I recently had the wonderful priviledge of meeting and enjoying dinner with two wonderful adoption "bloggers" that I so admire. What an amazing evening it was as a first Mother, an adoptive Mother, and I (an adoptee) came together and discussed the complexities of adoption in our lives and as a whole. I so wish we could have talked longer!
Family Ties: Sealed Records are Wrong. Period: Raising an adoptive child is not the same as raising a biological child. It's not better, it's not worse, it's just different, and it requi...
(Thank you, Brian Stanton, for filming this moving satire...it touches the heart of so many adoptees and their families.)
I wondered why this piece struck at my heart so much and decided to look up the word "amend". As Brian points out, when a person is adopted, their original (factual) "Certificate of Live Birth" is "sealed" and a new, "amended" birth certificate is issued, often with adoptees given new names and "intended" parents listed as those who actually gave birth. Why is it legal for a government document to be falsified (amended)? Parents who never gave birth to that child are listed. Parents who did give birth are erased. Why? To satisfy the needs of the new parents to be "legal"? Then why not issue a more truthful document such as a "Certificate of Adoption" and leave the birth document intact?
It seems as if adoptees are only deemed acceptable in society if our names, parentage, and histories are erased and falsified in order to fulfill a new role ~ a violation of our very personhood. Look at this definition of "to amend."
"amend" - to make better; improve; to remove the faults of; correct.
So our very identity (through our birth certificate) must be "made better", "improved", "removed faults", and "corrected" in order to exist? No wonder we struggle with self-esteem issues and feelings of worth.
What is so wrong with our original identity, heritage, and history that it has be completely erased, sealed, and "amended" on government documents? It seems as if we are forced to live as what we were not born to be, in order to fulfill a role in new family ~ and then we are deemed "ungrateful" or "angry" when we question the very system that erased and created for us a falsified (amended) birth certificate. The only other time in American history where humans were exchanged for money, and their government documents "amended" and held from them, was in the era of American slavery.
I completely agree with Brian ~ if adoptee's God-given identities (who we were born as) had to be "amended" in order for us to exist in American society, it is only right to release those records "sealed" from the very persons they pertain to and allow us to live as whole individuals. How many adoptees have died without knowing? Who knows, but we do know it is far too many.
"It changes criminal law, it changes civil law," Cassidy said. "It violates every policy we've ever had to preserve the rights of mothers and their children." First, it would bring to an end New Jersey's three-day waiting period for intended parents to have both of their names placed on a birth certificate.
Second, it would allow for formal contracts to be drafted between intended families and women who bear children for them."
The operative word here is "contract"....where are the rights of the human-being being created by these unethical reproductive "musical chairs" tactics??? Nowhere.
Human-beings are not commodities ~ except in adoption and surrogacy. No "intended parent" should be listed on a child's birth certificate, ever. Yet, in adoption and surrogacy this is common practice. Laws should be in place to ENSURE every American citizen a factual birth certificate, period. These are government documents, yet falsified by the state, due to laws enacted to protect a business of human-exchange.
Adoptees and donor-created individuals are NOT perpetual children, yet we are silent victims of these "contracts" allowed by law. We grow up and not afforded the same right as every other American citizen to a FACTUAL original birth certificate. They are falsified, sealed, and coerced from us in a business contract protected by "sealed records" laws, in a money-driven system of child-procurement ~ adoption and fertility "services".
Until adoptees and donor-created individuals refuse to be stripped of our civil right of identity, these unethical businesses will continue. Genealogists have estimated that within four more generations, NO American's family tree will be accurate, due to "contracts" and "sealed records" laws in adoption. When one person's rights are trampled on, it affects everyone. These human-rights violations cannot be ignored forever.
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