The other day I was reviewing some articles about gendercide in China, the practice of forced abortion, and child trafficking, and I was thinking how these types of events help create complex adoption issues many foreign born adoptees have to face, especially if one was adopted from a chauvinistic society like India or China. It seems there is a sad irony that exists when foreign social activists fighting for human rights come to America seeking support and assistance from American politicians.

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of experiencing a meeting-with-the-minds with a few really awesome (and very honest) Amoms.  Among the topics we discuss is the 'paper pregnancy', as exhibited in blogs that help explain what a paper pregnancy means.  As one blogger puts it, paper pregnancy is the technical term for one who is wading through the mountains of nightmarish paperwork required to bring home a precious

I've been thinking about the many ways in which adoption gets sold to the public, and one of my favorite misleading paths adoption advocates like to take is the one that teaches newcomers adoption is an altruistic decision, made by people who really care about the lives of children.

While there are various formal social studies/essays written about the stigma of Adoptive Parent and Birth Mother status, I found an excellent blurb that explained, very clearly, why adoption is altruistic from an evolutionary perspective. 

Just when I think the adoption industry can't get any more one-sided than it already is, I read the 2004 news article, Adoption Nears Reality TV that features the adoption agency, A Child's Waiting.

For television viewers, it is also a weird one, a combination of reality show and tear-jerking drama.

I've just taken about a years holiday from actively trying to get the whole of my adoption file and records of how I came to spend time in care, this has been a 17 year fight so far, I'm about to have another go at getting some more.

I feel a bit like Oliver Twist, asking for more all the time I have the luxury of living in country where we adoptees have had the RIGHT to have a copy of our original birth certificate since 1976 (original in every respect apart from having "Adopted" typed or written in the margin).

The other night I watched "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and was struck by the raw intensity of a film that was so simple in set and design, and featured in black and white film.  Those basics gave such brilliance to the acting themes, it was if they were intentional, making it better to see the true essence of what was building and collapsing between two people.

Are we born with the natural ability to love and parent?

I'm not so sure.  For me, I had to learn how to love my children... but that was easy, because they grew inside me.  As I learned each stage of development, I grew a deeper appreciation for what was happening to my own body, and I was better able to prepare myself for each baby entering my life.  I also got a better perspective of what my own natural mother endured for the sake of having me.  I was humbled by the birthing experience, as I think most women are.

If child child migration and orphan trains weren't enough, profit through new-placement got cloaked under a new scheme in the family-making business machine:  Maternity Homes.

Over the past few years I've gotten many letters from male-adoptees telling me about the sad confusion they felt after the birth of their own children.  The overwhelming grief shared by these men was in the question of "How?"  "How does a woman get rid of her baby?  How does a mother do that to her own son?"