Adoptees Crossing Lines Podcast

Please 💀

Man there’s so much bullshit out there it’s insane.

HOW does the industry keep getting worse. 😡

Light blue background graphic. Text reads: “Source: Pahrump Valley Times (2025). Nevada is adopting ‘Family-Match,’ a tech tool that claims to improve adoption outcomes. Agencies enter data. Families enter preferences. An algorithm decides compatibility. But behind the sleek design is the same old truth: Turning children into data points doesn’t address the harm that separated them.” A black “Swipe Right” button sits near the bottom. @adopteescrossinglines appears at the bottom right.

Light blue slide with circular abstract shapes. Text reads: “Source: Pahrump Valley Times (2025). Family-Match presents itself as efficiency. But efficiency doesn’t change why children end up in these systems in the first place. Families lose their children because they lacked support, resources, stability, or protection — not because technology failed to match them ‘better.’ An algorithm cannot change the structural conditions that made a child adoptable. It can only sort the fallout.” @adopteescrossinglines is at the bottom.

Light blue slide. Text reads: “Source: Pahrump Valley Times (2025). The tool promises fewer ‘disruptions,’ more ‘stable placements,’ and ‘improved matches.’ But no algorithm can repair what was broken upstream. No algorithm can repair the grief of separation. No algorithm can replace a child’s first family. No algorithm can guarantee safety. No algorithm can prevent instability created by the system itself. These are systemic harms — not technical glitches.” @adopteescrossinglines at the bottom.

Light blue slide. Text reads: “Source: Pahrump Valley Times (2025). Tech solutions don’t solve family separation. They streamline it. We need to fund families, not algorithms. We need support, not searchable databases. We need prevention, not better marketing. Adoptee justice isn’t found in a matching system. It’s found in keeping families together.” @adopteescrossinglines is at the bottom.

Nevada is adopting “Family-Match,” an algorithm that claims to improve adoption outcomes.

Algorithms don’t repair separation.
They streamline it.

#adopteesky

I am so sorry. That is abhorrent that he was a doctor but I’m not surprised. My adopters were both in education and instead of using to better support me they used it to beat the system repeatedly.

Light blue background graphic. Header reads “@adopteescrossinglines.” A small arrow icon sits in the top right. Bold title: “Adoptees have been naming harm in health care long before anyone studied it.” Body text explains that a 2025 study shows clinicians aren’t trained to care for adopted adults, and that dismissal and gaps in knowledge show up in appointments, charts, and interactions. Footer text cites “Source: Small et al., 2025 (Annals of Family Medicine).”

Light blue background graphic. Header “@adopteescrossinglines” with a small arrow icon on the right. Bold title: “The study captured what many adoptees experience every day.” Body text describes clinicians making stereotypical comments, dismissing concerns, repeatedly asking for family medical history adoptees don’t have, and listing “adopted person” like a diagnosis. Footer text cites “Source: Small et al., 2025 (Annals of Family Medicine).”

Light blue background graphic. Header “@adopteescrossinglines” with an arrow icon on the right. Bold title: “Those experiences have consequences.” Body text explains that adoptees facing adoption-related discrimination were more than seven times more likely to delay care or switch providers, not from avoiding help but from being dismissed or misunderstood. Footer text cites “Source: Small et al., 2025 (Annals of Family Medicine).”

Light blue background graphic. Header “@adopteescrossinglines” with an arrow icon on the right. Bold title: “Adoptees deserve care that sees the whole picture.” Body text states that adoptees deserve clinicians who understand missing family history isn’t a moral failing, and deserve screening plans, forms, and spaces that reflect their actual families and lived experiences. Footer text cites “Source: Small et al., 2025 (Annals of Family Medicine).”

A new national study confirms what adoptees have said for decades: medical care isn’t neutral for us.

#adopteesky

Thank you for sharing 🙏🏾

Adoptees Crossing Lines | Zaira | Substack Adoptee led media telling the truth about adoption, family policing, and belonging, a companion to the Adoptees Crossing Lines podcast. Click to read Adoptees Crossing Lines, by Zaira, a Substack publ...

