Pound Pup Legacy

When we started Pound Pup Legacy in 2006, we felt there was a need for a website for those adoptees that experienced the dark side of adoption. For the longest time we were a marginal website at best, but we always had members willing to share their personal experience.

Looking at Pound Pup Legacy these days, I don't recognize what we once started. Just a couple of days ago, I posted an article about airlifting babies from Haiti, a post that has been commented on more than 50 times by now. Many of those comments come from people eager to "rescue" and adopt children.

This is no longer the Pound Pup Legacy we had envisioned years ago. Once we were a safe place for abused adoptees, now we are a website littered with pro-adoption speak.

Over the last six months I have seen few personal threads on our website, and hardly any adoptees have signed up as a new member to share personal experiences, either in public or in our closed group Adult Aftermath. At the same time, we have seen growing numbers of adopters flocking to our site for information and to learn about agencies involved in unethical practices. It's nice to reach such a large audience, but it's not what we intended this website for.

When we started Pound Pup Legacy, Kerry introduced me to the fact that abuse in adoptive families is something that happens far more often than is commonly believed. At first, I didn't realize how right she was and for several months neglected the issue. Later, when I heard about several other cases, I got curious and when Kerry suggested I collect individual cases in a special section, I was eager to start working on that.

What started as one section about abuse in child placement has over time grown in multiple sections about several child placement issues, backed-up by a database of information about adoption organizations and people working in that field.

The collection of all this information was intended to be used as a reference, something to link to when making a post, but it has become more and more a feature in and of itself. The adoption agency information in particular, has become a beehive for adopters, wanting to know how their adoption agency rates.

Opening our content to anonymous comment further increased the influx of adopters to our website. This increase of adopters posting on PPL has made our website an unsafe place for adoptees to talk about their experiences.

Today I realized the direction we have taken is not the right one. There is far too much emphasis on information and too little on experience. There are far too many adopters posting, while adoptees are rarely seen. There is far too much reason and too little expression of hurt.

I believe it's time we change course. One of the steps we have taken is to close comments for anonymous visitors. Everyone is welcome to join our website, but fly-by shooters are no longer able to reply.

Comments have also been closed for all informational content. Blogs, discussions, videos and the like are still open for members to comment on, but it's no longer possible to comment on the information about cases, organizations, persons etc. These entries will as a result no longer show up in the recent posts anymore. 

I sincerely hope these decisions will help PPL become a safe place for adoptees to express their feelings and share their experiences again.