People not knowing they were adopted

[eloisesparkle]

Christ on a bike another fu** up.
Some people born between the late 1940's to the late 1960s may be adopted but not know it.
You couldn't make this stuff up.

I still don’t know whether my cousins (born in the sixties) know that they are adopted.

@decorhate, i know what you mean. I have thought about this. If as a relatively wealthy couple, you went to china and knew that a mere one thousand euro could put that baby's mother on her feet and allow her to move to a more urban location and keep baby, i would really struggle with taking the baby home. Because basically what is a tiny amount of money to us could reunite the same baby with its mother.
But i am not judging because i didnt experience longing to be a mother.

skinnies I read an article a couple of years ago about a girl who had been adopted in China by an American family who was trying to trace her birth family. I had always assumed these babies were perhaps born to single mothers who could not look after them. However, the article reported that dozens of couples had come forward hoping the girl would be theirs - they had been forced to abandon their much loved babies who were then taken to orphanages because of the one child policy at the time.
I have relatives who adopted abroad & their kids are aware & not bothered by it. But I do feel for the parents who may have given them up very reluctantly

It was like advertising a dog for sale.

One of the ads asks -

Who will adopt a beautiful 6 weeks old baby boy of very good parentage ?

Very good parentage - despite the fact the mother is probably being vilified for being a 'fallen woman' in the Mother and Baby home.

So so sad.

I also think that there is some double standards in the reporting. I know many people in Ireland who have adopted from abroad in recent years. While they don't hide their children's origins, I often wonder how willingly their birth parents gave them up. It's like history repeating itself in reverse
Huge double standards there. People crying about babies being "sold" to couples in the US and how awful it was, while Irish couples are doing the same thing now and it's all good.

Yes it's all good our end because the parents were vetted so thoroughly as prospective adoptive parents but we don't know the other half of the equation. Those women could be shamed, desperate, unsupported, already mothers, too young......... ALL SOUNDS FAMILIAR

I'm not anti-adoption per se but those who argued on the NO side who thought that Adoption was some great big magic solution, no it aint

There are obviously very few relinquished babies now, thankfully the stigma of being an unmarried mum has for the most part gone. Most adoptions are of children removed from their families by Social Services. That is the case with my DDs. We have a life story book for each of them provided by their social worker, which we share with them. There are also 2 later life letters, one for the child to read when at primary school age, and the other one for when a teenager, with far more information.

It's a tough thing for adoptive parents to do, to bring it up, I suspect most adoptive parents in the past just kept putting it off, not because they were selfish (although some were, no doubt). It's easier for us as our 2 DDs are full birth sisters.

My DNephew OTOH is a relinquished baby, probably for the simple reason that his birth mum didn't realise that she was pregnant before she was past the legal limit for her to be able to terminate the pregnancy. He was her fourth child and one of her children has SN. So she had the baby secretly and relinquished him for adoption and never told anyone in her family about it. So her DC don't even know that they have a younger sibling. She wouldn't even say who the father is.

This will be a heartbreaking thing for my DSis and DBIL to explain to my DN. They have a life story book for him, but obviously it doesn't include those distressing details.

There is a big scandal in Spain re stolen babies.
Up to 300,000 babies over 40 years.
A famous gynaecologist is implicated.
Appalling.

I'm involved with a Christian charity that helps Central Asian women. I visited a CA country not long after my DH and I had been approved to adopt while we were waiting to be matched with a child. We visited a couple
of projects for mothers and babies, and seeing the children there really made my heart ache, and I would have loved to be able to adopt one of these children.

But then the lady running the project spoke about the corruption that's rife in the orphanages, how they would spirit babies in their care away from their families and change their identities. I could see how if we adopted a baby from one of the orphanages, there would be no way of knowing that they hadn't b

I accidentally pressed post there. I was trying to say that there was no way of knowing that your adopted baby hadn't been stolen away from their birth parents. It really was heartbreaking.