Adoption is Unconstitutional

Webster's New World College Dictionary's definition of adopt is to choose and bring into a certain relationship; specif., to take into one's own family by legal process and raise as one's own child.

All slavery isn't about labor, drudge, or toil, but all slaves are under the control of another as owner and master. Slavery exists when one human beings takes ownership possession of another. In this sense, adoption is a form of state-sanctioned slavery. If slavery is unconstitutional, then so is adoption. Let's look at the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution:

Amendment XIII Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Adoption in the United States is an industry. Capitalist industry demands growth. In capitalist counties adoption is the ultimate answer for privileged couples who cannot have children of their own.

In America, about six babies are lost to adoption every hour. The State of California, for example, reported in 2005 that it separated 10,000 more babies from their natural families in 2004 than it had in the previous year. Adoption is an immensely profitable franchise sung to the tune of over $4 billion a year in profits. The supply chain is institutionalized on an endless conveyor belt of guilt, secrecy, and lies.

We hear outrage about puppy mills, but rarely a mention of baby mills, which are lucrative and state-sanctioned. Intellectual property rights are fiercely guarded and protected by federal law. How about adoptee identity rights? The right to know who you are and keep that knowledge as your own? We all know the golden rule: he who owns the gold makes the rules.

Natural mothers, coerced from their own children, are the breeders, workers, producers. Adoptees are the product, resource, and commodity. The state, or CEO, and its baby brokering agencies, along with adoptive parents are the consumers, beneficiaries and stock holders. Laws are written to support the stock holders. As with other resources like water, trees, and livestock, commodity is inexhaustible and workers expendible. They are there for consumption, convenience, and to feed a pathological myth. Organized religion bolsters this myth by its blessing on adoption, and adoptive parents use religion selectively to justify their theft. The Catholic Church, for instance, has a long history of active baby trade.

Except in rare cases, adoption is unknown in "poorer" countries where families continue their heritage as sacrosanct, with continuous, unbreakable bonds. Doing otherwise would never occur to them. In some cases, adoption certainly is unavoidable. For example, when the child's natural parents die. But in "poorer" cultures, another family member takes on the care of childen who lose parents to death.

The truth is that no one can ever raise a child "as one's own." There is only one set of real parents. Everyone else is a caregiver. A surrogate. Nothing can ever replace the bond that exists between a natural mother and her child. And the myth perpetuated that adoptive parents are the real parents is unspeakably shameful.

Adoptees are expected to be grateful for being "saved" from a life of misery and hardship. The truth is, who set themselves up to be God and say what the fate of the child would have been? Adopters' justifications and cliches about "chosen babies" and "in the interest of the child" form the glue that makes them feel better about their "choice" of creating a fake bond. Sometimes the glue holds, sometimes it doesn't. But once you break something, the crack is forever there. An adopted child is always the elephant in the living room.

Which isn't to say that caregivers cannot be kind, giving, and understanding human beings who do whatever it takes to help the child discover who he or she is without the arrogance that goes with possession of the child as private property. But this type of selfless caregiving is rare in a society of narcissists.

Americans truly think the world is their shopping cart. Their attitude is, "If I paid for it, it belongs to me." If adoptive parents paid $30,000 to some agency to buy someone else's child, they are going to be damn sure no one, especially not the natural parent, lays claim to that child whose true identity has been carefully sealed away and replaced with a new one that pleases the purchasers. If you can buy a new Mercedes, you can buy a new baby. You may have to import this "chosen bauble" on the market, but that is certainly acceptable in affluent social circles. Curious, isn't it, how white affluent couples are the largest segment of the population with greatest infertility problems?

The adoption industry's managers and beneficiaries are in the business to separate families that should have had cultural support to remain intact. The natural parents must deal with the separation as best they can, often with irrepairable emotional damage.

But the the most tragic result of adoption is like an infinite worm coiled in the center of every adoptee. That worm eats away a bigger and bigger hole that nothing can heal. From the day of separation the adoptee is rendered invisible and her feelings inconsequential. Even if the child one day re-unites with the natural mother, the damage was made permanent. The child not only lacks knowledge of her true identity, where she came from, and medical history, but she lives with the constant message that she wasn't good enough because she was rejected at birth.

Caregivers are never enough. Nothing is ever enough. The adoptee is a dungeon of anxiety. Addictive behaviors, depression, need for control, intimacy problems, suicide thoughts, and self-hatred are just a few of the life issues adoptees suffer. With their slave mentality, most adoptees remain docile and terrified of displeasing their owners.

But sometimes things go horribly wrong in the system and adoptees kill their owners or others, even themselves. Who would have guessed? Jimmy was a chosen child. He was special and had the best of everything. How could he have been so ungrateful to do this?

It's time adoption is seen for what it really is rather than as the ultimate solution for infertility that it is promoted to be.