No child is “saved” by a system that protects adults and agencies while ignoring the rights of the child. Placing a child into a different family doesn't justify erasing their identity, and adoption can't be considered ethical care when a child’s humanity and rights are disregarded in the process.🥚

"You should be grateful!" Grateful my first mother was coerced into relinquishment? That my extended families never knew I existed? That my origin story was a lie? That I have no access to my original birth certificate? That my adoptive mom had relevant information but kept it hidden from me? 🥚

That's bad. You know what's also bad? People using social media to buy babies. #adoption 🥚

How do you think I should've felt growing up knowing my birth certificate lists my adoptive parents as the parents of live birth? Can you see how that twisted my beliefs about my right to know my first family? My original birth certificate is sealed away. I can't see it. That reality distorted all 🥚

How do you think I should've felt growing up knowing my birth certificate lists my adoptive parents as the parents of live birth? Can you see how that twisted my beliefs about my right to know my first family? My original birth certificate is sealed away. I can't see it. That reality distorted all 🥚

“ethical adoption,” if we want to use that phrase, would denote a form of long-term custodianship that leaves a child’s vital records intact and accessible and that is annullable at the age of legal majority. And I don’t believe there is such a thing as ethical intercountry #adoption.

🥚 “Orphanages, sometimes used as baby factories, have been linked to increasing cases of child trafficking in SE Nigeria….In a baby factory traffickers hold women, mostly teenagers, against their will, rape and force them to get pregnant. The newborns are then sold illegally to adoptive parents.”

When a woman loses her child to adoption, she gets no record or recognition of her having had a child. The adopters, on the other hand, get a new birth certfiicate tailored to their fantasies of natal parenthood. The birth mother is written out entirely. Happy Mother's Day and fuck #adoption.

My son's theater Co is performing The Prince of Egypt (I know!). The #adoption tropes littered throughout are blech. Moses's adoptive mom first calls him a gift then sings "Did you hate us all along" after he learns the truth. His brother calls him selfish. His adoptive dad tells him to be grateful.

A group of birth mothers in South Korea is calling for a full government investigation into alleged negligence, and human rights violations tied to overseas adoption practices. Families say they were misled or coerced into relinquishing children who were later sent abroad. buff.ly/anojfPB 🥚

"Solitary confinement steals bites from the mind, heart, and soul every day... This confinement dismantles you and then reconstructs you, making you a product of this environment."

> - Why are they asking for money? Money can't change the past. Money cannot change the past. But being adopted can be very expensive. Travels to Korea to look for, or visit family, is expensive. Therapy is expensive. DNA tests, family search, interpreters... it all adds up. #adoption 🥚

So most of the comments on social media seems to be: -Why aren't they suing the Korean state? They are. And for all it's faults, South Korea have actually acknowledged wrongdoings, have issued an apology and are investigating it through their Truth and Reconcilliation Commission. #adoption 🥚 >

Does anyone know the date of Angry Adoptee’s Day?

I just learned tomorrow is Birthmother's Day. Did you know this is a thing? Sounds like it started with a group of first moms, but now it's been co-opted by the #adoption industry. Thoughts?

This weekend is especially difficult for #adoptees, who are not only denied their mothers, but in many cases don't know her name, and are never given space to grieve that theft/loss.

As an adoptee, I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate Mother’s Day. 🥚

adoption is often the "last chance" option for those unable to conceive 🥚

This is amazing.

The suit claims authorities failed to protect adoptees’ rights to identity, origin, and family life despite longstanding warnings of human rights violations in South Korea’s overseas adoption system, and that family connections are not privileges but fundamental human rights. buff.ly/cGwbVC2 🥚

I doubt we will ever see anything like this in the United States, the hub of adoption globally and the epicenter of the adoption industrial complex. I'm really proud of these adoptees in Denmark for taking on those who failed them, repeatedly. www.koreaherald.com/article/1073...

I hate that story you tell about your #adoption journey. It always begins with you sharing how you tried for so long to conceive and then delves into the sadness that came after years of failed infertility treatments. You complain about money spent and pain incurred. Lastly it gets to adoption. 🧵

The truth is most people in my life would be shocked to learn I'm for abolishing #adoption. The sad reality is majority of them would never bother to learn why. They would simply call me ungrateful. Me. The adopted person. The one with the actual lived experience of separation. Wild, isn't it?

🌁 The California Assembly will soon consider SB 381, the adoptee rights bill that passed 35-0 in the senate in January. Here is the explanation from 1935 about why it was necessary to "keep adoptions secret." Like most people who weren't adopted, legislators know little about this... + 🥚

I just learned that Haley Cohen Gilliland’s brilliant book A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD, which I chose for the book club I help lead at my library, is a finalist for the nonfiction Pulitzer Prize. 🥚 www.npr.org/2025/08/08/n...

