Maryreunited

I just had this confirmed today, after months of speculation and rumors it is official. Seymour Kurtz's agency Easter House based in Illinois is closed.

For months we had heard this but could find no information to prove that EH was indeed defunct. We did not know where records were, or how any of us (Mothers of adult adoptees) would ever get the info that was in our files, that we are entitled to. ie: Non-id for adoptees and copies of relinquishment paper work for mothers. (that by LAW- we should have gotten copies of when we signed!)

Currently the EH records are with Illinois DCFS, they do not have any protocol or procedures for releasing any info to anyone, be they adult adoptee, mothers, or adoptive parents. Nor do they know who will ultimately responsible for our records. The more people who write and call the better. Below you will find information for a contact person, please I urge all EH adult adoptees and nmothers to call and request your records. They are putting all information into a database. Also I urge everyone to write via snail mail as well to document the request. Don't just call, put it in writing. I will include a sample letter as an example for your use.

The contact person is Leticia

here is the snail mail addy:

Confidential Intermediary Service of Illinois
3158 South River Road
Suite 120
Des Plaines, Illinois 60018
ATTN: Leticia

email-

email: Ci-illinois@ macadopt. org


Here is telephone contact info:

The records are with DCFS,the number to call is 1-847-298-9096 ext 29 . This is Leticias direct extension.

The name of the lady I spoke with is Leticia.She did verify that they are closed.the more people who call the better she said,but it may take awhile to figure out who is going to be responsible for all the records."

Below is a sample letter you can use as a template in writing to Midwest.

Dear Leticia (Lastname):

Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. As discussed, I
am a child born in IL in 1984 and adopted via Easter House shortly
thereafter. I am attempting to locate my birth family and obtain
any information availalbe to me. I have contacted Easter House for
many months and they have refused to comply with the law (cite
statute). I would greatly appreciate your informing me of what
information you have, what you can do to help me, etc. etc. I am
aware they have provided information to other adoptees and even
mothers. I want the same information provided to me.

Please be advised that you are free to use my name and details of my
request. You can contact me via ...

Finally, if you are unware of the activities of Easter House and the
Kurtz network of agencies, I urge you to visit this site.

www.babybrokerwatch .com.

Also, please feel free to refer those separated by Kurtz to this
very supportive group and site.

www.ehbabes. com

Thank you.

Your Name
Contact Details.

I am not sure how long it is going to take for Midwest and DCFS to figure out what to do with the records, it may take some time. However, at least we finally know where our records are, and they are not lost in some far off "archive limbo" or lost in a fire or flood.

I am very hopeful that I will finally get what I am entitled to.

I don't often talk about my political leanings, tonight I make an exception. I still have dreams too, and tonight I am inspired.


I am moved tonight by our country. As I watched Jesse Jackson tears running down his cheeks on television tonight, I was reminded of where he came from and who he worked with. And, I was reminded why Barack Obama becoming President Elect is a great and wonderful thing.

While I do not support his political views, and did not vote for him. His win, is a win for our country. It reminds me of how truly awful racism was, I grew up during the 60's and 70's when racism and the fight against it began to truly take form. I lived in Illinois then, and lived with parents who never thought anyone was less than anyone else due to the color of their skin. I was fortunate, I hope and believe I have instilled the same values in my own children. That the color we bleed is the same as everyone else's, that we love is what matters the most. In the end, I hope and pray Barack Obama will keep in mind the things that make this country the best place on earth to be.

That he will keep the dream alive, and remember all those who sacrificed to make that dream come true. That he will bear in mind that those sacrifices are what made his Presidency possible. That he will remember that those who make this country great are those of us who work, and sweat, and dream of a better future for ourselves, and our children.

Senator McCain is truly a humble man, who in defeat is graceful, and grateful to the country that made it possible for a man like Barack Obama to win the election. I have great hope that this election is the start of something better for all of us.

You know what really chaps my ass? The people in this world who think they have a lock on how to "heal" from the pain adoption causes mothers and adoptees.

Healing and the ways in which we heal, are as varied and different as our looks, and as similar, and terrible as our stories.

