Adoption doesn’t exist outside the family policing system—it depends on it. Behind every “forever family” headline is surveillance, removal, and profit from separation. #adopteesky

If you really want to help children, support family preservation, economic justice, reproductive autonomy, and kinship care, not the system that commodifies us. Listen to #adoptees first, not the agencies or “happy adoption” PR. We are the data, not the anecdote. 3/3 🥚 #AdoptionIsTrauma

Adoption isn’t charity. It’s the permanent legal erasure of one family so another can feel complete. That’s true whether the adopters are gay, straight, cis, or otherwise. Exploitation doesn’t become just because it’s inclusive. 2/3 #AdoptionIsTrauma 🥚

Hi Jersey, #adoptee here. You ask: “what do we do with children who don’t have families” as though they materialised out of thin air. Most of us had families. We were coerced, separated, and rebranded to society as “orphans” to supply an industry that profits from our loss. 1/3 #AdoptionIsTrauma 🥚

there are a lot of good adoption books (and a lot of really bad ones) but i want to take a second during #NAAM to recommend “Relinquished” by @gretchensisson.bsky.social. mandatory reading if you want to have any kind of informed conversation about adoption in 2025. 🥚

Super excited to share THE WISHING FLOWER by @kipalizadeh.net and me at the next Rainbow Connections meetup on Monday, November 10 from 6:30-7:30 pm ET! Register here! tinyurl.com/5n92tr77 🌈 📚 💖 #kidlit #booksky

The head of the nation's largest pro-adoption industry group, Ryan Hanlon, launches lies and misinformation to disparage mostly the people who are the most harmed by adoption: #Adoptees. The voices of adoptees are making a difference. Discount this garbage. Speak up. ifstudies.org/blog/beyond-...

We're celebrating 5 years of Sojourners for Justice Press on November 22! Everyone is invited to join us virtually. We'll talk about where we've been and most especially about where the press is heading. Join us! withfriends.events/event/ojHgXX...

This Land is a Lullaby by Tonya Simpson illus Delreé Dumont won the GG Award!! Hooray! This eloquent picture book honors the enduring relationship between a child, their ancestors and the land. Here’s my ⭐Booklist #bookreview: tinyurl.com/y56dbsh8 #KidLit #CanKidLit 📚👍 @orcabook.bsky.social

“Full of fascinating facts and provocative, quirky designs, this is a museum page turner” THE GREAT BIG BOOK OF MUSEUMS from @redcometpressbooks.bsky.social portlandbookreview.com/product/the-...

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1) Until 3 yrs ago, I hadn't heard of the Baby Scoop nor adoptee fog. When I put my personal history up against current & historical data, I had my eyes opened. I'm remarkable only in that I am not remarkable. I'm just another stat in a system I'd never examined prior to the death of my parents.

Excellent piece! "the cult of adoption ... is so well integrated into society that it passes unseen. The harm and trauma it causes is passed off as a failure of an individual adopted person to appreciate the benefits, rather than structural, judicial and legislative intent."

I didn't know I had a name. My adoptive parents lied to me about that. I found out accidentally when I was a teen and it was later confirmed when my home state granted access to original birth certificates. It was then that my adoptive mom finally told me the story of my name change. 🥚

i think it's time to note that ICE did not pioneer child taking; that it's not a new atrocity being visited upon the vulnerable; that "child welfare" agencies routinely use it to police families in crisis; that good progressive people enter the "foster-to-adopt pipeline" to benefit from it. 🥚

less punditry and much more organizing.

If you live in NYC and you are interested in organizing with others around our public libraries, you are invited to join our work @nycplan.org. We have a chance to increase and stabilize funding for our public libraries and you can help make that happen. actionnetwork.org/letters/city...

Oh look English teachers have their lesson plan for the day on how word choice exposes POV. anointed not elected: reveals contempt with a whiff of religiosity strode not walked: implies arrogance cavernous not packed: evokes emptiness, darkness It’s you, NYT. You are talking about yourself

This was such a fascinating read. And felt heartbreakingly relevant to today. It’s based on the true story of a desegregation case in the 1930s in Lemon Grove. #MG #VerseNovel #KidLit

It’s unnatural to have to introduce your child to their grandmother. Adoption isn’t beautiful - it’s trauma and generational trauma. #naam

It's publication day for Read This When Things Fall Apart! So grateful to our contributors and to @akpress.org for making this book a reality. This is a strange time to be promoting a book, but I believe it's a text that has the potential to help us right now. Please get yourself a copy. ❤️

How does this person know what they know? is an excellent question to ask oneself.

On Sunday Nov 9 @adopteesunited.bsky.social is having a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon to reshape how adoption is represented online. By updating adoption-related pages with accuracy and adoptee-centered language, we help the world see adoption through a fuller, more truthful lens. Allies are also welcome!

