I wrote about Jessica DelBalzo … sorry, but that name makes me chuckle every time I write it … today on the Adoption News Blog, but I’m still so amused/annoyed that I feel the need to keep snickering at this moronic twit, so I’m doing a bit more of it here.
I’d written about her before, suggesting she was some hoax perpetuated on the Web by a sick mind that finds the idea of a website that sells … get this … anti-adoption-wear and products to go with — t-shirts, mouse pads, things like that … very funny.
Of course, I knew then that she was real enough, although I harbored strong doubt about how balanced she might be, and had lots of response from people who’d written her off years before as a kook.
Now, however, in an apparent effort to have yet something else to sell, she’s pushing a book through self-agrandizing press releases that try to sound as though someone other than the DelBalzo herself has written them, claims of acclaim and some strange personal hyping I really don’t see as being all that helpful.
Apparently at ease with flogging anything that will make her a buck, her Live Journal profile not only promotes her strangely vociferous anti-adoption stance, it also encourage folks to check out the site where she hawks adult sex toys.
Here’s her list of helpful hints she’s composed for consumption:
• Learning to Give an Erotic Massage
• How to Choose and Use Personal Lubricant
• Planning the Ultimate Bachelor Party
• Using Sex Toys to Get Out of a Sexual Rut
• The Five Best Sex Toys for Couples
• De-Stigmatizing Male Sex Toys
• Extreme Makeover — Bedroom Edition
• Orgasms with Sex Toys
• Fun with Condoms
• Sex Toys for Beginners
• Study Up for Spectacular Sex!
• Latex is for Lovers: Taking Fetish Fashion to the Extreme
• Bondage and Discipline: Turning Your Fantasy Into Reality
• Sexy Fashion Advice for Men
• Edibles in Action: Amazing Aphrodisiacs and Savory Sex Toys
• Enter from the Rear: Anal Sex Tips for Beginners
• How to Plan a Romantic Evening
• Leather Wear for Women: A Luxurious Indulgence
• Guys and Dolls: Fall For An Amazing Love Doll Tonight!
• Dildos for Everyone: Finding Your Perfect Match
• Love Potions that Work Like Magic
• Sexier Shoes, Sexier You!
• Caring for your Leather wear Restraints and Costumes
• Introduction to Enjoying Anal Sex With Toys
• Buying Adult Vibrators Information and Guide
• S&M Toys, Implements and Basic Usage
• Using a Cock Ring, Information on Cock Rings
• How to put on a Condom
• How to Wear and Care for your Latex Clothing
• Exploring Prostate Play with Sex Toys
• Masturbation Toys for Men
• How Do Penis Pumps and Enlargers Really Work?
• Red Hot Holiday Adult Sex Toy Gifts for Him
• Red Hot Holiday Sex Toy Gifts for Her
• Holiday Adult Sex Novelty Items
• Guide for Using Massage Oils & Lubricants.
• All you need to Know about Dildos
Rabidly anti-adoption AND knows all you need to know about dildos.
Gee … don’t we all want her at the table?
A collection of my short stories:
I'm in this one, too ...
And I'm in here, as well ...
Paradise Preoccupied 
I think I know who you are talking about, she seems like a nice girl.
If someone is antiadoption and into sex education that really isn’t a bad thing is it?
I also want to add that I admire the adoptive and potential adoptive mothers who are open minded to the antiadoption viewpoint. I have a lot of respect for the mothers who have adopted and express empathy to the mothers from whom they got the children.
I would be overjoyed if you chose kindness.
Good one, reunionwritings! Thanks for the morning giggle.
But seriously, folks, empathy for birth mothers comes naturally to me and is always my start point. This woman is not a birth mother. She has no relationship with adoption at all, other than figuring she can make a buck out of ranting against.
I simply can’t bring myself to pussyfoot around someone so disrespectful, no matter her irrelevance. In a way, I suppose, I’m doing her a favor. After all, it’s obviously attention she’s after, and I’ve given her some. Let’s call that choosing kindness, shall we?
Is it really necessary to mock Kim when she was making a sincere effort to be civil and nice?
