November is the month that the enormous adoption industrial complex, all the way to the White House, promotes this system rooted in family separation and inequities that denies rights to persons born domestically and outside of the United States.
NPR host Scott Simon (photo from of NPR, used for editorial comment and criticism purposes only)
Right on cue, Scott Simon, an adoptive parent and host of the National Public Radio’s (NPR) show “Weekend Edition Saturday,” decided to mix his own advocacy to celebrate his, yes, “white savior/adopter” status with current affairs, being the election.
With his pro-adoption talking points that would satisfy the entire board of the National Council for Adoption, the largest pro-adoption and advocacy group in the United States, Simon gushed about his role “saving” his kids from a terrible fate in China.
His syrupy monologue, broadcast on November 9, 2024, on “Weekend Edition Saturday,” proclaimed, Look everyone, because of him and his wife, these supposedly discarded humans found on a roadside in China (his summary in his own words, and we cannot fact check the actual origins), are now adults who vote in the United States.
“I stayed back while my wife and daughters checked in to vote, and in that moment it struck me: Our daughters, born in China, left along roadsides, and grew up in our family of mixed nationalities, languages and faiths, were voting for who would be the next president of the United States and their city council member. And their votes would count the same as any cast by a Nobel prize winner or a billionaire.”
So, this is my request to NPR and its almost entirely pro-adoption news staff that I’ve been listening to now for decades, almost daily.
We adoptees recognize that your legacy media organization has rarely given agency to adoptees and has never meaningfully covered adoptee rights issues for domestic and international adoptees, concerning denied legal rights. Even with this incredible bias that you appear unable to see and correct, please refrain from promoting adoption, unless it’s based in facts and news.
A search on Google found many online resources published in November promoting the system of adoption.
If NPR, its news team, and its hosts actually cared about tens of thousands of foreign-born adoptees today, after Trump has promised to deport 15 million “illegal immigrants,” they would not run this schmaltzy adoption PR.
They would have, instead, have reported that many thousands of “immigrants” could be adoptees without secure legal status at no fault of their own, and they may now be threatened by the clearly fascist policy agenda of Trump and the entire incoming GOP Congress to deport millions of people. They would be covering how so many adoptees born outside the USA and brought without any say to this country had adopter parents who failed them by not securing their legal rights.
Finally, to anyone like NPR’s host Simon or countless others who talk publicly about adoption, remember you do not own the voice of the person you raised. Please do not speak for your adult adopted kids.
If they can vote, they can speak their minds.
Taking “ownership” of another’s voice is coercion. Doing this with public storytelling, like Simon’s essay, which is by definition in public spaces, happens constantly, and it’s a form of control adopters exert. In fact this story was by definition a form of coercion over someone who is an adult. The adopter, who needed to affirm their heroic status, intentionally told the country with NPR’s blessing, that he “owned” the adoptee’s voice.
No one but the adoptee has the moral agency to speak for themselves.