Check out my latest posts on Substack.

adopteescrossinglines.substack.com

#adopteesky

Light blue background. Centered text reads: “Utah is trying to limit ‘adoption tourism.’ But the real story isn’t reform, it’s exposure. For years, agencies have recruited vulnerable women from other states, flown them to Utah, and pressured them into relinquishing their children. This isn’t ‘helping families.’ It’s the business model.” At the top is the handle @adopteescrossinglines. At the bottom is a small citation box that says “Fox 13 News Utah (2025).”

Light blue background. Centered text reads: “Investigations revealed agencies transporting pregnant women to Utah, separating them from support systems, and using vague ‘pregnancy expense’ payments as leverage. Some mothers reported they didn’t understand their rights or felt coerced into signing away their children. This is not an accident. It’s how adoption profits are protected.” The handle @adopteescrossinglines appears at the top. A small citation box at the bottom says “Fox 13 News Utah (2025).”

Light blue background. Centered text reads: “Utah isn’t ‘improving’ adoption. It’s trying to control the fallout of an industry built on coercion. These proposed rules—nonprofit licensing, transport limits, payment caps, and a 72-hour revocation period—exist because the abuse became impossible to deny. Not because the system is becoming safer. You can’t regulate exploitation into liberation.” The handle @adopteescrossinglines is shown at the top. A small citation box at the bottom reads “Fox 13 News Utah (2025).”

Light blue background. Centered text reads: “Reforms don’t address the core issue: children are made available for adoption through the manufactured vulnerability of their mothers. Until we confront the systems that exploit poverty, isolation, and crisis, adoption tourism won’t disappear. It will just rebrand. Adoptee justice means naming the harm at the root, not polishing the pipeline.” The handle @adopteescrossinglines appears at the top. A small citation box at the bottom says “Fox 13 News Utah (2025).”

Utah is advancing legislation to curb what many call adoption tourism — a pattern where agencies recruit vulnerable women from out of state to relinquish their babies in Utah.

#adopteesky

Light blue background with white starburst in the top right corner. Header reads “National Adoption Awareness Month.” Text explains that NAAM can feel like a celebration of adoptee silence. It describes expectations to be grateful for separation, to smile while grief is used as marketing, and states adoptees have always told a different story: one of loss, survival, and truth-telling despite a system built on silence. Bottom includes “@adopteescrossinglines” and a right-facing arrow icon.

Light blue background with a white starburst on the left. Large “01.” at the top. Text states adoptees deserve honesty about their beginnings, not fairy-tale narratives. Calls for language that names loss and for space to tell truths without labels like ungrateful or difficult. Ends by saying adoptee narratives aren’t the problem; the system that created their silence is. Bottom includes “@adopteescrossinglines” and a right-facing arrow icon.

Light blue background with a white sparkle icon on the right. Large “02.” at the top. Text explains that the public’s preferred adoption narrative — rescue, destiny, gratitude — comes at adoptees’ expense. It erases first families, reshapes identities, and treats separation as a gift. Notes that when NAAM uplifts adoption without context, it reinforces harmful myths that silence adoptees and maintain oppressive systems. Bottom includes “@adopteescrossinglines” and a right-facing arrow icon.

Light blue background with a white starburst on the right. Large “03.” at the top. Text states: If NAAM is about awareness, families deserve support, not surveillance. Adoptees deserve truth, and communities deserve care instead of carceral solutions. Abolition means building a world where no child is taken for being poor and where love isn’t weaponized for state power. Ends with: “Listen to adoptees. Fund first families. Tell the full story — all year, not just in November.” Bottom includes “@adopteescrossinglines” and a right-facing arrow icon.

NAAM is ending, but adoptees’ truths don’t fit into a once a year campaign.

Awareness shouldn’t end on November 30th. Tell the full story — all year.

#adopteesky

Slide 1: Light blue background with a white star shape in the top right corner. Text reads: “National Adoption Awareness Month. Most children in foster care aren’t there because of abuse. They’re there because their parents are poor. When families can’t afford food, housing, or childcare, the state calls it ‘neglect.’ Then uses that label to justify separation, instead of support.”

Slide 2: Text reads: “01. Across the U.S., 73% of child welfare cases cite neglect, not abuse. And ‘neglect’ often just means poverty: empty refrigerators, unpaid light bills, no safe housing. Meanwhile, programs like SNAP and childcare assistance are cut, pushing more families into crisis. The same government that fails to feed us funds the system that takes our kids.”