Nicole,
I wasn’t mocking anyone, and have no idea where your brain is going on this. I also can’t figure out why you seem so determined to cast me as an evil witch. Is this a personal thing with you? Some perceived clash?
If you want to take up for DelBalzo, be my guest, but if this is an attempt to pin something on me as a diversion, you’ll have to do better.
S.H.B.
Your tone did come across as rather mocking in a late night journalist’s bar kind of way and that’s ok with me.
Thank you Nicole for being there, I think that’s really cool 🙂
Your tone is also very competitive and a little tense, I don’t mean this in a nasty way, I just want to say that you don’t seem very happy or relaxed.
I have had those moments myself too, and no doubt will again.
I’m not at all happy or relaxed about adoption-bashing, actually. In fact I’m sick and tired of the ludicrous slinging of nonsense that is passed off as ‘information’ by twits like DelBalzo and feel obligated to point out the idiocy as it comes up since self-publishing and flagrant self-promotion do not happen in a vacuum.
So, tense I get, but competitive? What’s that about?
I do thank you, Kim, for your meditative vibe. I’m chilling out just reading your comments.
By the way, I love the Pug face. They don’t get much cuter than that.
Puggy is cute, thank you.
Well you do come across as competitive in your energy, maybe high achiever and perfectionist, this is all intuitive and I could be wrong. It was the “you’ll have to do better’ line that made me wonder.
I guess I have a thing for the underdog, being a mother on the wrong side of the adoption tracks. Jessie is targeted by adoptive mothers whom I have known to be abusive. Not saying you are abusive by the way.
Jessie is also young, my daughter’s age so it brings out feeling of protectiveness in me. Basically Jessie is into family preservation I can’t fault that.
As for the sex things well I live in Amsterdam so it’s kind of normal to see those kind of things and I don’t think it’s so silly after all who doesn’t need some kind of sex education?
You have an air of sarcasm about you too which I recognize, I recognize your intelligence and humour but I wonder if under that is something else?
If you were less sarcastic and more sincere I would like you more, not that I *don’t* like you but it makes me not trust you and makes me wonder why I even bother coming back and writing this.
Hmmm. I see DelBalzo more as a mad dog than an underdog, so she doesn’t bring out the warm fuzzies in me, and as a former foster mom who has seen great damage from ‘family preservation’ I can and do fault the warping the concept often gets.
I assure you, Kim, that my sarcasm is sincere, and under my intelligence and humor is 56 years of life and all that entails.
I’m not bothered about being liked, and because of that I’m completely trustworthy.
As for coming back to my blog, bothering to do so seems to indicate a dialog instead of just another drive-by slapping. That is appreciated.
Ok that makes more sense, you have seen the horors of family through foster care experience. I understand a little better where you are coming from.
What I have seen, Kim, is the big picture. I have friends that relinquished in 1969 when I chose to parent. I have friends and family who came to the mix from adoption … the oldest of which is 86. I am a mother to children homemade and adopted. I have spent a whole lotta time in orphanages that offer not a hope in hell in countries where a huge percentage of children die before their fifth birthday. I have loved a boy who suffered greatly before he came into my heart, and since he left my home.
I fully comprehend that the world is neither kind nor fair, and I have zero tolerance for those simple minded enough to throw down dictates that have nothing to do with improving the lives of real children living on this planet.
I resent the hell out of implications that adoption is a bad thing and attempts to tar it with some skanky brush reeking of personal agendas.
If sometimes I come across as a bit brusque or edgy, it might be because that is where I’m coming from.
Sandra…you rock. this comment dialogue was really nice to read and see get worked out. i’m glad Kim, you did come back and speak your piece.
yay for dialogue!!!! 🙂
I don’t think Jessie has a personal agenda, I believe she is genuine in her feeling of wanting to protect vulenrable mothers from the agressive and predatory adoption industry in America.
To be honest I haven’t studied her too closely. I know she has suggested alternatives to adoption like legalized guardianship.
It does annoy me that a woman has a certificate that says she gave birth to my daughter. Things like that do need to be changed.
