Paradise Preoccupied

So, big changes in the online adoption world, as you can see from the press release here.

Because I am one of the eight bloggers founding the site that is Adoption Under One Roof … ouradopt.com … I will be moving most of my adoption-related writing over there and leaving this blog for personal stuff, general opinions, politics, information on Seychelles and whatever else I feel like writing about that has less to do with adoption and more to do with other aspects of life I find interesting.

I encourage everyone to visit what we know as Our House, to come in for a look around, then wander all over and get to know the place and the people.

We have put a great deal of thought and work into Adoption Under One Roof, determined to make the site easy to navigate in a way that allows everyone interested in adoption, from whatever angle, opportunities to learn and to teach, to share and to listen, and even to fight when that seems a possibility for resolving conflict.

Years of softly-softly, please-excuse-me-for-having-opinions-but … communication in a population segmented into tidy groups of the like-minded stifled not only disparity, but also originality of thought as a byproduct, have produced only limited success, if that, in bringing about needed change in the adoption world. With each POV pulling against the other, often with almost irreparable results, forward progress has been near impossible, and as the community became more fractured it also grew more fractious, therefore less able to coordinate any efforts toward reform.

As the environment came to view the standard of separation as a given, bad habits developed and discussion between those with differing, although very often valid, views became progressively more rare and people stopped listening to entire populations simply out of reflex. Rules of engagement within neighborhoods of the adoption community grew less flexible and exclusion became more and more the common method of dealing with dissent.

At the same time, within cozy climates of agreement-at-all-cost the inclination was to support without question or debate ideas that couldn’t possibly hold water, being so full of holes and without enough real fabric to stick together, and this allowed much of the irrelevant and invalid to take on unwarranted gravitas and leak into discussions without ever having been subjected to the light of rational critique.

Allegiance became obligatory based on whatever version of shared point of view dominated a segmented population, and honest evaluation and demands for accountability took a back seat to comradeship-at-any-cost.

Although everyone has heard of adoption, only a small percentage have any real information, and most of those who think they understand adoption are actually way, way off the mark by just about everyone’s perception, so most of those finding themselves making an approach to the adoption world come with the great handicap of no information or a load of misinformation.

The key to reforming systems to the point that no child is unnecessarily relinquished, no mother is coerced into placing against her will or better judgement, no family adopts without having demanded the highest ethical practices, no agency over-charges or misrepresents, no government facilitates ease of adoption for reasons of profit or felonious purposes, no child is denied the hope of a loving family when needed and one can be provided, and no children are put or left at the mercy of the horrors of abuse and neglect is education and information; putting everyone as close as possible to the same place on the same page with access to ALL the information.

Whether a starry-eyed couple dreaming pastel dreams of parenting in spite of the odds against or a terrified woman trying to figure out how to make it from one day to the next, having access to all sides of what adoption is, and what it isn’t, will go a long way toward putting power in their hands, the power to make informed decisions based on here and now and tomorrow and fifty years from now.

It’s with this in mind that OURadopt.com began, and why those of us dedicated to the idea put Adoption Under One Roof.