Tag Archives: NPR

Will legacy media ever dare invite adoptee authors and researchers as guests to discuss adoption?

Promotion for an episode on U.S. adoption by the show “It’s Been a Minute,” aired on Nov. 26, 2024; image provided for purposes of editorial comment and criticism only.

Once again we have a show in the public radio universe, “It’s Been a Minute,” on Nov. 26, 2024, centering the voice of someone who, while being a worthy academic author, is not an adoptee and will never fully have the critical perspective of lived experience.

For the record there are dozens and dozens of adoptee authors who have contributed significant research to policy debates on the harm of this system to millions of separated families. They continue to be boxed out, denied any access, and ignored by legacy media who could care less about their expertise to actual policy proposals for restoring legal rights and assisting those harmed, including intercountry adoptees now in legal limbo with the incoming Trump administration promising unprecedented mass deportations of people.

And I personally object to this framing—”coming out of the fog” (a term other adoptees use, and that is always their right to describe their experience any way they want).

The promotion notes: “But adoptees and birth parents are opening up online about ‘coming out of the fog’—a term for becoming more openly critical of adoption, or facing the grief within their adoption stories.” I don’t use or even acknowledge that term as relevant to having an honest discussion of the history of mass family separation of millions of families, in the United States and abroad. For millions of us, this is a critical issue of denied legal and human rights, and such terms that don’t center the root legal inequality, promoted by the foundation of lies and deception to this system, prevent us from talking about solutions. I’ve never had fog. What I’ve had are denied basic human rights—that exist on the books to this day.

Finally, where the hell were Brittany Luse or NPR when, for instance, there were real policy debates going on in Michigan between November 2023 and February 2024, on bills that could have restored legal rights to tens of thousands of people denied their vital records only because they are adopted.

Do better public radio, NPR, and your many hosts. Talk to the experts and talk about real solutions.

Some thoughts on ‘adopter ownership’ of adoptee voices and this horrible adoption-promotion month

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.