Help Is Needed For International Adoptees Caught In A Legal — And Stateless — Quagmire
By Mirah Riben Read at the Source: : Mirah Riben on the Huffington Post
Musings of the Lame; An Adoption Blog
Adoption-Related Trauma and Moral Injury
By Mirah Riben When most people think of adoption, they think of the joy of a child in need being welcomed with open arms by those who longed for a child. Like a fairy tale! And when we think of trauma, we think of losing limbs, or eyesight. We think of war … Read at the Source: : Mirah Riben on the Huffington Post
What My Adoptive Mom Could Have Done Differently Or Better
I often give my opinion of open adoption and the resulting question from hopeful adoptive parents or adoptive parents is: What could your Amom have done to be better or make your adoption better for you? I really wish that people would take time to read, not only my blog, but as many adoptee blogs as possible, but often, people just want their question answered as quickly as possible. This…
New York and Adoptee Rights
Getting Screwed Over in NY 2016 Version Greetings from my backyard. Today I am wearing my Constitutional Tramplers T shirt in honor of the New York State legislators who seemed compelled to ignore all their constituents, facts and logic in order to pass some perverted version of a “AdoptionLand; shut the fuck up” bill and dares to say it is Adoptee Rights. This thing, the self admitted “half a loaf”…
If I Knew Then…
By Susie More thoughts from the American Adoption Congress Conference: After I had agreed with Suz to participate in her “Mitigating and Managing Collateral Damage: Impact of Adoption on the 1st Family” presentation, I thought of many examples of the collateral damage in my life. When it came to the “managing and mitigating” part, the only thing I could come up with was to not lose a child to adoption…
For the Birth Mother Who Doesn’t Want Contact with her Adopted Child
You are a mother. This is your child. You do owe them and they have a right to truth, reality and to know the person who gave them life. Yes, a right, I said that. The adoptee has a RIGHT to know where they come from. No adoptee should not have to be a banned as a dirty little secret their whole life. No one should have to have their very existence denied to protect another’s feelings, even their own mothers.
American Adoption Congress Conference 2016
By Susie After attending AAC 2016, I have too much to write about to fit it all in one post. Here is a summary of the experience, more to come in the following days: The Week of Firsts I attended my first ever “real life” adoption event ~ the AAC 2016 Conference. I traveled alone for the first time, which I surprisingly actually enjoyed. I was a presenter on a…
Family Preservation
By Mirah Riben If your neighbor lost his job a year after his wife died, and he had three small kids, would you “help” him by taking away his kids? If a family in your church or congregation’s house burnt down and they had no family to stay with, would you help them by adopting their infant child? Recently, Ronnie Stewart a Florida minister of the Refuge Church of New…
A Mother’s Love: Creating Gracie’s Bill
By Mirah Riben A mother’s love, loss and determination has greatly impacted social awareness and created organizations such as MADD, founded by Cindy Lightner, and the well-known Amber Alert system, which Donna Norris created. The power of another mother’s love also created the Make a Wish Foundation. All of these women, and others such as the parents in Sandy Hook, turned the loss of their children into a passion-driven effort…
The Drama and Facts in the Battle Over Little Lexi
By Mirah Riben Most of us have heard, seen or read about a six-year-old girl named Lexi who was ordered to be taken from those who fostered her for the past four years in Santa Clarita, California. The court of public opinion and social media are sympathetic and supportive of Lexi’s foster parents, Rusty and Summer Page. This is very understandable since the Pages have seemingly done nothing but provide…
Promote Your Adoption Event
There are various national adoption conferences that are yearly and bi-annually in different parts of the country. Also, there are many local adoption connections to be made and events organized by various adoption groups or even events that are adoption focused, or projects by those in the adoption community. ( please note: things such as adoption fund raisers to help make an adoption happen will NEVER EVER be unacceptable here)
List Your Adoption Event
There is a great need to provide adoption connections as a means of supporting the adoption community. You can list your adoption event, class, meeting, event, conference, call for papers, for FREE. Each event is given its own URL on the site as it becomes a post such as the ones listed below and will be listed on the Adoption Event Calendar as well. In addition to the 20K readers a month here, every post goes over to Facebook and also gets shared on Twitter too… so that’s about 30 thousand people that can see your adoption event.
AdoptionLand- the Community
Activism and Support; The Adoption Community Call to Arms
Adoption can be a very isolating experience. The rise of the internet has been an incredible tool which allows people to find those on a similar journey and can offer all sorts of support and validation. Because of this the adoption community has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years. No longer are we all alone in our feelings and confusion, there is always someone out there who cares.
Get involved with the Adoption Army, or keep track of pending adoption legislation. Read up on other adoption blogs by adoptees and birth mothers or write a guest post. See what adoption events are happening by you or worth you time and effort to travel to. And keep up on the latest in adoption news hitting the media and making waves. There is no need to be bystander anymore. You voice matters, use it and be heard!
Consider this your engraved invitation!
Statistics, Studies and Research on Adoption and Adoption Related Issues
Statistics, Studies and Research on Adoption and Adoption Related Issues
In the United States, there is not a central body that is collecting accurate adoption statistics. There is no one single oversight organization that actual collects data from all the different adoption agencies around the country. Often all the “big” number on adoption are estimated at best. Various facts and numbers float around and if they get repeated often enough, they are “facts about adoption”. Sometimes the source is lost and cannot be verified.
Actual scientific research on adoption and adoption related issues is frequently hard to find. For one, there just isn’t enough of it. Almost every study that I have ever read included in their conclusion “further studies are needed”.
Making Adoption Research Studies Public to All
The other issue is that many of the adoption studies are not made public. They are easy enough to find, but not read online. Many of the studies require access to an educational database or a purchase of the papers. In the last 12 years I have acquired quite a collection from various sources and am working to add them all here.
When I can transfer them over to copy, I have included the entire papers. When I cannot move the copy off PDF, I have a link to the actual PDF of the adoption research study.
I am not sure if this is even considered acceptable, but I have done it anyway. I am trying to get permission from the authors when I can. If you happen to have authored a paper here and would like to officially “allow” it, then please let me know. If you need it taken down, I will also comply. Maybe I am rationalizing, but all this work done helps no one if it cannot be accessed.
Adoption Infographics
Good info graphics are a wonderful way to share information across many social media networks clearly and concisely. An informational graphic creates a clear visual medium to share much needed information on adoption. We are so lucky in AdoptionLand that we are blessed with the wonderful info graphic designer, Kate Dahlquist.
The Coolest Adoption Infographic Design
Kate has made them all and keeps on creating new adoption infographics all the time! She has covered many important facts and figures regarding the truth in adoption, father’s rights, adoption coercion, adoptee rights, forced adoption, and what the adoption agencies don’t want you to know.
The Average Cost of Adoption; for the Adoptee, for the Natural Family
How much does adoption cost?
According to Google, about 3600 people a month want to know “how much does adoption cost?” Of course the word “cost” here is assumed to mean the monetary expenses incurred when a child or baby is adopted. Those facts and figures, the actual answer to “how much does it cost to adopt a baby” are rather simple to answer.
No matter where you do adopt a baby or child from, if you do it legally (ethically is another matter entirely) then you must have a home study and someone to handle the legal transaction of transferring the parental rights of said child.
However, please remember that adoption is at least a 13 billion dollar annual industry,
And then all the other “costs” and “fees’ that make adoption such a wonderful social construct, but that is just the money.
Let’s look at the true costs of adoption.
How Much Does Adoption Cost to the Child Adopted? How Much Adoption Costs a Birth Mother and Family?