That’s the title of this MoJo essay by Elizabeth Larsen. Below is an excerpt:
November was National Adoption Awareness Month, and the media:including Mother Jones, which recently published my story Did I Steal My Daughter? The Tribulations of Global Adoption:have been doing their best to bring fresh ideas to a much misrepresented topic. …
… But there are viewpoints that aren’t given a lot of real estate, most notably the perspectives of people:adoptees, birth families, adoptive parents:who are deeply critical of adoption. Novelist Tama Janowitz’s essay, published on November 12, unknowingly highlighted this disparity. Intended to be a humorous look at generational resentment, the essay employs the term “Mongolian” to describe her Chinese-born daughter’s features and refers to a recently published book in which Midwestern adoptees in their 30s and 40s “complain bitterly” about their experiences and as a result blame their parents. (The book, which Janowitz doesn’t name, is Outsiders Within: Writing on Transnational Adoption.)
It didn’t take long before the blogosphere was buzzing not only about the Janowitz essay, but also the fact that when some of those very same “bitter complainers” tried to post their reactions, they couldn’t get past the Times‘ digital gatekeeper. …
Read the whole thing here. Via Reappropriate, where there is additional interesting commentary.
–Ann Bartow