Slide 3: Text reads: “02. Being poor isn’t a parenting failure. It’s the predictable outcome of capitalism, racism, and policy choices that punish the most marginalized. When safety nets are ripped away, family policing fills the gap — not with help, but with handcuffs. Poverty becomes a crime, and survival becomes evidence.”

Slide 4: Text reads: “03. If we funded care instead of control, families could stay together. Food, housing, and childcare aren’t luxuries, they’re family preservation. The real solution to ‘neglect’ isn’t foster care. It’s ending poverty.”

Poverty isn’t neglect.

Most kids in foster care aren’t there because of abuse, they’re there because their parents couldn’t afford food, housing, or childcare.

The solution isn’t foster care. It’s ending poverty.

#adopteesky

Week 2 is up on Substack.

This one is about what the podcast has taught me, about the system, about grief, and about telling the truth even when people don’t want to hear it.
Read it here: adopteescrossinglines.substack.com

#adopteesky

Reproductive Justice in Adoption

This National Adoption Month, check out our partners who are shifting dominant adoption narratives:

Adoptees Crossing Lines
@adopteecrossing.bsky.social

Reproductive Justice in Adoption
www.reprojusticeinadoption.org

Radical, abolitionist family-building:

✔️ protects family bonds.

✔️ honors chosen family.

✔️ builds kinship free from coercion & state violence.

Radical, abolitionist family-building rejects the commodification, separation, and displacement of children from their families & communities.

Rather than provide a robust social safety net to meet the needs of marginalized families, the state facilitates the buying and selling of their children through adoption.

This is human trafficking, plain and simple.

Adoption is a multi-billion dollar industry.

States receive financial rewards for every child adopted beyond the previous year’s total, private agencies charge tens of thousands of dollars in fees, and people who adopt get tax subsidies—while parents are left in poverty without their children.

Private adoption is not the “consensual choice” it is marketed to be.

In truth, state-imposed poverty and racism puts a target on parents’ backs, making them vulnerable to the private adoption industry’s predatory and coercive tactics.

Adoption through the foster system depends on the state forcibly and permanently separating a child from their parent, often because of poverty and structural racism.

This is one of the most violent powers the state can wield.

Private adoption, too, requires permanent family separation.

Adoption is not a “good deed.” Adoption is not “radical family building.”

Adoption is a multi-billion dollar industry and a tool of state violence. 🧵

Light blue background with text that reads: “National Adoption Awareness Month. ‘Best interests of the child’ sounds compassionate, but it’s one of the most dangerous lies the system tells. Because who decides what’s best? Courts, caseworkers, and agencies — not the child. Not the family. Not the community. It’s a legal phrase used to justify separation, silence families, and sanitize state violence.”

Text reads: “01. The ‘best interests’ standard was designed in the early 1900s, when social workers targeted poor, Black, Indigenous, and immigrant families as ‘unfit.’ It gave judges the power to remove children based on morality, not safety. A century later, it’s still used to remove kids because of poverty, disability, or ‘failure to thrive’ under white, middle class norms. The same logic fuels family policing and adoption today.”

Text reads: “02. In courtrooms, ‘best interests’ rarely means what children actually need — stability, safety, love, and belonging. It means whatever keeps the system intact. Adoption is framed as a happy ending, even when it’s built on loss. But for the families torn apart, ‘best interests’ means grief, surveillance, and state sanctioned erasure.”

Text reads: “03. If we truly care about children’s best interests, we must care about their families’ survival. The safest place for most kids is not foster care or adoption — it’s home, with support. Abolition means replacing ‘best interests’ with collective care, resource equity, and family autonomy. Because safety without justice is just control.”

Media doesn’t just reflect adoption culture. It creates it.

#adopteesky

A blue-toned gradient background with a soft grainy texture. Centered black text reads: “THEY TOLD US ADOPTION WAS SIMPLE. ‘A BETTER LIFE.’ ‘BE GRATEFUL.’” At the top is the handle “@adopteescrossinglines.” At the bottom is the URL “adopteescrossinglines.substack.com.” Minimalist layout, clean sans-serif font.

