information is or is not passed between individuals should not be state mandated.

As I’ve written here time and again, individual medical histories and family medical histories are up to individuals to decide whether they chose to share or not.

At the core of the Bastard rights position is the demand that we be free to live our lives without undue governmental intrusion into our interpersonal and family affairs, asking only we receive the same treatment as non-adopted people.

When states then insist upon entangling medical histories into state mandated requirements, they do little more than CONTINUE the ongoing pattern of state interference and control over ourselves and our families’ lives. Simply put, it’s none of the State’s damn business. It’s an interpersonal matter between us and our families- just as such is under law for non-adopted people.

Again, all we seek is equality. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.

Deformers in New Jersey are creating what would be a catastrophe instead, attempting to put our families into the position of being essentially state blackmailed by the State itself into handing over personal and family medical histories, should they desire a lack of contact.

A752 is not an adoptee rights bill, it’s a false conflation of a bill that attempts to push medical histories and reunion issues into the discourse about our authentic need for restored access to our own records, our demand to be treated just like other non-adopted citizens.

It sets up precisely the systems that are the hallmarks of deform bills: false and interpersonal issues conflated in, and separate class of Bastards left behind in the wake of the bill.

Speaking as one of those left behind by Ohio’s contortionist deforms, I know firsthand what it means to have some people get theirs at the direct personal cost to people like myself. It’s why I will never support anything other than a pure restored access bill that leaves no one behind.

Anything this “compromised” bill would manage to pass in the short term will have lasting detrimental repercussions for those left behind for decades to come.

Horrible excuses for legislation such as New Jersey’s A752 say a very great deal about those supporting them. As I pointed out in my WTF page one of the clear indicators of a Bastard is that they are not in it merely for what they perceive as something that might get records for themselves, nor for some short sighted ‘quick fix’ that leaves other Bastards standing beside them screwed and left behind at the end of the day:

An adoptee who is cognizant of and cares about ‘class Bastard.’ I.E. an adoptee who either inherently understands, or has moved beyond caring about issues of equality and access from a purely personal position of merely wanting equality for themselves, to understanding “personal solutions” are not the solution. A Bastard understands that ‘compromising away’ the person standing next to you in an effort to get something for oneself is simply unthinkable. We don’t jump in to get ours now by putting the Bastard standing next to us off with promises of “we’ll come back for you later.” A Bastard understands to the core of their being politically and interpersonally, “we leave no one behind/no one gets left behind or forgotten.” All of which is to say, Bastards have learned a number of lessons from history and incorporated such thinking into their everyday, perhaps now second nature, actions.

If the so called “activists” in NJ claiming to represent NJ adoptees haven’t figured that out yet, they’ve forfeited any genuine claim to representing any adoptees other than themselves and their own personal interests: they’ve presented a selfish half-assed piece of crap legislation that not merely leaves other adoptees behind, but also once again, sets a model that will could (and likely would) be used by other states to screw yet more adopted people.

When you’re willing to settle for what amounts to table scraps instead of human rights, you should not be the least bit surprised when what you get table are scraps instead of human rights.

I, as an adopted person, oppose New Jersey A752.

Sadly if that’s all it did, it could be dismissed as yet another lousy compromised from the get go bill. Merely the latest in a very long string of such. Sadly, that’s not all it would do. Instead it goes further, going so far as to actually erase existing OBC information for kids who go through the state’s babydump (or so called “safe haven”) process, for example.

Marley has laid out the core of some of the mess it would create (emphasis added by me),

Sponsored by NJCare, (aka The Krampi) A752 (aka The Krampus Bill) is one of the worst throw-our-rights away bills on record. The bill, of course, contains the compromiser’s favorite compromise, the “birthparent” disclosure veto.

But wait, there’s more!

In order to make this veto work, the state extorts a family/medical history from closeted parents. Kind of a pay to play scam. If parents don’t submit the government mandated snoop form in 60 days, then The Bastard gets the obc. Sounds like a violation of HIPAA to me.

But wait, there’s more!

A752 also contains the whiteout “alternative” that will give adoptees, slapped with a veto, an “original birth certificate” that’s been mutilated by a government censor with a glob of white-out smeared over identifying information including their own names, and the parental addresses at the time of birth.

But wait, there’s more!

