As expected, National Adoption Month, also known as National Adoption Awareness Month, is not only generating pages and pages of informative content, it is egging on the anti-adoption crowd and spawning the production of even more than the usual amount of tripe designed to bat all helpful and beautiful aspects of adoption into muck.

In addition to a plethora of blogs cautioning everyone to lurid attention over adoption BEWARENESS, articles dressed as information, but designed to paint gloom, doom and destruction all over the face of building families through adoption are trotting out the same-old, same-old of cherry-picked quotes and half-thought themes.

(I will not link to these, as they are far too easy to find, if one should want to suffer this point of view, without me helping to bump their numbers.)

Thankfully, however, the the Washington Post has published something reasonable in this present climate of mass media bandwagon-jumping.

Hallelujah! And pass the peas! An article to be thankful for this month!

In the true honor of great wisdom, honor and common sense, Harvard Law Professor and faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School, Dr. Elizabeth Bartholet's contribution to the Sunday addition of the WaPo addresses international adoption as it should be addressed, National Adoption Month or not.

Stepping off with the present situation in Guatemala, then moving one-by-one through other targets of finger-pointing critics, she takes on UNICEF, insinuations of baby-buying, condemnation of transracial adoptions and the idea of cultural genocide through removing a child from its country of birth.

I paid tribute to Dr. Bartholet earlier this year, and plan to do so at every opportunity.

I would have thought a chance to discuss her contributions would have come after the recent "Ethics Conference" held last month in Washington DC, but unlike the 2004 Adoption Policy Conference that included Adam Pertman, whose organization hosted this conference, Jane Aronson, Professor Rita Simon, and other well-respected notables in the adoption world, the speaker list was much narrower. Dr. Bartholet, Dr. Aronson and Professor Simon, along with others whose views tend toward the positives in adoption, were not included.

For a list of Dr. Bartholet's published work, including, "Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift , and the Adoption Alternative", click here.


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