This comment is verbally abusive and highly inappropriate. It is also ironic considering the exact statements the author made in the very article on which you commented. Your IP has been blocked.

Well said, Kassaye. I see so much child-blaming and child-pathologizing happening on this issue that "justifies" and sanitizes child abandonment as well as violating a child's privacy.

But this is also totally a "both/and" thing where we can very much dislike the ways in which adoptions are handled while supporting that there are kids who need new homes. Money doesn't just prevent biological parents from parenting or pre-adoptive parents from adopting. The prominence of money is adoption is a barrier to homes for kids who need them, in various ways. Fundraising is a myopic approach to adoption that ignores the systemic influence privilege and power has on entire communities of people.

You are awesome and right on, as always.

A word for community care here: we were those kids who were relinquished--if anyone understands the reasons why, we do. It's not something we need explained to us :) #shoutyouradoption is about the false idea that infant adoption is a replacement for abortion. Therefore, it makes sense that an article pushing back against this concept would explain how infant adoption is not a replacement for abortion.

Mya, you came to Lost Daughters looking for how our content could relate to and support you, rather than seeing value in how our content supports adoptees and requires a lens which you do not have to understand our perspectives. I encourage you to put down defensiveness and build that empathetic lens through being an observer, rather than trying to twist and mold our perspectives and feelings into your boxes.

You mention the rights of adoptive parents--but whose rights are paramount in adoption? UNICEF says children have a basic human right to a name from birth. I don't think it's unreasonable for an adoptee (who actually had their name changed) to suggest changing a child's name is a big deal and that parents should fully investigate their own motives before imposing identity changes on a child.

And this is indeed an adoptee-centric website. Which means that julie j's article was intended to provide catharsis for her adopted and fostered adult audience. Some adoptees, like me, have had our names changed 3 or more times (and legally changed our names back as adults). We deserve to be able to read our own perspectives without having to defend them. This post was not intended to be critique, advise, or content otherwise for adoptive parents. I would like to ask that we avoid re-centering this conversation on the needs of adoptive parents. Adoptive parents are important, but most adoption content is dominated by and geared towards their needs and perspectives including almost every major adoption magazine and publication. Please lets have adoptees have their space without making it about someone else.

I think julie j already did a great job explaining what changing a child's name means to her, and why she thinks it is wrong. Lost Daughters is an adoptee-centric space, so I'm going to pose a different question. You asked (in summary) "what's wrong with honoring *adoptive parents* by changing a child's name?" I will instead ask you:

"Does it honor the child to have their name changed by someone else?"

Can your answer have the child as the only subject of why the name-change occurs, without mentioning how the change benefits anyone else?

Adoption is supposed to be an institution focused on meeting the needs of kids who need homes, not meeting the needs of adults seeking to parent. Children need to be at the heart of everything in adoption. Adoption is about them.

Karen (the author of this blog) did refer to Jakiela's adoptive parents as her "adoptive parents" (or "adoptive mother" in one instance) when referring directly to them. "The people she grew up with," then, indicates a broader meaning--friends, family, classmates, teachers, neighbors--who witnessed her childhood but were not exclusive to her immediate family.

Shelly, your comment is really hurtful and against our guidelines. The only reason I am approving it is because you're an adoptee and I wish to respond.

I counted no fewer than seven very common stereotypes in your response to Cathy that not only reflect a culture within adoption that seeks to silence and shame adoptees whose experience deviates from the traditional adoption script of the happy, grateful adoptee but are also rooted in a centuries-old historical context of how societies globally and in the U.S. have legally and socially regarded children in need of care and children born to poor or unmarried parents. "Ungrateful," "real parents," "bitter," "your parents were probably terrible," "your bio parents were probably worse," "victim mentality," "you must need therapy," "chosen"... my Adoption Discourse Bingo Card is full and yet none of us have won anything from speaking to each other this way.

We all make meaning of our own stories but that doesn't give us license to do the same for others. My story has meaning too and it's no more superior or inferior to any other. I have 4 real parents who are real people with real feelings whom, without all of their realnes, I could not be real. My adoptive parents are two of my best friends; I am not grateful they did their job and met my human rights as an innocent child. They however are grateful for the opportunity to parents, as I am grateful to be a mother to my own two miracles. My adoptive family is not better than my original family. My original family is not better than my adoptive family. I was not "better off." I have no regrets. I am not a victim. I am intolerant of injustice but I am not bitter. I sit comfortably in a place of paradox and meaning. My responses to adoption, and Cathy's, fall within a normative developmental trajectory for adopted people, as apparently do yours. I do not need therapy.

There is space in adoption for what Cathy has to say, even if it makes someone uncomfortable.

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