I don’t say I agree or disagree with you Sandra. I just don’t think Jessie needs to be seen as a villain. She’s just a young woman who is passionate about a subject that you are passionate about too. She’s very extreme in her views that adoption ought to be abolished.
In some cases adoption is a good thing and is good for a child. I still see that the way it is conducted in America is very cruel to the natural mothers and they have very little legal power and certainly no real voice.
I understand from what you write that you feel we all had a choice to parent or not to parent. I didn’t feel like that. I truly felt that my daughter needed to be elsewhere to get a better chance, to have what I had never had, a wonderful childhood. I am glad that she had opportunities from that and am even gladder to have her back in my life.
And I am not here to debate whether adoption is a good thing I mean every case is different.
I don’t share your anger. I have seen kindness too, I have experienced the cruel side of adoption and I now experience the beauty of reunion.
I choose kindness for now. I just adopted a single mum in the Ukraine, it makes me feel ten feet tall to do that.
It’s ok that you are brimming with a little bit of fury, you have a sharp tongue that is true but there is something attractive in your energy too.
It’s good if we can learn something from each other and be open to each other’s points of view.
I don’t think Jessy is skanky, she’s just very passionate and I don’t think she is doing this for any other reason than she believes in the cause.
Thank God for those gun ho antiadoption people, they are the ones that help to set up programs for single mothers, they fight for reform, they are in your face and extreme and very hard to ignore. They are making changes for the better. Adoption won’t ever be abolished but some adoption reform may come out of this and I can only say yes please to that.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree on DelBalzo. I’ll continue to have a problem understanding why, if she doesn’t have a personal agenda, she’s flogging one product or another at every turn. Anti-adoption entrepreneurship may be a clever twist on an old idea, but it’s still a personal agenda.
Have to take issure with the “Thank God for those gun ho antiadoption people” bit, though. I, and a whole lot of other adoptive parents, fund programs for single mothers and fight very hard for reform. This is NOT the exclusive territory of anti-adoption nuts. There are hundreds of organizations set up by adoptive parents that are doing amazing work … real work, making real changes in the real world. I would venture a guess that there are actually more of these than those by people with the anti-adoption agenda.
Is there an anti-adoption version of the Adoption Institute or Ethica, just to name two?
What I see out of that group is a whole lot of holler … self-published books and strident websites, insults, name-calling, an almost gleeful casting of aspersions … but very little action that helps anyone but themselves with anything but perpetuation of a very narrow, and usually self-focused, agenda.
If I’m wrong, please correct me and point me in a direction that would lead to something positive. Please.
By the way, I didn’t say DelBalzo was skanky. I said I have no tolerance for tarring with a skanky brush.
Well, every little bit helps, the gun ho antiadoptionists bring attention to the fact that the adoption industry is in desperate need of reform.
Some of my best friends are adoptive mothers, I know that there are good souls who have adopted, some of them are on my links list. I just got a book called “The Tao of Pug” from Dawn of http://thiswomanswork.com today.
Some of the most generous women in my big sister project are adoptive mothers, I don’t dispute that. I am not here to say adoptive mothers are bad.
I see groups of people who adopt who use derogatory language and explain how God chose them to be parents and not us, people who treat adoption like it’s shopping. There are awful people in all the camps, not just the antiadoption people. In the antiadoption crowd there are some furiously angry ones, I still defend them even though they have described me as friending the enemy.
What is positive about the antiadoption movement? Is that your question?
The websites are wonderful, they help me not feel isolated, they make me feel less alone in how it felt to be an exiled mother waiting out my long closed adoption sentence. They expose the ridiculous “positive” adoption language that wants to change the word reunion to “contact” and other such absurdities.
The name calling? I don’t know about that but I think birth mother is name calling.
Self published books? Well what is wrong with that? Some of them are excellent, some of them are probably not great reading. There are some purely EVIL self published books about adoption from pro adoption people too.
The holler you mention is making noise, shining the light, making people aware that there is corruption and bullying, stealing and manipulation going on in adoption. Not everywhere, but enough that it needs to be exposed.