The Krampus Bill automatically seals the obc of all persons anonymously dumped under the state’s “safe haven” law, even if one or both parents are identified on the obc (one of baby dumping’s dirty little secrets). See, a safe haven dump, coerced out of a confused parent ” is a legal assumption of an on file and notarzied “disclosure veto.” Tough, but at least you weren’t thrown in a dumpster. That receptacle is reserved for your rights.

Finally, Krampus includes a fiscal note of $90,000 from the General Fund to finance the cost of a national advertising campaign to warn biological parents that their bastard may be hunting them down with the adoptee-requisite drywall hatchet in hand. Be sure to get that veto on file while you still have your hands to write with.

It would create a whole new ‘right’ of sorts for parents (”of origin”) that sets them apart from all other people. The ability to have our paperwork modified and to demand adopted people go through an intermediary whether we want to or not.

NJCare board member Carol Barbieri, writing of A752 in the Asbury Park Press goes so far as to claim those not wanting contact “will be left alone” as a result of their bill, relabeling such a sick form of “protection”:

For starters, it gives birthparents who wish to remain anonymous a year to file a notarized “request for nondisclosure” letter with the state. Their name and address will be omitted from the adoptee’s original birth certificate. If a birthparent doesn’t want contact from an adoptee, they will be left alone.

Currently no such protection for birthparents exists in New Jersey. Furthermore, if a birthparent wants to reunite with an adoptee, he or she gets to choose how they would like the initial contact to take place — directly or through an intermediary.

All of which firmly inserts state interference into the ways in which adults conduct their interpersonal affairs.

Adopted people’s constitutional and human right to free association, would now be explicitly circumvented. We would be forced down chutes of predetermined contact or lack thereof with government serving the role of enforcer over our interpersonal relationships.

This holds no resemblance to any known concept of adoptee equality, instead, adopted people would form yet another new class, a set of people with what amounts to a pre-emptive restraining order set against us and interpersonal contact not based on any standard of prior actual behavior but merely on our EXISTENCE as members of a a class of people, those adopted and ‘nondisclosured’.

This is precisely the sort of pre-emptive restraining orders on interpersonal contact we’ve seen over and over down through the years out of the usual opponents of Bastard rights. To see such instituted on the back of any notion of an “adoptee rights bill” would be a damn sad day indeed.

Anyone who thinks this New Jersey bill does no harm has missed the horrific details contained therein.

Furthermore, if Bastards settle for utter garbage such as this, the odds of New Jersey ever being adding the roll of honour of states that treat adopted persons equitably under law are slim to none. No state that has settled for “compromised” legislation has ever come back and become a state authentically supportive of our full equality.

The United States according to Bastard Nation-

(Alaska and Kansas never sealed their records away from their adopted citizens. Oregon, Alabama, New Hampshire and Maine have each entered the roll of honour over the course of the last nine years.)

If New Jersey passes this bill it will instead join the list of states that rather than moving towards equality for adopted people, have chosen to protect the interests and secrets and lies of those with much to hide and much to answer for.

For adopted people themselves to side with such interests, putting forward bills that maim our demand for full equality under law is nothing short of an embarrassment. They side with those whose hands are dirty over those of their own class and long term interests. Such shortsightedness belies any claim to speak for adopted people as a class.

They have been “bastardized” by the State and wish to continue precisely such patterns of discrimination.

There is no shame is asking for what you really want, restoration of rights for all adopted people and genuine equality under law.

Conflating in search and reunion interpersonal issues, state enforced pre-emptive restraining orders, record nullification for those entering the system via the babydump mechanisms (a nice little X-mas bonus, cleaning up an oversight on the part of the dump pushers by piggybacking on a supposed ‘adoptee rights bill,’ nice that. so yup, an ‘adoptee rights’ bill that will actually take an eraser to a class of Bastard’s OBCs) , and granting new powers to parents (that will utimately come down to the State’s whims in interpretation) all at the direct expense of adoptee human and constitutional rights is unacceptable.

Such junk legislation should go only one place, the nearest shredder.

This bears no resemblance to adoptee rights instead, in a truly Orwellian fashion, it guts our existing rights and takes white out to “Dumpee’s” (or “Dumplings”) OBCs.

It’s yet another ‘I hope for mine, screw the costs to others’ bill.

