Tag: birth parents
End Adoption Secrecy – The Atlantic
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You could say I grew up not knowing who I was. I knew that I’d been born in an Indianapolis hospital in 1968, and that my parents had adopted me when I was 10 days old. That was it. I didn’t know who my birth parents were, or why they couldn’t raise me. I had no medical history.
If you had asked
The U.S. Child-Welfare System Fails Its Children
When I was a teenager in the early 2000s, my parents both died. Like many American children, I had been steeped in stories about orphans for years, but the books I had read and movies I had watched (Jane Eyre, Annie) failed to mirror my experience of parental loss. They also contributed to my mistaken understanding of orphanhood and the makeup of our child-welfare system—misconceptions that many Americans hold today.
For one, I believed that orphanages were
The Family Who Tried to End Racism Through Adoption
Growing up as the adopted Korean daughter of white parents in a predominantly white community, I discovered early on that my presence was often a surprise, a question to which others expected answers. I soon learned how to respond to the curiosity of teachers at school, strangers at Sears, friends who had finally worked up the nerve to ask Who are your real parents? Why did they give you up? Are you going to try to find them someday?
Chesa Boudin and Rising Crime in San Francisco
Late one recent afternoon, Chesa Boudin logged onto Zoom to have a conversation with me while his wife was in labor. His critics see the 41-year-old San Francisco district attorney as a symbol of the progressive legal-reform movement’s excesses. But Boudin has also attracted national attention because his personal story is so extraordinary: When he was barely a toddler, his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, left him with a babysitter so they could rob a Brink’s armored car with