Adoption laws need to evolve with the times

"Adoption is a violent act, a political act of aggression towards a woman who has supposedly offended the sexual mores by committing the unforgivable act of not suppressing her sexuality, and therefore not keeping it for trading purposes through traditional marriage. The crime is a grave one, for she threatens the very fabric of our society. The penalty is severe. She is stripped of her child by a variety of subtle and not so subtle manoeuvres and then brutally abandoned." - Joss Shawyer, Death by Adoption, Cicada Press (1979) Young parents today are still pressured and coerced into surrendering their children. These abusive practices are still alive and thriving in America's $1.4 billion-per-year adoption industry. Adoption is and has always been deeply imbued in classism, as it is adoption's intent and most often outcome to move a child from lower to higher-class status. This is truer today than ever, as adoption has become a business of finding children for clients Legal adoption in America only came into mainstream a century ago when people stopped believeing that sins were passed from mother to child, and at first all adoption records were open to the public. When they began to be closed, it was only to the general public, and the intent was to protect adoptees from public scrutiny of the circumstances of their birth.Adoptive parents and agencies that profited from adoption lobbied to overturn reform laws.Adoptees who held questions of identity, ancestry, and genetics had nowhere to turn for answers.The records were sealed for 99 years, even with joint consent, and searching carries a criminal penalty. A Public Affairs pamphlet from 1969, You and Your Adopted ChildӔ, states, Instances of extreme curiosity and concern almost never happenӅ However, should a youngster ever raise the question, it is important, of course, to make it very clear that a search is unrealistic and can lead to unhappiness and disillusionment. The Impact of the 1960Ԓs and 1970s Revolutions on Current Adoption Practices ■Liberation movements: womenҒs liberation, civil rights movement, sexual revolution, adoptees liberty movement (ALMA, 1971), birth fathersҒ rights. ■Birth control methods reduced the number of unplanned pregnancies. ■The legalization of abortion gave women a choice in whether or not to carry an unplanned pregnancy to term. ■Normalization of single parenthood in the dominant culture allowed women to choose whether to place a child for adoption or raise the child alone. ■Support of this choice was provided by increased welfare aids for unmarried females and head of household tax relief, as well as increased job opportunities. ■The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA-1978) ■Normalization of step, blended, or other family types which are not connected by blood. ■Birth Parents and adult adoptees began to speak out about their experiences, their rights and their needs. Groups such as Origins USA (founded in 1997) started to actively speak about family preservation and the rights of mothers. The intellectual tone of these recent reform movements was influenced by the publishing of The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. "Primal wound" is described as the "devastation which the infant feels because of separation from its birth mother. It is the deep and consequential feeling of abandonment which the baby adoptee feels after the adoption and which may continue for the rest of his life." In 2007, the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute published a report concerning the issue of adoption records written by Madelyn Freundlich, the former general counsel for the Child Welfare League of America and past associate director of program and planning for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Two of the main findings of the report state that adoptees are the only people in the U.S. that are, as a class, denied the right to view their own birth certificates, and denying adult adopted persons access to information related to their births and adoptions has potentially serious, negative consequences with regard to their physical and mental health.Ӕ The child who does not grow up with his own biological parents, who does not even know them or anyone of his own blood, is an individual who has lost the thread of family continuity. A deep identification with our forebears, as experienced originally in the mother-child relationship, gives us our most fundamental security.