A blue grainy gradient background matching the first slide. Centered black text reads: “BUT WHAT IF THE STORY YOU WERE HANDED NEVER MATCHED THE LIFE YOU LIVED?” The handle “@adopteescrossinglines” sits at the top. The Substack URL appears at the bottom.

Same blue grainy gradient background. Large centered text reads: “WHAT IF THE ‘BETTER LIFE’ WAS A NARRATIVE, NOT A TRUTH?” The handle sits at the top and the Substack URL sits at the bottom.

Final slide with the same gradient grain texture. Centered black text reads: “THIS IS THE FIRST PIECE IN AN 8 WEEK SERIES ABOUT ADOPTION, BELONGING, SURVIVAL, AND THE STORIES WE’RE EXPECTED TO CARRY. READ IT ON SUBSTACK. (LINK IN BIO.)” Handle appears at the top, Substack URL at the bottom.

New Substack piece is live, the first in an 8 week series I’m writing ahead of the next season.

It’s about the gap between the adoption story we’re given & the life we actually lived.

If you want to follow the series, you can subscribe here: adopteescrossinglines.substack.com

Love your shirt ✊🏾

Light blue background with text that reads: “National Adoption Awareness Month. ‘Best interests of the child’ sounds compassionate, but it’s one of the most dangerous lies the system tells. Because who decides what’s best? Courts, caseworkers, and agencies — not the child. Not the family. Not the community. It’s a legal phrase used to justify separation, silence families, and sanitize state violence.”

Text reads: “01. The ‘best interests’ standard was designed in the early 1900s, when social workers targeted poor, Black, Indigenous, and immigrant families as ‘unfit.’ It gave judges the power to remove children based on morality, not safety. A century later, it’s still used to remove kids because of poverty, disability, or ‘failure to thrive’ under white, middle class norms. The same logic fuels family policing and adoption today.”

Text reads: “02. In courtrooms, ‘best interests’ rarely means what children actually need — stability, safety, love, and belonging. It means whatever keeps the system intact. Adoption is framed as a happy ending, even when it’s built on loss. But for the families torn apart, ‘best interests’ means grief, surveillance, and state sanctioned erasure.”

Text reads: “03. If we truly care about children’s best interests, we must care about their families’ survival. The safest place for most kids is not foster care or adoption — it’s home, with support. Abolition means replacing ‘best interests’ with collective care, resource equity, and family autonomy. Because safety without justice is just control.”

“Best interests of the child” has never been neutral.

It’s how the state disguises control as compassion.

#adopteesky

Slide 1: Blue background with subtle paper texture. Text reads: “Adoption isn’t what they told us it was. The stories we were given don’t tell the whole truth.”

Slide 2: Same background. Text reads: “I’ve been telling these stories through my podcast and posts like this, now I’m expanding that work through writing. I created a Substack to dig deeper into how these systems work and how they shape the stories we’re told.”

Slide 3: Same background. Text reads: “This space is for honesty and context — a place to ask harder questions, share lived experience, and connect what’s personal to what’s structural.”

Slide 4: Same background. Text reads: “The first post dropped today. Subscribe free at adopteescrossinglines.substack.com, or become a paid supporter to help keep this work going.” Each slide includes the handle @adopteescrossinglines centered at the bottom.

I started a Substack.

A place to go deeper, beyond the posts and the episodes.

Essays and reflections connecting adoption, family policing, and the systems that shape our lives.

The first post is live: adopteescrossinglines.substack.com

#adopteesky

Text on a light blue background reads: “National Adoption Awareness Month. Every time the state says it’s ‘saving children,’ someone is getting paid. Billions of federal dollars flow through family policing each year, not to keep families together, but to remove and rehome children. This isn’t about protection. It’s about profit, power, and punishment disguised as care.”

Text reads: “01. The Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997) rewards states up to $10,000 per finalized adoption, on top of millions in annual federal reimbursements for foster care. Meanwhile, family reunification programs receive only a fraction of that funding. It’s not that the money doesn’t exist — it’s that it’s intentionally redirected away from keeping families whole. The system profits more when families are separated.”

Text reads: “02. Private agencies, lawyers, and nonprofits profit from every step of the adoption pipeline. But the cost is paid by parents criminalized for poverty, by families fighting to be reunified, and by adoptees who inherit the grief of state violence. For every check written in the name of ‘child welfare,’ a bond is broken, often permanently.”