That being said, there are some out there, who think they are the be all, and end all in how to heal. They think, that they are the best at telling others what it takes to heal, what it takes to have a good relationship, and a good reunion. I am here to tell you, that no one person, no one therapist, has the right method for ever single person out there. Some may well do wonders with IC work, others may find that just talking works for them. As I said, many different people, many different methods.

Not every woman who has been through the adoption machine needs to constantly say, I am angry, I am sad, I am hurt, because (fill in the blank here)... Once you finally come out of the fog and realize what was done to you, once you can admit that you were damaged and you still hurt, you can begin the business of dealing with it.

I don't think the pain will ever go away completely, it is there, and it always will be. Not the way it was four years ago, and certainly not the way it was twenty four years ago. It is one of the subtexts of my life, part of who I am, but not all that I am. It does not define who I am, or how I live my life. Maybe, once upon a time, it did define me, not now. It is my past, not my present. I have, finally come to a place where I don't have to keep saying how hurt and angry I am. Doing that and re-living the anger and horror I felt when I lost my daughter, was not healthy for me. It is not healthy for me, to keep ripping the scab off the wound and letting it bleed, doing that was keeping me in a place of pain and anger, a place of self loathing, that there seemed to be no way out of. Until, I decided that it was ok to let go of the anger and pain, and yes, the self loathing. If I hadn't learned to let it all go, then I could not have continued to heal. I would not be in the place I am in now, which in all honesty is a much healthier place than where I was a year ago.

A year ago, I was deeply depressed, totally un-motivated, and not anywhere near a place of peace. So, I went on anti-depressants, and when my mom got sick, I went to stay with her, to help her. But, in doing so, I also helped myself. I think I finally understood what had been going on with me when mom said to me. "Mary, it is enough, you have punished yourself enough. It's time for you to let it go, and stop punishing yourself." Funny how our mothers seem to know eactly what we need to hear isn't it? I love my mom, she gets me, she understands me, sometimes better than I understand myself. (Which is part of the reason, I went, other than the stated reason of helping her recover from her stroke. I went for me, not just for her.)

Which brings me back to the how to do it crowd. Who all stated I had no business going to my moms for so long. Who stated that I had no business leaving my therapy, when I so obviously needed more help than I was getting(really? when you don't live with me you can decide I need more help?). Who stated I was being a bad mom, for leaving my kids for so long. And, they apparently also thought they knew what I should be doing to further my healing! I would like to know, who decided the how to do it crowd can decide and dictate what any person needs to do to heal? It makes me flamingly angry to know, that others think they know so much more about me and my personal journey than I do, or my therapist does. Talk about having boundary issues..

I guess the real point of this post is this, no-one heals in exactly the same way, no other person can tell you what you need to do, to heal yourself. Not all of us will learn the lessons I have learned. Not all of us will heal, just as not all of us will find our way out of the fog. We are all different, we have similar experiences, but we do not all have similar journey's. Some of us will never know the joy and heartache of reunion, some of us will not know the simple peace of knowing where the other part of us is. You can make peace with that, you can learn to let the anger go, and live a full life in spite of it. You can learn not to perpetuate your pain, by constantly ripping the scab off the wound. Because there comnes a point, when all you are doing is making it bleed, instead of draining the poison in the wound. Anger can be your friend, it can make you feel again, pain can also be your friend, it lets you know there is something to heal, or that something is healing. But, there comes a point, where in order to heal you have to let it go. And no one in the how to do it crowd can know when you as a person reach that point. No one has a lock on how to heal, nor does anyone hold the absolute key to healing. We all learn that sooner or later, I hope someday the how to do it crowd, learns that lesson too..

I need to get in touch wiht Paragraphein and can not find her contact information! Can one of you please let her know or direct her here for me?

second thing, I disgusted with all the choices for president this election year... therefore I will be voting for anyone but the candidates of the parties...

You are probably wondering what this has to do with adoption? The following are some long (very long) excerpts from the above named book. Once those are typed in, I will try to explain my thought processes and how these words you will (I hope) read brought my mind back to adoption..


"A is A.... and Who is John Galt?" two very famous quotes from Atlas Shrugged keep them in mind...


"Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders' attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man."

"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking—that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.

"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

"Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence—that man is an indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions—that, like a judge impervious to public opinion, he may not sacrifice his convictions to the wishes of others, be it the whole of mankind shouting pleas or threats against him—that courage and confidence are practical necessities, that courage is the practical form of being true to existence, of being true to one's own consciousness.

"Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others."

"Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a totter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence."

"The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man's mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man's standard of value say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure 0f God, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man's standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man's right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren."

"Selfishness—say both—is man's evil. Man's good—say both—is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man's good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice—cry both—is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man's reach."

"Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you're drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself—use it now. The word that has destroyed you is 'sacrifice.' Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You're still alive. You have a chance."

"'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't."

"If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and gave it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor's child and let your own die, it is."

"If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself that is the virtue of sacrifice in full."

"If you renounce all personal desire and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice."


"A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward—if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection."

"You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man—and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death."

"Sacrifice could be proper only for those who have nothing to sacrifice—no values, no standards, no judgment—those whose desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong, of the good to the evil."

"The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral—a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it can't impart to men any personal stake in virtues or value, and that their souls are sewers of depravity, which they must be taught to sacrifice. By his own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good and can only subject them to constant punishment."

"Are you thinking, in some foggy stupor, that it's only material values that your morality requires you to sacrifice? And what do you think are material values? Matter has no value except as a means for the satisfaction of human desires. Matter is only a tool of human values. To what service are you asked to give the material tools your virtue has produced? To the service of that which you regard as evil: to a principle you do not share, to a person you do not respect, to the achievement of a purpose opposed to your own—else your gift is not a sacrifice."

"Your morality tells you to renounce the material world and to divorce your values from matter. A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite—yet that is the man who obeys your morality and divorces his values from matter. The man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another—the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another—the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another—the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash—these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality."

"Do you say it is the spirit that such men have renounced? Yes, of course. You cannot have one without the other. You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness. Renounce your consciousness and you become a brute. Renounce your body and you become a fake. Renounce the material world and you surrender it to evil."

"And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil—surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow."

"It is your mind that they want you to surrender—all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: 'It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others'—end up by saying: 'It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others."

"This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth—in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number."

"If you search your code for guidance, for an answer to the question: 'What is the good?'—the only answer you will find is 'The good of others.' The good is whatever others wish, whatever you feel they feel they wish, or whatever you feel they ought to feel. 'The good of others' is a magic formula that transforms anything into gold, a formula to be recited as a guarantee of moral glory and as a fumigator for any action, even the slaughter of a continent. Your standard of virtue is not an object, not an act, not a principle, but an intention. You need no proof, no reasons, no success, you need not achieve in fact the good of others—all you need to know is that your motive was the good of others, not your own. Your only definition of the good is a negation: the good is the 'non-good for me."

"You who have no standard of self-esteem, accept the guilt and dare not ask the questions. But you know the unadmitted answer, refusing to acknowledge what you see, what hidden premise moves your world. You know it, not in honest statement, but as a dark uneasiness within you, while you flounder between guilty cheating and grudgingly practicing a principle too vicious to name."

"I, who do not accept the unearned, neither in values nor in guilt, am here to ask the questions you evaded. Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?"

"The answer you evade, the monstrous answer is: No, the takers are not evil, provided they did not earn the value you gave them. It is not immoral for them to accept it, provided they are unable to produce it, unable to deserve it, unable to give you any value in return. It is not immoral for them to enjoy it, provided they do not obtain it by right."


"Such is the secret core of your creed, the other half of your double standard: it is immoral to live by your own effort, but moral to live by the effort of others—it is immoral to consume your own product, but moral to consume the products of others—it is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself—it is evil to profit by achievement, but good to profit by sacrifice—it is evil to create your own happiness, but good to enjoy it at the price of the blood of others."

"Your code divides mankind into two castes and commands them to live by opposite rules: those who may desire anything and those who may desire nothing, the chosen and the demand, the riders and the carriers, the eaters and the eaten. What standard determines your caste? What passkey admits you to the moral elite? The passkey is lack of value."

"Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim upon those who don't lack it. It is your need that gives you a claim to rewards. If you are able to satisfy your need, your ability annuls your right to satisfy it. But a need you are unable to satisfy gives you first right to the lives of mankind."