I’m not saying you are like that, but it does go on. I know because I experienced it first hand as a young pregnant teenager. I çhoose not to hold on to that anger, but I want people to know it’s going on . I want laws to be changed, I want adoption to be ethical.
I don’t know if you’re wrong, maybe we are both right, or both wrong. I don’t think there is *one* right or one wrong.
I just don’t think scapegoating the antiadoption people is a good idea. So Jessie isn’t a direct member of the adoption community, it doesn’t bother me that she wants to speak out against adoption.
We all have an agenda. I don’t want another woman to go through what I went through, that’s my agenda.
Everyone does what they can the way they can with the intent to make things more fair and better, I see that in Jessie too, that’s my point. You don’t have to like her, but you don’t have to squash her like a bug either!
Ok so you didn’t say she was skanky. A great word is skanky is it not.
I am seeing that we aren’t in disagreement over much, Kim, just approaching from different directions.
To clear up one issue you find offensive, I use the term birth mother … two words … at the express request of Jan Baker — CUB officer, birth mother, writer. As someone who represents the community through her writing and participating, I feel that complying with her adjuration is a respectful way to deal with what is always a touchy issue.
Personally, I’m not all that hot on “adoptive mother” as a lable for me, as I find it marginalizing and demeaning … too legaleze without enough heart to begin to describe my role.
I understand that you aren’t saying that adoptive parents are bad, but in the comment I responded to you did allude to reform as if it was completely within the mandate of anti-adoption people, which it most certainly is not. In fact, I still maintain that adoptive parents are the more active group in reform by far when it comes to getting real work done.
I’m not “scapegoating the anti-adoption people”. I’m attempting to hold them accountable when they scapegoat adoption and to illuminate the personal agendas in their attacks. That’s not only fair, it’s my job as a writer and a mother.
There are nasty people in the world doing and saying nasty things, and some of those target birth parents. Others target adoptive parents. You react to some, I react to others. The God’s destiny / bad girl types are every bit as intentionally cruel as the ones calling adoptive parents ‘abductors’. Members of both camps should be called on the carpet every time the pull this crap.
You agenda is not wanting another woman to go through what you went through. Of course, and a valiant cause.
Mine is not wanting another child to die in an orphanage or be sold into sex slavery or neglected and abused to death by drug-addicted parents who couldn’t care less, when a loving family longed to offer them a home. An agenda that would put an end to that option strikes me as evil. Also, if I may be allowed to point this out myself, a valiant cause.
Now, I’m not saying that you aren’t bothered by the fate of the children I described. At the same time, it should never be assumed that I’m not bothered by coercive and underhanded treatment of pregnant women. These are not mutually exclusive POVs, simple intense individual focusing on different sections of the same picture.
There’s no problem with this until it comes to people stridently insisting that the area of their focus is the only part of the picture that matters and taking this so far as to demand that everything else be either ignored or removed as an aid to diminishing the scene to fit into their aperture. It’s this behavior that earns my wrath.
Well we are definetly on the same page about a lot of things. We want children to have good solid beginnings and to be loved and not abused. We want adoption not to be an abusive or predatory machine.
It is my belief and I think on this we also agree that reform has to be with ALL OF US TOGETHER pushing for change. I always said we need all the sides of adoption, both types of parents and adopted adults to speak out. I never meant that only the antiadoption people ought to be working for change, I believe that their voices are valid and are helpful to drawing attention to the cause. To ridicule them is to ridicule adoption loss and that’s what I don’t support. I don’t ever want to be trivializing the grief that adoption causes to families. I think it’s too easy to point to that and belittle it, and I don’t find it attractive when other people do that.
It’s a highly emotional subject adoption. I am still haunted by what happened, I won’t deny that but I am standing strong now, standing in the light. I am not crippled by the grief, I have a good life, my career is taking off and things just get better and better.
Let’s just see if we can focus on what we have in common and see if we can contribute something together towards our common goals? I’d really like that.
If you must call me a birth mother I don’t have the power to stop you, I’d rather you didn’t just for the record. I am a mother in reunion. If you don’t want me to call you an adoptive mother then I won’t, I respect your wishes there.
