More Adoption Blogs from Adoption Bloggers

Avoiding Sibling Separation in Adoption

By Mirah Riben Michael Allen Potter and his brother and sister were taken from their schizophrenic mother and adopted separately. He writes in “Le Roi Inconnu”: “I stare at people more than I should on the subway. …. One of my greatest fears is to be two seats behind my brother or my sister and not realize it until they’ve stepped onto the platform and the doors are closing behind…


Shout It Out

By Cassi So, between taking my sweet Granddaughter to Disney World and getting into our family place at the lake, I’ve spent most of September barely on social media.  I’d pick up a little bit here and there when I’d log in but not enough to know what was going on. Seeing the tags for#shoutyouradoption here and there had me curious, but not enough, I admit, to do further research…


Why Adoptees Search

By Laura Marie Scoggins One cannot annul the fact that one was given up by one clan and taken in by another; one can only see the consequences of that fact in a new light that illuminates what happened in a healing way.  Betty Jean Lifton, Journey of the Adopted Self One of the most common questions asked of adoptees is why they search for their biological family. Our response…


The Intercountry Adoption Debate

By Mirah Riben What is the debate concerning international child adoption? That depends on who you ask. Forty-four experts representing a variety of disciplines including law, medicine and health, social work, anthropology, religion, sociology and history have their say inThe Intercountry Adoption Debate, edited by Robert L. Ballard, Naomi H. Goodno, Robert F. Cochran and Jay A. Millbrandt.     The formidable 737-page, hard cover volume contains twenty-seven essays in…


U.S. GOA Report on Adoption Rehoming

By Mirah Riben Two years after Reuters’ five-part report on the rehoming of adopted children in the U.S., the U.S. Government Office of Accountability (GOA) has released a report entitled “Steps Have Been Taken to Address Unregulated Custody Transfers of Adopted Children” (GAO-15-733: Published: Sep 16, 2015. Publicly Released: Sep 16, 2015). “GAO examined (1) the reasons adoptive families consider unregulated child custody transfers, and services that exist to support…


How Search and Reunion Saved My Life

By Laura Marie Scoggins One of the most common questions adoptees are asked when they tell people they are searching for their biological family or have been reunited is “why would you even want to search?” The insensitivity of this question makes my blood boil. I have to pause and count to ten before replying. Sometimes when that doesn’t work and the blood boiling makes my head feel like it’s…


Toward Preventing Adoption-Related Suicde

By Mirah Riben National Suicide Prevention Month is an appropriate time to talk about something that puts adolescents at increased risk for suicide: adoption. Attempted suicide is more common among adolescents who live with adoptive parents than among adolescents who live with biological parents. The association persists after adjusting for depression and aggression and is not explained by impulsivity as measured by a self-reported tendency to make decisions quickly. (Slap,…


Validating My Motherhood

By Susie One of the biggest hurdles I have had to overcome in the six+ years since being reunited with Christopher has been the claiming of my motherhood ~ from my very first pregnancy, not just from the birth of the children I raised. For I never allowed myself to consider that Christopher was my child, therefore I was not “really” a mother to him.  He was always “the baby…


Equal Rights for Adoptees Cannot Be Compromised

By Mirah Riben In 1989, my first book The Dark Side of Adoption was published. That same year I organized a speak-out at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC at the culmination of a walk of adoptees and mothers who had lost children to adoption that began in New York City. Also, that year, at the AAC national conference in NYC, I organized a “red tape” event that garnered media…


Why Adoptees Are Outraged Over the Kim Davis Hypocrisy

By Laura Marie Scoggins Kim Davis is the County Clerk from Rowan, Kentucky who has refused to issue same sex marriage licenses because of her religious beliefs. This post is not about same sex marriage or Kim Davis. This post is about why adoptees in the adoption reform and adoption search and reunion community are outraged over this situation. It’s because every single adoptee in the United States of America…


The Perversion of American Birth Certificates

By Mirah Riben What is a Birth Certificate? A birth certificate is issued to legally register every birth. It is a vital record documenting the facts of a birth. It memorializes the arrival of each and every human being – setting the date, time, and location of that auspicious and unique event. Every person has just one original certified birth certificate (OBC) which serves to verify their age and citizenship…


Are Parents Disposable and Interchangeable?

By Mirah Riben Recently CBS News reported on what they called “The New Fatherhood,” which featured two men: physician Conrad Cean and photographer Alan Cresto, each of whom decided to be a parent, without a partner. Each purchased eggs and hired a surrogate to carry a child for them, intentionally creating motherless children. Clinical psychologist Barbara Greenberg appeared on the segment applauding their family-building, joining the CBS News anchors in…


In The Funk. Again.

By Susie I’ve been in an adoption funk again for the last couple of weeks.  I know it’s partially because a planned visit to see Christopher in July didn’t happen due to my getting another kidney stone a couple of days before I was supposed to go.  Now we are finding it difficult to find time when we are both free at the same time.  It’s been over a year…


Hate In My Heart

By Cassi I have come to know so many First Moms in my years fighting for Adoption Reform, Adoptee Rights, and even Father’s rights.  Some I consider my greatest friends.  Wonderful allies in this knock-down, painful world of adoption and the fight to change it. Then there are those who I often disagree with.  Believe are playing right into the coercion and manipulation the adoption industry seeks.  Pushing and encouraging…


Shame

By Susie I ordered the new adoption memoir “A Life Let Go: A Memoir and Five Birth Mother Stories of Closed Adoption”. As I was reading the reviews for the book on Amazon, I found my breath taken away by one of them.  One sentence in particular: “…true story of a pregnant teen hiding in the house, frozen and blind to all possibility beyond invisibility, as a baby grew in…