Corruption Item 14: Help Mature Adoption Beliefs

14) Work to Mature the Way Adoption is understood in Our Society.

--Much of our inability to believe adoption corruption exists begins with our society's simplistic, AP centered, and mythic understanding of adoption. Adoption is mythically considered an always and absolute good. When adoption is seen in more mature, realistic, and balanced ways, our society will start to realize that adoption, like almost everything else in life, can be used for good or ill (to help or to exploit and harm). Adoption is a good only when used and practiced responsibly with an understanding of what it is and what is it is not; the good that it can be, but also the real inherent losses that it causes.

--As in all things, educating yourself is first. Seek to understand adoption as an elephant surrounded by blind men. Our society believes and acts as if the only valid perspective on adoption comes from the blind man standing in the position of adoptive parent. That blind man is given a megaphone and all others (very valid others who stand around the majority of the elephant) who have different perspectives are ignored, greeted with skepticism, and/or silenced. Learn to see adoption from the perspective of other blindmen-adoptees, birth families, those hurt by adoption, the big picture, the historical perspective, etc.

--Join the online adoption support list called International Adopt Talk (IAT)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/International-Adopt-Talk/
and encourage others to join; listen and learn. there. Be willing to change and mature your perspective.

--Read adoptee memoirs, blogs, and stories

--Read books on adoption history and practice

--Read criticisms of intercountry adoption including those that see intercountry adoption as a continuation of neocolonial practices and an outgrowth of the evils of globalism; seek to understand the racial aspects and the first world/third world power inequities of intercountry adoption.

--Read first mother and first family blogs, accounts, and stories.

--Seek out stories that show other sides of adoption

--From all of these form a more realistic understanding of adoption.

--Remember this: It is always easy to recognize the injustices of another time and place; the hard thing is to recognize the injustices of your own time and place. In every time and place where injustice has been condoned/ignored/allowed to thrive by society there has been a worldview and a simplistic uni-blind-man mythology that makes injustice look just, especially for those who benefit from it. It is easy to shift blame, make problems into non-problems, injustices into non-issues, and ignore massive problems. It is harder to take a stand against the zeitgeist and be a flea or a lion biting against injustice. Reform begins with understanding the view from somewhere other than society's single approved blind man. It starts when people begin to recognize that there are other human beings involved---people as human as themselves. People who have the same emotions, the same hopes, and the same dreams--and who feel pain in the same way and for the same reasons as they themselves--when we start to care about the way the world looks from the perspective of those other equally human beings. Not just the way WE think the world looks from their perspective (in our minds), but the way it IS from their experience and perspective. When we GIVE THEM VOICE and LISTEN TO THEM.

--Whenever you see adoption being portrayed in a simplistic, AP centered, uni-perspective, mythic sort of way, speak up and share a different perspective.