"If you succeed, any man who fails is your master; if you fail, any man who succeeds is your serf. Whether your failure is just or not, whether your wishes are rational or not, whether your misfortune is undeserved or the result of your vices, it is misfortune that gives you a right to rewards. It is pain, regardless of its nature or cause, pain as a primary absolute, that gives you a mortgage on all of existence."

"A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness—non-existence—as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defeat: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw—the zero."

"Who provides the account to pay these claims? Those who are cursed for being non-zeros, each to the extent of his distance from that ideal. Since all values are the product of virtues, the degree of your virtue is used as the measure of your penalty; the degree of your faults is used as the measure of your gain. Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues."

"Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality; the next is self-esteem. When need is the standard, every man is both victim and parasite. As a victim, he must labor to fill the needs of others, leaving himself in the position of a parasite whose needs must be filled by others. He cannot approach his fellow men except in one of two disgraceful roles: he is both a beggar and a sucker."

"You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of, your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as 'theory,' the knowledge that by the moral standard you've accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man to man?"

"The justification of sacrifice, that your morality propounds, is more corrupt than the corruption it purports to justify. The motive of your sacrifice, it tells you, should be love—the love you ought to feel for every man. A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men—this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers."

"It is only the metaphysics of a leech that would cling to the idea of a universe where a zero is a standard of identification. A leech would want to seek escape from the necessity to name its own nature—escape from the necessity to know that the substance on which it builds its private universe is blood."

"What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit the first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit. Their non-material, non-profit worlds are realms where rivers run with milk and coffee, where wine spurts from rocks at their command, where pastry drops on them from clouds at the price of opening their mouth. On this material, profit-chasing earth, an enormous investment of virtue—of intelligence, integrity, energy, skill—is required to construct a railroad to carry them the distance of one mile; in their non-material, non-profit world, they travel from planet to planet at the cost of a wish. If an honest person asks them: 'How?'—they answer with righteous scorn that a 'how' is the concept of vulgar realists; the concept of superior spirits is 'Somehow.' On this earth restricted by matter and profit, rewards are achieved by thought; in a world set free of such restrictions, rewards are achieved by wishing."


"And that is the whole of their shabby secret. The secret of all their esoteric philosophies, of all their dialectics and super-senses, of their evasive eyes and snarling words, the secret for which they destroy civilization, language, industries and lives, the secret for which they pierce their own eyes and eardrums, grind out their senses, blank out their minds, the purpose for which they dissolve the absolutes of reason, logic, matter, existence, reality—is to erect upon that plastic fog a single holy absolute: their Wish."

"Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgment of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else—that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch—and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn't, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought."


Cited via APA Format:

Rand, Ayn (1957). Atlas Shrugged. New York, New York: Signet


Now please keep in mind that while the book the above excerpts come from has nothing to do with adoption, the excerpts I chose, and particularly the excerpts I bolded call adoption to mind. FOR ME!

The book itself, is about man's entitlement attitude, his/her wish to get anything he/she wants simply because HE/SHE wants it.


When you read this try to envision what adoption is like in todays world. When adoption has become not a process of finding a home for a child, but of finding a child for some couple who simply wants a child.That is the crux of what is wrong with adoption in today's world, people want a child(any child), people will pay big money for said child. In a largely un-regulated industry, that in my eyes is nothing more than a meat market, a modern form of slavery, if you will, it is no longer about the "Best Interests' of the Child" but about the best interests of the prospective adoptive parents in far, far too many cases.

There are children in our country who are in Foster Care, who truly need good, loving, stable homes that are largely ignored as "damaged goods" not worthy of the trouble to raise. What a sad reflection on our country and our society! How in the world did this happen here you ask? Start with researching The Baby Scoop Era, and continue to research as far as today what goes on in the world of adoption, to mothers, their children and yes adoptive parents. Far from being the "feel good" solution, the so called win-win-win, it is anything but.

Now I expect that I will get some not very nice comments, if they go to far be assured I will censor them, and I will respond to any of you who choose to comment. My good friends who are adoptive mothers (Margie!) don't think this post is about you, it is about those who feel entitled to a child, not those who actually did think about what was best for a child/ren they would adopt.

Let's discuss this shall we?

One of my favorite poems and while not about adoption I find the words mostly make me think of adoption and what it has done to my life...


Still I Rise
by Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.