Selfish

by Michelle Ann Newton

Created on: October 31, 2007   Last Updated: August 30, 2010

I am an adoptee, twice over.

Yes. You read it correctly. I was not once, but TWICE adopted, prior to the age of nine. I have three legal names, and associated birth certificates, the first of which is my given name at birth, not yet identified.

The most frequently asked question is, "How did that happen?" My birth mother, who was married when I was conceived, had an affair. I can only assume she believed I was her husband's child, which is the reason why she chose to carry out her pregnancy in the first place. By the time I was two, it become more than evident, I was not her husband's child. At that point, her husband, who was a highly decorated military officer, demanded, "Either she goes, or I go." Ultimately, my mother complied with her husband's command, and soon placed me with an agency for adoption.

At age five, I was adopted by the first family. Before my ninth birthday, I would have suffered unfathomable mental and physical and sexual abuse, so much so, that I ran away, in the middle of winter, wearing slippers and short sleeves, to escape yet another beating. Not long after this event, I was taken away from the first adoptive family and placed with a second adoptive family. There too, I was horribly brutalized in emotional, physical and sexual ways, and still suffer the long-lasting effects of surviving, abused.

Adoption, as it pertains to the person or persons responsible for making a decision or choice to keep or give away their own flesh and blood, IS SELFISH. In simple terms, adoption is the equivalent of a real-life, repetitious "Little Red Riding Hood" tale. An innocent (a child), is in essence, lost inside a forest, and hunted by a big bad wolf lurking deep within the shadows. A child, who may or may not be attacked, and who may or may not be able to escape the wrath of the stalking hungry wolf. Little Red rarely escapes this tale unscathed.

No other choice in life is as significant as determining the fate of a life you've bore. The entire premise of adoption is cruel beyond your wildest imagination, unfair to the parents and the children it involves, and is often unjustifiable by mere desperation or relative circumstance.

How is adoption selfish? Adoption is like an alien invasion, one that will inevitably affect all parties involved, for the entirety of their lives. Why? Because it is designed to remove a child's identity, rightful heritage, and genealogy, forever. In my case, my birth mother didn't bother to inform my birth father that I existed. That means, my father, and everyone else in his bloodline, was never given the opportunity to accept the responsibility of raising or loving or wanting his own daughter.

Adoption is a process that does not require lengthy investigation related to identifying or informing other legal family members, prior to placing a child into an adoptive home with complete and utter strangers. "Screenings" (as their called), of potential parents and families are the only required proofs of proper stability and security for a child, during the adoption process, as if a background check and a few planned personal meetings can ever truly reveal the potential for underlying mental or emotional issues, or hidden sexual or physical abusive natures. If the needle were this easy to find in a world of haystacks, there wouldn't be much crime to tame or report, anywhere.

Factor in the strong possibility (almost a certainty) shown to exist by the huge percentage of publicized adoption nightmares and horror stories that show, more often than not, children placed in adoptive homes are abused, mistreated, ostracized or otherwise physically, mentally or sexually harmed, including by the loss of true identity.

An adopted child's identity is erased and the child is reincarnated or reinvented as someone else, and their original identity is immediately placed under seal by the courts. Can you imagine what it feels like to look in the mirror everyday and not know who you are or where you come from? Do you know if you have your mother's eyes? Your father's nose? These are simple answers I may never know, unless or until I can establish my true identity. To this day, I have never seen a picture of myself before the age of five. I don't have the average familial ties and bonds, like most "real" families share, because I was never truly accepted outside of my immediate family, and sometimes, even then, I felt left out, lost and alone.

The hardest decisions and choices are typically made based on potential difficulties, struggles, hardships, and demands outside of your own control (and relative to someone else's needs, wants, etc), and your willingness, or lack thereof, to include or exclude a potential "problem" or difficulty in your life. In other words, you MUST decide whether or not to be responsible for something or someone else, outside of yourself.

The most SELFISH choices, in almost any case, are to avoid, deny, wash your hands of, and remove yourself from any circumstance or situation in which you have a legal or moral obligation and responsibility, such as with a car accident. Walking away from or leaving the scene of an accident is a punishable crime, and a felony chargeable offense. Abandoning a child, by any means (excluding the no questions asked drop-off sites for unwanted new born babies as a last-stitch effort to preserve life), is also a felony, EXCEPT in cases of adoption.

How ironic, since, the very purpose of abandonment laws are intended to protect the innocent from the irresponsible and to uphold accountability for one's own actions. But adoption is the "legalized" way to relinquish ALL parental responsibilities for a child, without culpability, which has been proved, again and again, through countless testimonials, to cause more HARM than good in the majority of adoption cases. It appears, abandoning a hunk of replaceable metal like a vehicle, means more in society's eyes, than the safety and well being of an innocent child.

Open adoption removes the "identity loss" factor from the adoption process, and is on the right track to lessoning the potential for harm and damage typically associated with adoption.
For those of us who've had no open voice, no open choice, and no open protection from a system of legalized abandonment, we are each left behind and caught in the crossfires of dealing with the long term effects sure to follow the critical losses of both family and self.

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