It’s been nice dialoguing with such a sharp mind!
hope to talk over other things with you too.
oh and I forgot to say that being antiadoption doesn’t mean that people want children to languish in orphanages or to be abused and treated badly. You will find they offer alternatives like family support and financial investment into family preservation.
Sandra…
Sorry it took me a while to come back.
I was not taking up for DeBalzo. Some of the anti-adoption rhetoric drives me crazy, too.
I was just VERY frustrated that you seemed to be mocking Kim, when she tried so hard to be nice. If you weren’t mocking so be it, but that is how it came across over here.
It frustrates me that you assume things about me. It frustrates me that you encouraged Elisa in her writings when she was so clearly insulting to people who are NOT anti-adoption, just hurting people. It frustrates me that you keep implying that I have an “all-or-nothing” viewpoint.
I too have spent time in orphanages… in Mexico. I too have worked with foster kids. I too have seen the effects of neglect and abuse. I too have witnessed the horrors of RAD and PTSD in a child and physical abuse and sexual abuse.
There are PLENTY of mothers who should indeed give up their kids.
But there are also those of us who DID give up their kids unnecessarily. Good moms who are hurting over that mistake; honest adoptees who blog about their own struggles; and you just add insult to injury when you cheer on writers like Elisa, who was offending us at every turn.
You say you are pro-reform and I believe you, but then my only request is please do not cheer on people who hurt us.
Thank you.
Excellent!! Great job as usual at communicating, Sandra, and kudos to you, too, Kim, for your part in an excellent dialogue. If we can just spread this to the rest of the community, we should have adoption reform cornered in no time 🙂
As a writer/performer who has the same name as Ms. Del Balzo, many friends and contacts have expressed confusion after googling me and finding lots of her information and propaganda online as well. It’s all mixed in together, and I’ve seriously considered taking a pen name or stage name so as to avoid this mix-up. Reading the reviews of her book was definitely a push in that direction. No way do I want to be accidentally associated with so much negative press.
Ms. Del Balzo is a distant cousin who recently found me through an online writers’ community we both belong to. While I don’t agree with her viewpoints (half of my cousins on my mother’s side of the family are adopted and well-cared-for) and honestly am not sure quite what her opinions and beliefs stem from, I feel like I should say something…This stuff blows my mind and amuses/annoys me as much as it does you and others. I completely agree with you on many counts, and I totally don’t get what she’s doing, but the fact that we’re related makes me feel compelled to try to understand. Even if she does come off as a whack-job, at least she’s passionately pursuing something she believes in?
I don’t know. This is always an awkward thing for me to explain to others, that “I’m not that crazy anti-adoption lady.” I mean, yeah, she’s a real person with feelings, but wow. To each their own, I guess. I thought you articulated your thoughts very well, but I really wish you wouldn’t make fun of our last name. We didn’t choose it, you know, as I’m sure you didn’t choose yours.
Sorry about the last name crack. Cheap shot, and not necessary in her case, as she does such a good job of her own foot shooting.
As for “passionately pursuing some she believes in”, the same could be said about suicide bombers, so passions are better tempered with sense and compassion.
The DeBalzo book is garbage. She also supposedly has no background for discussing adoption, since she was never an adoptee, birthmother or an adoptive parent.
She lumps all infertile women into one category: out to steal another woman’s baby. Never mind the fact that many infertile women might not even want kids, or if they do, they may not choose adoption anyway. The “barren woman” stigma is being perpetuated by DeBalzo. She has also openly boasted about her ability to conceive, as if having functioning ovaries somehow makes her superior to another woman.
I never chose to adopt, but I am extremely offended at the comments made about “infertiles” – comments made by adoptees and birth mothers who feel guilt over giving their baby away. If a woman wants to keep her baby, she should do that.
DeBalzo can take some of her sex toys and go boink herself. Seems that she needs something to occupy her time.
Wow, my thanks to Charon for commenting on this old thread. I’m sure I’d never have read it otherwise.
Excellent dialogue on anti adoption hollering and reform, in fact I think the best I’ve ever read.
High praise … I’ll take it!