Seeing adoption as a finished legal act or purely positive child welfare solution ignores the lifelong impacts adopted people carry, particularly around identity loss and other forms of harm that often fall outside existing legal remedies. 🥚

THE SHAPE OF LOVE by Carren Jao and Corinne Caro is en route and set to arrive on shelves September 22nd, 2026! Forthcoming from our friends at Lee & Low Books 💌 🎁 bit.ly/TheShapeOfLove

CA SB381--the unrestricted OBC access bill already passed by the Senate-- has just been assigned to the Assb Health and Judiciary Committees. We will issue an Action Alert shortly, but in the meantime we have already submitted our letter of support. bit.ly/4nbRLjH bit.ly/4nbRLjH

I needed to read this today. 🥚 share.google/wDletYZLVe2M...

The @affcny.bsky.social Conference starts Thursday! Don't miss Suzanne Bachner giving her presentation, SEARCHING THROUGH STORY: Freedom, Fantasy and the Adoptee Imagination, on the first day! Last chance sign up here: affcny.org/about/what-w...

Saw a post by an adoptive mom complaining about the lack of support she's received from her church. "You called us heros and now you've abandoned us!" she wrote. JFC 1. Never see yourself as a hero for adopting 2. Never use abandoned to describe your feelings within the context of #adoption 🥚

I will be moderating a talk at the annual political and current affairs festival "Folkemøde" next month. "Adoption: 60 years of human rights violations - how do we create ethical families with the child's best interests at the centre?" 🥚

I've BEEN saying that the two best works of nonfiction last year were @brian-goldstone.bsky.social's THERE IS NO PLACE FOR US and Haley Cohen Gilliland's A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD—glad the Pulitzer committee agreed with me!

🥚 I will never not be mad that adoptees have to surrender our own genetic material to for-profit DNA labs to subvert the deceptions, secrecies, and incompetence of institutions claiming to be protecting the privacy of everyone else just to find out who our parents are.

“Klaus Josefsen believes that if the adoptees win the case, it could lead to more similar cases. - ‘It is a central case that has been raised, and there is no doubt that if it has a favorable outcome for the eight plaintiffs, it will definitely inspire others, he says.’” 🥚

Eight adoptees are suing the Danish state and demand millions in compensation 🥚 www.dr.dk/nyheder/indl...

every “feelgood story” you read about #adoption reunions or DCPs finding relatives is a story of human rights being jettisoned so that other people can solve their own problems.

Anonymous donor conception is selfish in a morally profound sense: those who resort to it aim at a genealogical connection to a child PRECISELY by denying that child full access to their own genealogical connections. It should be outlawed.

Unpopular opinion, but his racism showed when he adopted a child from Ethiopia.

Do you know how it feels to be powerless in your own life? I never searched for my first families because no option existed to search that gave me the power to search. My option was to ask strangers: use an intermediary or beg the adoption agency. I never had agency until DNA. That's power. Mine. 🥚

Any other #adoptees find out later in life that your first mother, from a very early time, knew your name and where you lived? I was floored when she casually told me this during our first meeting. She knew who I was. My first father and I lived in the dark for decades, but she got to know.

And this is why I roll my eyes real hard when yall get on here calling people stupid for doing 23andMe and the like. It’s an ignorant judgement. And I implore you to sit with that. 🥚

DNA technology has become one of the only paths to answers long denied by broken systems, missing records, and secrecy. A former foster youth reflects on finding his biological father through genetic testing and knowing his own relatives, history, and identity. buff.ly/aZf3RIw 🥚

the idea of dividing people into those who deserve to parent their children and those who do not is an expression of white supremacy and is what undergirded the development of the systems of family policing and of plenary #adoption in the United States.

I think every white adopter should read and consider the famous 1972 statement on transracial #adoption by the National Association of Black Social Workers. www.nabsw.org/node/430

I think a lot about how many white adopters I've seen get offended at the suggestion that they move to a new neighborhood or church, choose schools or extracurriculars carefully, but they fully expect the Black or brown kid they've adopted to quietly assimilate into their all white neighborhood

The child you're raising shouldn't be the first time you're in a real relationship with a Black or brown person, but unfortunately this is common in transracial adoption

No like I’m livid. He really said she was called the n-word at *every* school she attended. AND YET it took an incident in high school for it to click. They never fucking believe us. Took that baby from her home country just to raise her as a white child. BAN INTERNATIONAL ADOPTION.

This enrages me.

A NEW EPISODE of the upEND Podcast is out now! We talk to Dinah Ortiz about what real safety looks like for families when a parent uses substances.