The New Abolition: Ending Adoption in Our Time

Here is more from my brilliant articulate adoptee friend Daniel Ibn Zayd, a follow-up to my interview (on August 13).  He posted The New Abolition: Ending Adoption in Our Time on the website DISSIDENT VOICE... Here are a few quotes that resonated with me... He is working on a book!

"The implication here is that the adoptee also traverses the phases of being “colonized”: coddled by the seeming safety of his new-found place, seduced by the imposed mythology of a dominant culture, and abetted by the willfully distanced memory of his generational past. ...a clear definition for what is often referred to within adoptee circles as “the fog”, or “drinking the Kool-Aid”: the acceptance of a fragile notion of security sustained by a false sense of self within an alien and alienating environment....

"As our activism has grown over this near decade, I have been greatly inspired by adoptees in South Korea, for just one example, who have helped shut down adoption in that country as of this year. Other source countries are following suit, and I am further heartened to see an expansion of this activism, here citing just a few examples: mothers in Guatemala, demanding the repatriation of their kidnapped children; in Argentina, demonstrating for an accounting of the infants born to the imprisoned and then disappeared; in Spain, investigating the stolen children of the Franco era and beyond; in Russia, criticizing the despicable treatment of their children exported abroad; in indigenous American Nations, parents reclaiming their stolen progeny. This list grows longer every day.

"I invoke this term (abolition) fully aware of its weight as concerns the movement to abolish slavery, and to clarify this usage, I define adoption as follows:

Adoption is, in and of itself, a violence based in inequality. It is candy-coated, marketed, and packaged to seemingly concern families and children, but it is an economically and politically incentivized crime. It stems culturally and historically from the “peculiar institution” of Anglo-Saxon indentured servitude and not family creation. It is not universal and is not considered valid by most communal cultures. It is a treating of symptoms and not of disease. It is a negation of families and an annihilation of communities not imbued with any notion of humanity due to the adoptive culture’s inscribed bias concerning race, class, and human relevancy...

 "...And thus American Indian reservations, secret bases of extradition, Japanese internment camps, urban and rural ghettoes, the corporate-industrial prison complex, vigilante terrorism directed against immigrants, the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. Shamefully added to this list are the children sent to adoption rehabilitation camps in Montana, Russian boys returned alone on airplanes, disrupted adoptions, deported adoptees, the stockpiling of children by adoptive collectors and hoarders, RAD therapies, rebirthings and other pseudo-treatments bordering on outright torture, over-medication of our “mental illnesses”, as well as our “treatment” and study by an army of therapists, social workers, academics, assorted quacks and other misery-industry profiteers. The very existence of this cavalcade of systemic jerry-builders is a greater condemnation of the dysfunctional societal structures undergirding the industry of adoption than anything possibly expressed by the critics thereof. This, in and of itself, should give us great pause...."

http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/08/the-new-abolition-ending-adoption-in-our-time/

Daniel Ibn Zayd currently lives in Beirut.  This article is distilled from a book in progress comparing the political and economic aspects of adoption. He can be reached by email at:daniel.ibnzayd@inquisitor.com. Read other articles by Daniel, or visit Daniel's website.