If New Jersey activists came back with a real access restoration bill next time out, I’d gladly blog, write, and work in support of such, but when the best NJCare appears to have to offer at the moment is white out for a new set of OBCs, it’s past time to let this bill die.

I leave readers with the contact information for the Speaker,

Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts, Jr,.
Brooklawn Shopping Plaza
Rt. 130 South & Browning Rd
Brooklawn, NJ 08030
Phone: 856-742-7600
(No fax number listed)

email him via his web page: http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/members/bio.asp?Leg=16 (cut and paste) (hit the email link.)

Ask that he allow A752 to die.

After all these years of work, it’s long past time, New Jersey needs a genuine bill that restores adopted people’s equality, not a piece of legislation that will ultimately gut what few existing rights we have left.

]]> http://www.babylovechild.org/2009/12/12/new-jersey-let-a752-die-the-conflation-of-family-medical-history-with-authentic-restored-access-and-preemptive-restraining-orders-among-other-nightmare-senarios/feed/ 2 http://www.babylovechild.org/2009/07/22/nebraska-first-baby-dump-after-the-fiasco-and-age-down/ http://www.babylovechild.org/2009/07/22/nebraska-first-baby-dump-after-the-fiasco-and-age-down/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:53:11 +0000 Baby Love Child http://www.babylovechild.org/?p=818 Marley/Bastardette has the details in her blog post,

NEBRASKA: POST-FIASCO BABY CATCH– ‘NO QUESTIONS ASKED”

Both her piece, and this have been crossposted to our Nebraska blog chronicling NE’s series of legalized child dumps, Children of the Corn.

Monday evening a baby boy was left at Box Butte General Hospital in Alliance under Nebraska’s aged down new dump law created over the legislative special session. (Nebraska law, originally accepted older kids, but was “aged down” in the wake of their “big kid” dump fiasco that made international headlines.)

This marks the first legalized infant abandonment in Nebraska since the final “big kid” dump in late November ‘08.

Quoting Marley’s piece,

According to Nebraska Health and Human Services Chief Executive Officer Kerry Winterer (RIP Todd Landry), in an HHS press release:

“It’s important to gather information like family medical history to meet this child’s current and future needs,” he said.

Officials asked that anyone with information call the HHS office in Gering at 308-436-6559, the Box Butte County Sheriff’s Office at 308-762-6464, the Alliance Police Department at 308-762-4955 or the Nebraska State Patrol at 308-632-1211.

While it appears the “fiasco” taught Nebraska at least a little about the vital importance of preserving at least a few scraps of information for the kid, clearly Nebraska has yet to learn the broader lesson:

EVERY SINGLE LEGALIZED CHILD ABANDONMENT MARKS A FAILURE:

• a fundamental failure of the state to protect the long term interests and human rights of these kids.
• A failure of the state to treat these instances as what they are, marking a crisis for the parent (s), be that psychological, economic, covering over traumatic events such as incest or domestic abuse, etc.
• The state inexcusably providing what amounts to a “make it all just go away” vent, whereby underlying core issues, and genuine needs, are simply ignored. The kids themselves are left to deal with the legacy of such.

Monday marks yet another sad day, a day on which the State of Nebraska failed one of its most vulnerable and least able to protect their own interests, and a day when whatever family this child once had is left to disappear into shadows with their own lifetime’s worth of a festering secret that can never be rectified.

Nebraska had an opportunity after seeing what legalized child dumping or what is oh so politely reframed as “safe haven,” meant to those old enough to speak of their own experiences of being “legally abandoned.” An opportunity to dismantle its dump system. Instead they chose to preserve it, aging down to those unable to speak about their own experiences. In essence, Nebraska found a way to silence its most directly affected and experienced critics, at least until they grow older, long after this crop of politicians leaves office.

No, this is not some “greater good,” this is not a “save,” nor should this act be celebrated. This is nothing more than rot from within. Shame on Nebraska for maintaining its system of secrets and lies, pushing the lifelong consequences of such down onto a newborn.

LD 1084, An Act To Provide Adult Adoptees Access to Their Original Birth Certificates

In 1953 Maine took away adopted adults’ access to their own state held records, locking them away and forcing Adoptees to gain a court order before being granted access to their own information.

Now after 56 long years, the most basic human right, that to one’s own authentic identity, has at long last been restored.

Those 56 years represent an ugly chapter in the state’s history, a time when adopted people had their original identities confiscated by the state and withheld from them.

