Rudy Owens and his adoptive mother, 2008
Trends regarding adoptee rights advocacy come and go, and some stay and have lasting power. One I am seeing the past couple of days is promoting the importance of genetic closeness, ahead of National Adoption Month. Adult adoptees are showing photos of their birth kin they may know to show biological connections and to subvert what the month means to millions of adopted persons. I refuse to do that. I have several reasons I will share.
First, I refuse to be part of a spectacle for entertainment for others because of a broken and inequitable system. My severed connections are not for your pleasure. They demand collective actions by allies and political leaders to fix problems in order to support millions denied basic legal rights. More importantly, there are millions of adopted persons who may never meet their kin or ever see anyone who looks like them. This is spiritually painful to many of them, and it creates additional pain where there is a dark hole already.
Finally, this form of sharing allows us to ignore the greater and more important issues of finding solutions to overcome legal, cultural, and political barriers that prevent lasting reform. So yeah, count me out of another social media trend. I will be thinking about those adoptees who are of all ages and who are still denied knowledge of who they are and from whence they come.
For the record, when I launched my website for my memoir on the U.S. adoption system, I created an online gallery where I intentionally blacked out the identities of my biological and adoptive kin. It was my way of making clear my denied biological family connections will never be used as clickbait for media or anyone else for voyeuristic pleasure. I will not participate in this type of online bread and circus. Eventually I may share photos, but it will be purposeful so that it supports the larger goals of my efforts to restore adoptees’ legal rights.