Things to Celebrate During National Adoption Awareness Month

I stated last year and will say it again this year, National Adoption Awareness Month should not be a celebration.  You cannot spread awareness about issues when you are busy celebrating something.  A celebration does not point out problems nor does it seek to.  How, in fact, can you celebrate something and point out its problems?  You just can't.  It's either something to celebrate or something to fix: it doesn't work both ways.

Reasons why I won't celebrate.....

• Foremost, National Adoption Awareness Month is intended to provide awareness to the over 120,000 children in foster care legally cleared for adoption who need homes.  To make it a celebration of all-things-adoption is to misappropriate the reason this month has been dedicated to adoption awareness.
• Personal reasons.  I love both of my families but am so very aware of all of the losses involved, a celebration would be downright dismissive.
• Because I know adoption isn't a wonderful thing for everyone.
• Adult adoptees still are not equal.
• 43 out of 50 States still have discriminatory, archaic adoption laws based on shame and secrecy.
• Because unethical adoptions still happen.
• Because adoption is still often seen as a first resort instead of providing support to families to stay together.
• Because women are still unequal, which yes, negatively impacts how adoption is practiced.
• Because adoptees lose their original identities and families and often times their country, culture, and language of origin.
• Because adoptees are still incredibly stereotyped individuals.
• Because adoption is portrayed in media in an amount completely disproportionate to its prevalence in real life and is done so as entertainment for others, which is completely dismissive and disrespectful to those who live adoption each and every single day.
• Because racism, sexism, heterosexism, adultism, to name a few, are all alive and well.  And yes, those issues impact how adoption is practiced too.

...to name a few.

Things I can, individually, celebrate.....

• Happy reunions.
• When an adoptee's families are supportive of them.
• When a state restores an adoptee's right to their Original Birth Certificate.
• When those affected by adoption find healing.
• When children who need homes, get homes.
• When families are preserved.
• The resilience, strength and accomplishments of adult adoptees.
• The many friends I have made on this journey.
• Growing in strength in family relationships.
• The strengthening of the Adoptee Rights, Adoption Reform, Family Preservation, and overall Identity Rights Movements.
• Each and every instance someone keeps an open mind and listens to someone elses' adoption experience.
• Every time an equal access bill is drafted.
• Every time better sex education, health care, and contraception are provided and made to be more easily attainable.

Take Women's Rights Day, for example, that I said wasn't a celebration either.  We can celebrate the accomplishments of women.  We can celebrate the many strides taken in the quest towards women's equality.  But we can't celebrate something that isn't the way it should be: women are not equal and our rights are constantly at risk.  So far this session, women's health care has been attacked SEVEN times on the federal level and many more at state levels.  The working poverty rate and the unemployment rates are astronomical but, somehow, we have time to attack women's health care.  That doesn't sound like celebration time to me.

Adoption is no different.  I was talking to a friend of mine who was in the foster care system about this.  It's good for kids who need a home to get one.  But they lost so much up to the point that lead to them needing to be adopted; are adoption advertisements, promotions, and whipping out the cake and balloons really, honestly, appropriate?  I think not.

"It may be necessary to temporarily accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good." --Margaret Mead

Photo credit: Paul