Some of those adopted as children lived and died in the space of those decades never knowing the truth about themselves. They were never granted the State’s permission to access the most fundamental aspects of their own lives, their authentic origins, the paperwork listing their original birthdate, in some cases, perhaps even the original names they were given.

Today, Maine has taken an important step forward, restoring access to these state impounded documents. Upon age 18, adopted people will once again have access to their own most personal information, putting an end to an era of secrets and lies and what had amounted to state held secret dossiers on those who had been adopted.

Original Birth Certificates for Maine, or OBC for ME has further information, including the link to the official state application form and the details of what will also be required when submitting a records request.

They have a lot to be proud of today. Tomorrow January 2, a set of opening day activities are planned.

Maine now joins the proud ranks of the five other states that have either never taken away or have since restored access to their adult adoptees since 2000 (Oregon having been the first to restore access.)

Bastard Nation’s map of full access states; Alaska and Kansas never sealed their records, Oregon, Alabama, New Hampshire and now Maine have restored after an intervening period of having our most basic identity rights stripped away from us:

These are the few states that treat adult adoptees who were born there as equal citizens.

That said, even in some states that have reopened, the State is still clearly uncomfortable with with the notion of adult adoptees as being able to conduct their own affairs free of the government cast as a third party to our interpersonal relationships.

Apparently we are not to be trusted to act as other citizens, assumed to simply be able to associate freely and control our own intimate associations free from the state maintaining files pertaining to our relationships.

Sadly, Maine, like Oregon, Alabama, and New Hampshire has added a (fortunately toothless) “contract preference form,” by which the state is to collect parents “contact preferences” and then hold such paperwork to pass along to adult adoptees upon their submitted records request.

We as adopted citizens must be free to conduct our most intimate interpersonal affairs, deciding whether or not to contact our own blood relations free from government’s insistence upon information collection “on our behalf” or “for the protection of those involved” and essentially the government insisting upon being a party to our interpersonal relationships process.

It’s simply none of the State’s business.

Today at least, such “preference” forms have no enforcement power behind them, but they set a terrible precedent, AND maintain the role of the state in how we conduct our intimate associations, insisting our private lives and associations or lack thereof ARE quite literally, the business of the State.

No other class of citizen has to endure such indignities.

If you are not an adoptee, the state does not keep track of whether or not your parents or other blood relations want to see you or not. Only adoptees are subjected to such State intrusiveness.

It’s insulting, and maintains the State’s ability to portray adopted individuals as a form of ‘forever children,’ constantly in need of the watchful eye of the State, allegedly forever unable to achieve full self determination.

All of which has it’s basis in the (adoption industry propagated) mythologies that many if not all adopted people could become stalkers or harrassers at the drop of a hat, that parents must be protected from them, and that most parents would not welcome the presence of their long lost children in their lives.

None of which are true.

The facts remain, not only are most adopted people NOT stalkers or harassers, but many parents actively wish to be found. Indeed, many were promised by agencies that when their children turned 18 they would have their paperwork released to them and that their children would come find them.

In those exceptional, rare circumstances in which individuals are unable to respect a “no” or “not interested,” the violators should be treated as any other adult would be. Restraining orders and such can be issued based upon a demonstrated pattern of misbehavior.

Any attempt to instead place any form of pre-emptive restraint upon adoptees as a class, interferes with our constitutional right to free association.

Fortunately Maine does not include an actual form of pre-emptive restraint, for now at least, but it sets up the systems by which such could become possible at a later date.

The Maine law does however, continue in the fine tradition of infantalizing adopted adults, even as the concrete effect of such is to finally restore adult adoptee rights.

Sadly, it is even less kind to our parents.

Along with the contact preference form, the state has coupled the act of affirming that they wish to restore contact (or even that they do not prefer contact, at least that was their feeling at the time the form was filled out) with their adopted children with the parents’ own medical histories, something that adopted adults have no legal right to.

While adopted people may contact our blood relations and REQUEST their familial medical history, there is no legal requirement that our parents divulge their own personal medical information. They may do so at their own choosing, but they cannot be required to do so.

The contact preference clause is spelled out thusly in the law:

3. Contact preference form. The state registrar shall develop a contact preference form on which a birth parent may state a preference regarding contact by an adoptee. The form must contain the following statements from which the birth parent may choose only one.