Text reads: “03. Imagine if those same dollars funded food programs, housing, childcare, and cash assistance instead of removals. That’s what abolition looks like — shifting money from surveillance to survival. Ending the family policing system isn’t about scarcity. It’s about choosing care over control.”

Every time the state says it’s “saving children,” someone is getting paid.

Billions in federal dollars flow through the family policing system each year, not to keep families together, but to remove and rehome children.

This isn’t protection. It’s profit.

#adopteesky

Light blue background with white starburst in top right corner. Text reads: “National Adoption Awareness Month Adoption doesn’t exist outside the family policing system, it depends on it. Every adoption that starts with state intervention begins with surveillance, investigation, and removal. Its real function is social control, punishing poverty and breaking up families in the name of protection.” @adopteescrossinglines with an outlined arrow icon in the bottom right.

Light blue background with white starburst in top left corner. Large black text reads “01.” Below it: “In 1997, the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) tied federal dollars to adoption quotas. States receive bonuses for every child adopted out of foster care, turning separation into state revenue. Since then, thousands of families, mostly Black, Indigenous, and poor, have lost their children permanently to meet performance targets. This isn’t safety. It’s state sponsored trafficking.” @adopteescrossinglines and sources listed at bottom: ASFA (1997); U.S. DHHS Adoption Incentives Report (2024). Arrow icon in lower right.

Light blue background with white starburst in upper right. Large black text reads “02.” Below: “Family policing operates like every other carceral system, through surveillance, control, and punishment. Caseworkers act as police, mandated reporters as informants, and courts as sentencing chambers for parents living in poverty. When adoption follows this process, it’s not an act of love, it’s the state erasing families under legal cover. And the trauma is generational.” @adopteescrossinglines with sources at bottom: Child Welfare Abolitionist Handbook (2023); Family Defense Center (2021). Arrow icon in lower right.

Light blue background with small white starburst in lower right. Large text “03.” Below: “Adoption and family policing are not broken systems, they’re functioning exactly as designed. To end the harm, we don’t reform them. We dismantle them and build systems rooted in care, autonomy, and collective survival. Abolition means no more stolen children, ever again.” @adopteescrossinglines and arrow icon at bottom right.

Adoption doesn’t exist outside the family policing system—it depends on it.
Behind every “forever family” headline is surveillance, removal, and profit from separation.

#adopteesky

That’s valid. I shouldn’t have made it a blanket statement but I think what I was trying to convey is that the majority of the time when they say unsafe they really mean is neglect aka being poor. Thank you for the feedback.

Light blue background with black text reading: “National Adoption Awareness Month. They tell us adoption ‘gives children a better life.’ But what’s rarely said is that most adoptions start with a family that could’ve stayed together if they had been given what they needed to survive. Adoption is the system — a pipeline that takes from poor families and rewards the state for breaking them apart.” The handle @adopteescrossinglines appears at the bottom with an arrow icon.

Text reads: “01. In 2023, over 75% of child removals were for ‘neglect’ — not abuse. And ‘neglect’ is most often just a euphemism for poverty: no childcare, unstable housing, food insecurity. Families aren’t unsafe. They’re unsupported. When the state refuses to meet basic needs, it manufactures ‘neglect’ — then justifies removing children instead of resourcing parents.” Citations listed below: “U.S. DHHS, AFCARS Report #31 (2023); Family Justice Journal, ‘Reframing Neglect as Poverty’ (2022).”

Text reads: “02. Family preservation means funding food, housing, and care, not foster care and adoption subsidies. It means believing that families deserve to stay together, even when they struggle. Supporting families costs less, heals more, and builds stronger communities than paying agencies to separate them. When we resource people, we dismantle the family policing system piece by piece.”

Text reads: “03. Family preservation isn’t a program. It’s resistance. Every dollar spent removing a child is a dollar stolen from keeping a family whole. Because ‘saving children’ shouldn’t come at the cost of destroying their families.”

Adoption doesn’t “save” children, it rewards the state for separating them.

Most removals happen because of poverty, not abuse.
Families aren’t unsafe. They’re unsupported.

When we resource families, we dismantle the family policing system, piece by piece.

#adopteesky

Thank you for sharing. 🩵