[Continued from HERE.]

Is there nothing you can change? Are you powerless? No. Absolutely not. You may
not have a say at birth or during the first few years of life, but you can be fairly in control of your life now. It is your turn to choose: your ‘adult’ family including your friends, your significant other and whether or not to have children. You are also responsible for choosing your job, your religion, where you live, what you wear, to what music you listen (or not), what you eat (or don’t) … geez, that sure is a whole lot of control to be taken for granted … and that’s just a few tiny dots of ink in the matrix print-out of your life. YOU place the majority of those dots from here on in. YOU.

If you really believe in the need for change in the adoption world, do something about that (I know some of you already are…I applaud you for doing something, even if I might not agree with the things you choose to do). You have the rest of your life (a timeframe you also cannot control) to be active in the change-making process on many levels. Lobby for change in adoption legislation, in the accessibility to information for adoptees. Volunteer with orphans who are ‘waiting’ to be adopted. They probably feel more alienated and alone than even you, who actually had a family supporting you throughout your life.

If you are really anti-adoption, don’t just approach it from the negative, for example, getting adoption ‘banned.’ Postulate alternatives to adoption in the cases where children have been taken from abusive families or parents are not available to take care of them for various reasons and there exists no extended family willing to do so. Consider what options should be offered to pregnant teens, any women, who are fairly certain they don’t want to be parents for one reason or another. Pontificate the various sources of adoption and what root issues exist there … then formulate your solutions to those issues and share them with the world.

Go abroad and work in orphanages or volunteer for agencies that attempt to unite orphans with the remnants of their birth families when wars end. Think hard on how to address the growing number of AIDS orphans in the developing world and then find the right ears or partners to put it into action.

In other words, go ahead and get angry and criticize and hate the whole adoption thing … but THEN come up with other solutions. Don’t tear the old house down until you build a new one … otherwise you’ll just be homeless. You are considering the fates of real children, here… and many of them ARE homeless … really homeless, not metaphorically homeless. I think criticism is productive if improvements/solutions are the result. Otherwise, criticism can just be nasty, nitpicky, and downright bitchy.

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