A. “I would like to be contacted. I have completed this contact preference form and a medical history form and am filing them with the State Registrar of Vital Statistics.”

B. “I would prefer to be contacted only through an intermediary. I have completed this contact preference form and a medical history form and am filing them with the State Registrar of Vital Statistics.”

C. “Do not contact me. I may change this preference by filling out another contact preference form. I have completed this contact preference form and a medical history form and am filing them with the State Registrar of Vital Statistics.”

While contact preference forms and medical histories are not required as a precondition to records release to the adult adoptee, for a parent to affirm that they wish contact, the state has essentially coupled a medical history form to the contact preference form unnecessarily.

Created in the name of protecting alleged “privacy”/confidentiality, this new set of state held files actually is quite the opposite, and becomes yet another layer of the State injecting itself into our interpersonal affairs.

Personal medical information is best shared between the individuals directly affected, not between our parents and the state, who will then file and hold such, releasing it to adult adoptees if they submit a records request.

The State needs to stop treating adopted adults differently.

What we want is equitable treatment, to be treated just like anyone else, no preference forms held by the State, none of this unnecessary nonsense. We want the ability to conduct our own interpersonal affairs without the State injecting itself as a third party into our relationships, collecting and holding information pertaining to our families.

The entire section of the law quoted above creates another NEW layer of state held files pertaining to our lives, our relations, and our interpersonal relationships. More bureaucracy and meddling that “normal” (i.e. non-adopted) citizens do not have to endure.

Just because such “preferences” are not enforced today does not necessarily mean they will not be at some future date.

States need to simply restore what they took from us, records access. Period. Not utilize such legislation as an excuse to go build NEW sets of files pertaining to adopted people and their families.

Legally speaking the personal “preferences” of our parents do not factor in. Records access restoration is a matter between adoptees and the state, and also between parents and the state.

By putting parents preferences in files for adult adoptees, the state is falsely pitting the desires of parents AGAINST their own children. This is built on the false notion of adoption as a “triad,” (parents, adoptees, and adopters.)

The reality is our records are not sealed upon relinquishment.

And despite all claims of “privacy, often raised by industry or those with what certainly appear to be dirty hands, such as the Illinois Catholic Conference (who have admitted in Illinois, that opening records would likely produce lawsuits against them, and that information contained in original birth certificates could be false) never once has a single document actually promising “privacy” to parents ever surfaced. Even if such ever should, there was no force of law behind such supposed promises. Further, parents were often promised the precise opposite as part of the process of getting them to sign away their kids, they were assured that such wasn’t forever, the kid would come find them when they turned 18.

Records access is not a matter between adoptees and their parents. Parents do not hold the power restore records access to their children.

Records are sealed upon our adoptions.

Records restoration is a matter between adoptees and the State. Similarly, parents are also battling the state to gain records access as well. The State confiscated the records, and the only place that we can turn for restoration is the State.

There is no “adoption triad.”

Adoption is built instead, upon an adoption pentagon:

1. parents
2. adoptees
3. agencies/lawyers/intermediaries/lobbyists/industry/etc
4. the State
5. adopters

It should be noted, some parties to adoption have more power and control than others.

While it serves the State’s interests to have adoptees and parents at one another’s throats in some false game of “conflicting interests” the bottom line is, our genuine interests are not at odds.

The “preferences” of those who were not parties to our records being closed cannot be used by the state as something to hide behind in the process of re-opening them (or not.) Our parents were legally out of the picture at the point in time when our records were closed.

It’s past time the State begins to trust adult adoptees to conduct our own lives. No more state held files, no intermediaries (unless directly personally chosen by the individuals involved, preferably non-commercial/non-contracted) etc.

We’re grown ups, it’s time for the State to start treating us as such.

In the end, it’s a damn good day for Maine adoptees.

The real bottom line here is that people who have waited their entire lives for the most personal and basic of information about themselves have finally had their civil and human right to access their own information restored to them.

It’s just a shame that states insist upon insulting adoptees and their families in the process and building yet new bureaucracies upon false notions that we still are unable to conduct our own lives without the State butting in.

Finally be sure to see both Marley’s piece on Bastardette- MAINE: RECORDS OPENED, GRINCH CRINGES! and Robin’s piece on Motherhood Deleted- New Year, Same Old Myths both about Maine.