It’s only October 13 but the National Adoption Awareness Month Wurlitzer is spewing out propaganda.and swag ops already.
This came across my Twitter feed this morning via disinformant sex educator and grateful adoptee Pam Stenzel .(More about her in upcoming posts).
Blessed by Adoption<>
This campaign is to bring awareness to the blessing that adoption brings to birth parents and adoptive families. November is National Adoption Awareness month, and we would like to raise awareness by offering this design as an option to purchase for families that have been touched by adoption in some way. Life is a gift.
Every November, you see, adoption celebrates itself by reducing the so-called “triad” to a dyad–or if one wants to be really adopta-correct and picky– a monad–valorizing the consumer and its middle men and women.
One has only to glimpse the hundreds of “celebrate adoption” stories each November that show up online, in newspapers, magazines, and in staged courtroom adoption finalization spectacles to know that the sole purpose of adoptees is apparently to be propped out, pimped out, and pawned out to feed the pocketbooks, and politics of the adoption industry its anti-abortion sycophants, and the narcissism of certain numbers of its consumers.
Life is a gift, NAAMsters proclaim, and adoptees are a gift. Nonetheless, NAAM curiously erases real-life adoptees from the public and private adoption narrative, snuggling them safely and quietly inside “the family”–or in the case of Blessed by Adoption hoodies, between two hearts. An odd silent position for the symbol of” life” they purport to cherish.
I cannot imagine my mom or dad ( all four of them) wearing a Blessed by Adoption hoodie even though they were all adopters. When I was adopted, the elephant may have been in the living room,but she wasn’t commercialized, mediaized, and politicized. Adoptees just were. Just like their “legitimate” counterparts.Records in most states ironically were still available to us.
The more celebratory and consumerized adoption becomes the more our rights are denied or at best delayed.
Time to sharpen those #flipthescript pencils.
Adoptees as Props.