This. There are so many lies that the adoption industry and adoptive parents string together. Untangling them is a series of traumatic events we are never prepared for. When your very foundation crumbles, who can you trust?

21 months I don't know where I was or with whom. I do know I was in 3-4 different fosters homes and taken to visit my mother's killer (my father) in jail many times

🌤️ Organizations IN SUPPORT of California's SB-381 "Vital records: adoptees’ birth certificates" = 24 Organizations OPPOSED = 0 ❗ Next step will be in August. By September we might finally remove the law blocking us from seeing our birth record since 1935 ! THANK YOU CAAR for all your work 🌁 🥚

What secret have you learned later in life about yourself as an #adoptee? I had no idea I was in foster care for the first month of my life. Didn't know I was in the ICU for a week either. Of course I never knew my birth story until I met with my first mother when I was 48. What about you? 🥚

Just putting this here in case you are A VIRGINIA-BORN ADOPTEE WHO WANTS A COPY OF YOUR OWN ORIGINAL BIRTH RECORD. Just saying. 🥚 adopteerightslaw.com/virginia-ori...

Oh no, you purchased a child and now you find out that child was trafficked. Who could have guessed?? #adoption www.bbc.com/news/article...

Truth and Reconciliation for birth mothers of Korean #adoptees 🥚 www.koreatimes.co.kr/amp/southkor...

Here’s a review from yesterday’s judiciary committee meeting with Senator Aisha Wahab and the California Alliance for Adoptee Rights. It’s a privilege to contribute to this conversation and help move forward the case of open records for adopted people. Next: appropriations!

They make it very clear that my original one is just for informational purposes and will not be accepted *anywhere*. But the one where they literally changed my BIRTH parents’ names to my adoptive parents is the real one. My legal birth certificate says my adoptive mother literally *birthed* me.

The ironic thing about original birth certificates for adoptees is the “THIS CANNOT BE USED FOR LEGAL PURPOSES” rule. Like, I cannot use my original birth certificate to prove citizenship at the DMV or something. Idk but that’s so funny to me bc the fake certificate is the “correct” one 🥚

Whenever someone says, “she relinquished her child for adoption because she couldn’t give the child the life they deserved” what they’re really saying is this mother and child were failed by society and the systems that should’ve been there to help them. #wefailedyou #adoption #adopteevoices

in the USA one doesn’t generally hear the phrase “forced #adoption,” despite the fact that virtually every context in which a parent relinquishes a child to a family of strangers—Baby Scoop, intercountry adoption, adoptions of Indigenous children, CPS foster care to adoption—is forced.

Those of us whose lives were forever altered by forced adoption—carried out by churches, and agencies and abetted our own government—are super clear that the legal sealing of our birth records, adoption records and original birth certificates serve the purpose of concealing all this vileness.

🥚 Huge news in the adoptee rights community: the UK apologies for decades of forced adoptions. Looking at you, USA, and all your see-no-evil adoptive moms who got their kids via behind-the-scenes coercion, deception, and bullying. The shame is yours as well. www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

❗Well done! Discussion of adoptee rights bill SB381 ended at 9:20am PDT, all testimony in support. One legislator asked what took us so long. We've been trying for years! However, we have to wait for a vote because there was no quorum in the Assembly Judiciary Committee. I can't imagine failure. 🥚

Happy July 1 to all VA-born adopted people! If you’re 18+ you can apply for a copy of your original birth certificate today!! 🎉 Here’s the link to the application. www.vdh.virginia.gov/vital-record... Please see next skeet for instructions from the Virginia Adoptee Rights Alliance

Yes!!! The VA law takes effect today!!! 🥚 🎉

NEW! Intimate stories by 28 writers, including numerous #adoptees, who’ve either spent years longing & searching for their unknown biological families or were shocked to discover they have parents or siblings they never dreamed of. Woven through is the question: What does it mean to be family?

Try this link for this morning's California Judiciary Committee www.assembly.ca.gov/events/media... 🥚

Informed by Gabrielle Glaser. Check it out and share! 👇🏽🥚 m.youtube.com/watch?v=CLfV...

No but really- there's a ridiculous level of audacity in being appalled at someone trying to take the kids you stole. "I can't believe you'd do to me what I did to others" You were fine with the Stolen Kids Industry when you were the one buying, babe.

the sociolegal practice of #adoption epitomizes white liberal hypocrisy, because it is valorized by white liberals despite the fact that it would all but disappear under the social conditions they profess to wish to bring about.

"Amy Coney Barrett has two adopted Black children from Haiti AND she helped clear the way for Haitians to be stripped of protection and thrown into the mouth of deportation. That is not a contradiction. This is how whiteness works." #Adoption #Adoptee #Haiti #Haitian #Immigration #TPS #SCOTUS

Really struggling to feel sorry for Pete Buttigieg having CPS called om him. He is someone who has literal power to change the family policing system, but won't, because that is what allowed him to adopt his two black children. #adoption 🥚

Adoptees know this feeling well. This is honestly how most humans behave and look at their progeny. It’s just that most children within a reasonable bound meet the expectations of their parents and the issue never arises. We should stop being surprised. 🥚

#adoption is not and has never been about "the best interests of the child." It is and has always been about redistributing the privileges of parenthood in accordance with racist and classist notions of fitness and desert.

