Infant Adoption: The Perfect Crime

By Karen Wilson Buterbaugh

The truth of adoption needs to be told and retold again because what is happening is an injuring and a reinjuring of exiled mothers and the children they lost to adoption whether the loss occurs in America or elsewhere.

Since the mid 1940s through the 80s, babies were removed en-mass from their natural mothers. This was done against our wishes. Can you imagine what it feels like to us to have had our babies taken from us simply because we didn't fit the accepted profile of the rest of society?? Because we were young. But youth is not a crime. And because we didn't have a job. But being jobless is not a crime. Yet we were treated like criminals.

If you could remove everything you know about adoption from your mind and think only about these facts, you might more fully understand the horror of social workers and adoption agencies, along with the blessing of society, removing your own baby from you. How would that experience make you feel?

I always ask people who accept that there is nothing unusual about the history of this event, "Which one of your kids would you chose to be removed from you?" It usually leaves them speechless.

Resourceless mothers are not responsible for the pain, confusion and the damage done to children they were pressured to surrender. Social workers are, adoption agencies are, maternity facilities are, churches are, our governments are, and society is. Not us. Yet we are the ones repeatedly punished for this supposed crime. We are the ones who are rejected by our kids when we find them or when they find us. We are the ones blamed.

Why is this? Because people do not understand, or even want to understand, that mothers are not the ones who caused the surrender of their children. This is a classic case of the victims being blamed for the crime. Our children were injured and victimized, too. So we have to live with that reality with no one willing to listen or accept The Truth.

This is a crime. It is a crime against mothers and against their children, regardless of the countries in which we live. This is what's at the heart of adoption. The fact that mothers are too young and unprotected at the time to comprehend that their rights are ignored and abused--all of their rights--civil, human and legal. Totally ignored and disregarded. During the "baby scoop era" societies could easily get away with it. Today it still occurs on a large scale.

Mothers who have awakened from this trauma find that social workers and other pro-adoptionists made, and still make, a great deal of money from our vulnerabilities and our suffering. They are counting on the fact that no one will listen to us or believe us. Even the media shuns our claims, stories, and articles. No one wants to face this hideous crime. The ramifications are too huge. It would turn America upside down to admit The Truth. But that doesn't stop us from speaking out. It is too important -- one day very soon it could happen all over again. As with the Jewish Holocaust, unprotected mothers have had their own domestic Holocaust.

Removing babies from mothers, whether from the United States, Asia or elsewhere, is the mass elimination of the true heritage of those children and the amputation from a mother of the most revered and sacred relationship known to humankind.

Adoption remains the perfect crime.

Karen Wilson Buterbaugh