Sadly, they still hold up. The "30 answers to 30 questions” cover a lot of ground, and provide summaries as well as reading material + references that help to ground one’s positioning. The goal: Move from the personal to the economic and political. #adoption 🥚 LINK: www.albikar.org/wparchive/30...

November is National Adoption Awareness Month, created by the adoption industry and others who enable and benefit from family separation to celebrate and promote their “work”. Please take the opportunity to listen to adopted people and others who’ve been harmed by the system—this month and always.

100% agree with this! "This month don't celebrate adoption. Interrogate it."

the fact that crises of poverty constitute the overwhelmingly determinative cause of relinquishments gives an especially bitter flavor to a day when the national imperilment of SNAP benefits coincides with the start of National Adoption Awareness Month. 🥚

For National Adoptee Awareness Month, this lives rent-free in my head. 🥚 #adopteesky

why, as adults, can’t we annul our adoptions? why are we not free to reclaim our original identities, but instead must forever remain tethered to a legal contrivance made with no possibility of our consent?

National Adoption Awareness Month, which is about promoting #adoption, begins today. none of the promotional material contains an answer to the following naïve question: why does “give this child a loving and safe home” require “erase and rewrite this child’s entire identity”?

it’s been a couple of years since my friend @gretchensisson.bsky.social published RELINQUISHED, reporting her years of research on the causes and consequences of women relinquishing their children for #adoption. i think now is an especially apt time to recommend this brilliant book. +

Adoption is always traumatic. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes things work out relative to what the other options were. But especially for the adoptee, adoption is always traumatic.

🥚 over the years i’ve seen countless variations on “i know people who are happy with being adopted” (tip: you have no idea how adoptees really feel because the stakes of honesty are so high, and we keep so much to ourselves). but calling someone “thrilled” with their adoption is honestly bonkers

My maternal great aunt offered to take me and raise me but my grandparents declined.

Systemic issues underlie the adoption/foster care debacle. 💯👇🏽🥚

When I met my aunt at age 50 (after finally coming to terms with my trauma and searching for my first family), she told me she would've raised me had she known I existed. Tell me again about the beautiful system that permanently and legally separates families?! #adoption 🥚

Adoption has life long effects & we move through phases of grief, acceptance and rage repeatedly though the process is different for everyone. Like being queer but still questioning/closeted there is a lot you process internally that is different from what you perform externally.

Even as a white woman adopted into a white family with all the privileges I can vouch for that. You can be surrounded by "family" your whole life and it can be the loneliest experience ever. That feeling of if I don't wear this mask, I am not accepted, I am not included, I am not understood or loved

We get that you are using the argument to point out the general unfairness of being gate kept but we are asking you to think deeper than that. BC at the end of the day it is adoptees who have to deal with the outcomes of this very incomplete narrative. And we are tired of being used to prop it up.

Everyone’s responses here are very relevant to OP bc it posits that children are being ‘abandoned by the straights’. Which people are saying is not the case but is colonialism, racism, classism and organized abandonment by the state that fuels a profit drive industry. Please listen to adoptees.

It’s horrific when someone goes missing and family has to search and wonder if they’re okay. But this is everyday for adoptees - except no one is helping us look. Instead we are looking for answers easily known and often concealed by others. #adopteevoices

If you are an adoptee born in Michigan and you need help with obtaining your birth info from the state, including petitioning the court for your own original birth certificate, don't miss this free online workshop next Tuesday evening. 🥚

Erasing data for the sake of order falsifies the universe. Restoring data, even painful data, is to return to honesty. The insistence by #adoptees on open records isn't sentimentality. It's the pursuit of data integrity. Reality can't be ethical if it depends on the destruction of evidence. 🥚

Especially today, props to intercountry adopted people who speak out about being denied US citizenship despite being adopted by US citizen parents decades ago 🥚 www.bbc.com/news/article...

Adoption is human trafficking based in colonial racism and classism. Child Protection Services (Family Policing) disproportionately removes BIPOC children per the same classist, racist ideology. 🥚 www.alandettlaff.com/book #AdoptionIsTrauma #AbolishAdoption #adopteesky

Most "available" children are stolen due to racism and classism, not abandoned. No one has a "right" to buy a stolen child. The entire industry should be abolished. The profits are used for forced birth legislation. bsky.app/profile/jnxo...

i would like to join with the many other adoptees i’ve seen discussing this on other platforms and say that NAAM should stand for National Adoptee Awareness Month not National Adoption Awareness Month. we know you’re aware of adoption. we need you to learn about the people who are harmed by it. 🥚

Thank you Congressman Neguse for laying it plain.

Until Monday to respond???

because the #adoption industry promotes itself during November, many adopted people find this time of year somewhat grim. in fact, yesterday was Adoptee Remembrance Day, when we mourn those lost to violence and suicide.