And then there is the adoption tax credit, in tax year 2025 refundable up to $5000 per qualifying child. @gretchensisson.bsky.social’s studies of relinquishing parents reveal that for many of them, $5000 would have allowed them to keep their children.

Adoptees notice how hopeful adopters will run gofundmes to afford #adoption fees, while the idea of financially supporting pregnant people or struggling parents at risk of losing their children to foster care or adoption is never considered. These systems are not about child welfare.

🥚 Renewed calls for an apology to Canadian adoptees/birthmothers as called for in 2018 report which acknowledged that 300,000 unwed Canadian women were forced to give up their babies between World War 2 and 1980s, most in government-funded, church-run maternity homes. www.cbc.ca/radio/thecur...

NEW REPORT: Sick and disabled infants deemed unadoptable were denied medical care and left to die in a UK maternity home where unwed mothers were forced to surrender their infants for adoption. 🥚 Heartbreaking story from the Baby Scoop Era www.bbc.com/news/article...

I wasn't planning to spend an hour watching a film but I got hooked on the emotional stories of adoptees in Illinois who obtained their original birth certificates when the law changed in 2011 (albeit with a veto option). Adoptee Jean Strauss’s film "A Simple Piece of Paper" vimeo.com/88410746 🥚

Actual conversation w my cardiologist as we try apply the new cardiology protocols to me: Dr: You have high levels of the inherited risk factor LP(a) but a 0 calcium score, excellent stress test, and no family history of CVD so I could go either way on statins Me: We don’t know my family history

🥚 A UK adoptee finds his birthmother, discovers his father is Iranian, and has a complicated experience. “I do not regret either reunion. There is power in gaining self-knowledge, and connecting with my cultural heritage that was erased by the adoption system.” www.theguardian.com/society/2026...

"Adoption has often been likened to a ghost world, in which the adoptee, the birth parents and the adoptive parents are haunted by spectres of the past. For the birth parents, the primary ghost is of the child lost to adoption. For the adopted person, it is their birth mother." 🥚

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UPDATE: my Iranian #adoptee friend has been granted asylum by DHS and the judge. She was adopted as a child but never received her citizenship. The PAAF Act would alleviate this process for all non-naturalized adult US adoptees. 🥚 #PassThePAAF P.S. she's one of the few fortunate adoptees.

This is a great article about my Iranian #adoptee friend who's in legal limbo because of their "non-citizen" status. The author, Joy Alessi, is now CEO of Adoptee Rights Center, an NPO fighting for adoptee citizenship rights. Please share. 🥚 joyalessi.substack.com/p/the-illuso...

🥚 This essay goes out to my fellow queer adoptees, especially those adopted by conservative Christian couples—the privileged clients of US adoption agencies. Many of us ended up expelled from two families. For some, fear of that outcome worked to keep us closeted for way too long. #PrideMonth2026 🏳️‍🌈

As is my Pride Month ritual, I’m re-upping my coming out essay. 🌈 The hero of the story is one of my former students, a gay Somali refugee. I don’t know where he is now. www.terrain.org/2019/guest-e...

there has never been and will never be an adoption industry that does not prey upon and exploit vulnerable people. Relinquishment is the “choice” of the choiceless. 🥚

The South Korean gov't has recently begun to investigate its role in fraudulent adoptions. For @thebaffler.com, I reviewed a new book about how a messianic quest to “save” Korean children created the intercountry adoption industry and is bound up with a familicide: thebaffler.com/latest/god-s...

True adoption history: "...the single Korean mothers of these children were loath to relinquish their children... mothers often hid their 'Amerasian' babies from white missionary workers and men like Harry Holt— not out of shame but because they were afraid of being coerced to give them up...” 🥚

Reflecting today about my name. It's my adoptive mom's middle name and the one she always wanted to give to a daughter. I never liked it. It doesn't fit. And walking around with that name attached to me, especially after finding a letter from my birth mom that she hid, makes me hate it even more.🥚

🥚 US adoptee Kyle Adler has been reunited w his birthmother. “The 36-yo is one of thousands of children who were stolen from Chilean families.” Tellingly, his adoptive parents didn’t support Kyle’s search. I hate that for him. I also hate that they named him Kyle…1/3 apnews.com/article/chil...

Many people are genuinely surprised to hear that I have opinions about #adoption. You remember I'm adopted, right?! Having lived experience tends to provide you with some context 🙄 Honestly, it's amazing how otherwise intelligent and thoughtful humans can be so uncurious when it comes to adoption.

I encourage *everyone* to press play on this. And listen to some first hand testimonies from adoptees and birth parents about our experiences being in the dark. 🥚

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM48... 🎞️ Filmmaker Jean Strauss made this 4-minute film from January testimony for SB 381 that passed unanimously in the California Senate. Next it will be heard by the Assembly. "In the meantime, Virginia became the 17th state...to pass adoptee birthright legislation." 🥚

You may not like it, but white saviorism is real. 🥚

If I hadn't been adopted I could have been raised by my first mom my dad either set of grandparents one of 4 aunts maybe an uncle one of 2 great aunts That was never possible because they weren't asked to keep me. Most never knew I existed. Instead an #adoption agency profited from my birth.

Saw a post in an adoptee group asking "how many times has anyone asked you how it feels to be adopted?" I knew the answer would be 0. But still amazing reading the replies confirming this reality. No one has ever asked me how it feels to be adopted, but they all sure assume to know how we feel! 🥚