I’m always coming up with another metaphor in an attempt to describe the loss and emptiness of being adopted at birth without access to what is rightfully mine: my identity as a human being.
But before I sink another one, I want to talk about the whole idea of private property, which, along with money, is sacrosanct in Western societies. If children are considered the private and sacrosanct property of their parents, why are less-well-off (i.e., poor) young mothers coerced to give up their babies if they are seen as too poor to raise their babies (i.e., too poor to protect their private property)?
The obvious answer is that the aggressors (i.e. the state, the church and their vampiric agencies) stay away from more well-off mothers not so much because they are perceived to have enough capital to raise children but because it the aggressors know they’d be in for nasty litigation if they dared to disrupt the sanctity of the family, of stealing private property euphemistically called “children.” Well-off people tend to be better educated and tend to know their rights or pay attorneys to protect them.
The concept of poverty vs. wealth is like rent vs. own in the eyes of the aggressors. Poor mothers are seen as squatters, or at best as renters, machines that only temporarily and inconveniently house what will presently become the private owned property of more entitled parents. (For an excellent description of the exploitation of the poor, see The Capitalist System by Michael Bakunin.) The entitled would never allow the aggressors to swoop in and take their property, neither real nor intellectual, and certainly not their children.
So adoptees are legally stolen by profiteers from poor mothers or couples though unnecessary vanity adoptions by entitled, childless couples. It’s clear to most thinking people nowadays that such practice must be struck down as criminal. But as it stands, corrupt, sated, bully justice systems in the “developed” world are selective to favor money. And until this criminal practice ends, poor natural parents and their children will continue to suffer on many levels for their entire lives after the theft.
The fact is that adoptees have had their identities stolen. Wikipedia reflects the general ignorance about identity theft when it involves adoption:
“The term is relatively new and is actually a misnomer, since it is not inherently possible to steal an identity, only to use it…”
Now for the metaphor I spoke about in the opening of this post. I use open-source Ubuntu software as my operating system. When I brought home the computer I built with the Ubuntu OS on it, I used the default login and password for awhile and uploaded a lot of data including meaningful family photographs.
But one day last month I decided I wanted to change the password and login, so I clicked on a system preference called “pack for shipping,” which I learned from tech support was the way to change the P & L. I typed in my new choices and hit “enter.” The screen went blank, then after several minutes, the log-in screen came up. I didn’t see any of my desktop icons. I looked in my files, but they were all gone. I looked everywhere for my data, but it had been wiped clean. One click, and my data disappeared forever. Wiped clean. Just like the identity of adoptees.
But the difference between computers and people is that people are infinitely more sentient and that means they grieve, they long, and they carry their loss with them to their graves. But the law is set up to favor those who take ownership of children who don’t belong to them, to wipe their data clean so everyone can pretend that life starts from zero with the new ownership.
