"What the fuck's with HIM...!"

Since I have succeeded in alienating my entire adoptive family, many friends, and a couple of bio-cousins I only recently met with my rants about adoption, I've decided to vent here. It's an internet-age replacement for a journal, I suppose, one I can store off-site with little chance for detection by those whom might be (cough) offended.

Let me start out by saying that I am not anti-adoption. There will always be occasions where adoption is the best solution. They happen today. They could amount to many tens of thousands of adoptions per year here in the US. But adoptions happening because they are the best solution for the child is not, typically, what is happening. Many, many children spend their entire lives in the foster care system, while a block away a childless couple pines for a little one in the house. But what they want is a healthy infant less than a year old, preferrably their race, to replace the missing figure in their perfect-family-photo they've dreamt about for so long. Foster care children tend to be older, and they so often have problems don't you know.
Well, no shit. I wonder why. I have attachment issues I believe came from being abandoned, but I was adopted by a stable, secure, fair if not particularily loving couple. I can only imagine what it is like to feel continually abandoned, as I imagine many foster care kids do.

So I am not anti-adoption. But I am anti - 99% of the adoptions in the US today. Like all industry, adoption is consumer-driven. Adoption consumers have been conditioned to expect fees of several thousand dollars for "paperwork" and, like all industry, when supplies are tight the price increases, opening new avenues for nefarious activity. And it occurs. Adoption of healthy white infants here is big bucks business and illegal transactions are happening more and more frequently, even with the much-touted "increased oversight". "Official" agencies have been, and continue to be involved in some very shady activity. Reports of children taken from parents under very shaky pretenses and adopted away against their wishes get my blood boiling.

I will add links and update soon as I find time. No shortage of that kind of shit out there. Sad.