What do you make of current efforts to slam the current “administration” in the US for having separated immigrant children from their parents? The disgust and horror in the media is, to me, rather hypocritical. I say that as someone who grew up looking at missing children’s faces on the back of milk cartons, who […]
Category Archives: Adoptee Related
Prior to 2013, I was considered, by some, to be an adoption activist as I wrote and presented about historic trauma, and the role of legislation in determining legitimacy as a family, a person, a representative of an ethnic group. Adoptions were bad, staying within family/community was good. But then a funny thing happened on […]
I don’t remember the first time someone told me I was White. But I definitely remember the last. It was the summer of my junior year in college and I was a new student orientation leader. My university was diverse but mostly segregated, and this staff was about half White and half Black – plus […]
I want to ask your thinking about the claim that childhood in North America (at least) has been making children into consumers for decades and that essential to that project has been the “constant stimulation of desire and longing.” Do you see practices underlying adoption and donor conception that reflect that kind of stimulation of […]
The metaphor of “coming out” has been used elsewhere as a way to describe the experience of disclosing one’s status as adopted. What do you think about how this metaphor illuminates and distorts being open about one’s adoption experience?
I received my original birth certificate today, which confirmed one of my better guesses (based on genetic testing and genealogical research) about the identity of my genetic mother. However, as I had been forewarned would likely be the case, the document contained no information about my father, since (as in many states) birth certificates in […]
Having lately resorted to genetic testing to uncover my immediate genetic family, I confront therefore the panoply of folks, mostly not adopted, who are on a similar (but different) quest for their origin.[1] Compared to whatever conceits are at work in the efforts of committed and serious genealogists, the amateurish, armchair types—the ones who causally […]
Manifold disclosures about the unethical and immoral practices of those trafficking in human children now make clear the systemic, not merely idiosyncratically aberrant, character of those ethical and moral violations. [1] My adoptive parents paid for a white baby, but they didn’t get one—as 10.4% of my genetic heritage makes clear in its tracing back […]
As I plod slowly along on the slow trail of information-gathering to hunt down trails of my possible genetic origins through different genetic testing tools, I sometimes note an obnoxious petitioner’s syndrome that being adopted [1] can engender. Petitioner’s syndrome points psychologically to having to address a greater power for essential information and structurally to […]
Several for-profit companies now make personalized genetic testing more widely and readily available than in the past, adding the particularly attractive feature of widespread comparison amongst people’s genomes.[1] The usefulness of such genetic testing (for orphans and non-orphans alike) resides almost wholly in the breadth of participation by other people who have been tested, since […]
This is a copy of my first article for Adoption Arena – the first of many I hope! Interesting question raised by another adult adoptee that posted a piece in a private forum on social media. It got me thinking. Here in the good old U of K we’re introducing reforms to the Children and […]
A recent study on adoption and suicide suggests genetic (biological) rather than environmental factors play a dominant role in risks for suicide. Researchers used Danish adoption data and compared non-biologically related siblings of orphans (children who had been adopted and biologically related siblings that the orphan did not grow up with. Basically what they looked […]
One question three ways: At its bluntest: when is the worst time in one’s life to be adopted? Asked more reflectively: what age at time of adoption creates the greatest risk for negative consequences in an orphan’s life (e.g., at birth, or up to age 2 or so when language is acquired, or from post-language […]
I went to the local animal shelter yesterday. I do that sometimes. To get back to my roots. This is therefore in two parts. The first part summarises details from the trip. The second part poses some of the questions as: To be chosen or not to be chosen, is that the question? What are […]
I was proactive at a very young age. Ok, full disclosure: I am wordy-nerdy. I have been thinking about how we define ourselves as either adopted or as adoptees. Both of these words feel very much about action that happened TO us. One EFL site referred to adjectives ending in ‘ed’ as words that “show […]
Transracialeyes 