Baby Love Child's blog

An incredibly important Supreme Court decision has come out of India on Monday!

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

By way of a brief follow up on my original post,

Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC) conference screens racist misogynistic objectifying anti-abortion maternity camp propaganda video

ASAC has added a brief addenda to their description of the film, “A Man Without Culture Is Like a Zebra Without Stripes: the Adoption Triangle in South Africa” screened at the conference:

[This description, provided by the presenter to ASAC, suggests something very different from the treatment of birthmothers shown in this film. Rather than promoting openness, the agency controls birthmothers’  communications with the adoptive family, and cuts them off after two years. In the film, a social worker  claims that two years is enough time for birthmothers to grieve.  Professionals and birthparents know that this is often not true, and some found her comment appalling and  said so in the discussion period. Focusing on South Africa, and showing the transfer of poor black children to prosperous white families, the film painfully (and ironically) recalls the treatment of black mothers under apartheid.  The film's website claims that it gives an idea of good practice in post-adoption counseling according to the Hague convention, but the accompanying film showing adoptive parents with their children demonstrates that this agency's post-adoption counseling does not provide the anti-racist perspective that adoptive parents and children in transracial adoption will need, and thus does not follow the Hague Convention's requirements of respecting the child's ethnicity and general best interests. These films received much criticism at the conference. We do not endorse their viewpoint or the practices they show. They gave us a painful education about the limitations in how the Hague Convention has often been interpreted, and serious problems in some intercountry adoption practice.]

In essence ASAC appears to be trying to say the film they got did not line up with the way the film was proposed to them prior to the conference. They then go on to bemoan “the limitations in how the Hague Convention has often been interpreted.”

(Niels kindly asked if I would move a copy of this piece over from my personal blog. I originally published this yesterday.)

I first began blogging about adoption in late October 2007 in the aftermath of having attended the “Adoption: Ethics and Accountability” conference (Ethica and and the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute were some of the primary sponsors.)

That conference was a case study in both the lack of ethics and buzzed worded/soundbyted  “accountability” (accountable to whom exactly?) that pervades the landscape of adoption-land.

Now two and a half years later, I sit at my keyboard having left the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture’s (ASAC) Conference in Boston, entitled “Adoption: Secret Histories, Public Policies” after attending merely a single afternoon’s sessions.

My partner and I left  but not without my first expressing at least the bedrock of why it was we left.