Prison Adoptee

🥚Do you really know your whole adoption story?

Honestly, most unwed mothers went to hospitals to deliver because they were NOT from families of significant means. Other girls were literally incarcerated in maternity homes because they were criminalized or were wards of CAS/OTS, with the government paying the full rates. 2/2

🧵Where did the money come from? The witness fumbles her way through the question but does admit it came from girls from families of significant means and from the provincial government.

But why the provincial government if families were paying? See next thread.
1/2 🥚

🥚Do you really know the truth about your adoption in Ontario? The most marginalized & vulnerable women and girls—incarcerated in various institutions under a web of federal and provincial laws—are erased from the narrative about the forced adoption of their children.

#HIddenHistories
Coming soon...

🥚The maternity home scandal & adoption are far more complex than many realize. Too often, the story is told by those whose families had significant means—not by those who were criminalized or wards of CAS or OTS. The most marginalized voices remain unheard under CYFSA and YCJA.
More coming soon.

This includes any facility—even maternity homes or asylums. If a juvenile (now called a youth or young person) was criminalized or a ward of a Children’s Aid Society, disclosure laws can block this info from adoption records. Do you know the whole truth about your adoption?

🥚Reading Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering. In my experience, most women incarcerated at the Mercer Reformatory lost their children to adoption. Alarming: youth disclosure laws bar info to adoptees if their mother was criminalized under 18.

#HiddenHistories

It’s a class action—interesting!! I will never forget the day I received my file and found out I had two other siblings, and a third—the firstborn—whom they never told me about. Two siblings were adopted together, and I, being the baby, went elsewhere. archive.ph/Ftke6

🥚Who was in maternity homes? Wards of the Children’s Aid Society, Ontario Training School girls, and girls the Salvation Army diverted from a sentence. Disclosure laws hide wardship and sentencing records. Other girls? Parents of means. The truth about maternity homes is not being told correctly.

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More than 300 adoptees file complaints in Korea's renewed adoption probe - The Korea Times More than 300 overseas adoptees submitted complaints to Korea's truth-seeking body Thursday, marking the first wave of petitions in the renewed sta...

Let's go! #adoption 🥚
www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/g...

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I know I've flooded my TL with news sources about my dear friend, Iranian adoptee sister, and now DHS target.

If you want to help, contact her California Representative Young Kim at 714-984-2440 and give her an earful! This is an injustice, and Rep. Kim can get involved. Make your voices heard! 🥚

🥚The Child Welfare Act, 1965 provides that the Children's Aid Society gains temporary or permanent custody of a child when a parent is imprisoned. In the year ending March 1964, 559 women and girls were imprisoned in Mercer; once CAS took custody, it was often difficult for mothers to regain it.

She was an orphan adopted from Iran by a US veteran. The Trump administration wants to deport her A woman adopted as a toddler by an American war veteran, who he found in the 1970s in an Iranian orphanage and raised as a Christian, is being threatened with deportation to Iran, a country notoriousl...

Yahoo has a piece on my Iranian adoptee friend who is in the removal process! Please share!! 🥚

www.yahoo.com/news/article...

Foster Child An important figure in the history of Canadian Indigenous filmmaking, Gil Cardinal was born to a Métis mother but raised by a non-Indigenous foster family, and with this …

🥚Criminalize & disappear a mother to make it look like a no show for a court hearing regarding her child
• your mom had been...charged with being intoxicated... went to Fort Saskatchewan jail for two months
• that’s why there was a two month period we didn’t hear from her
www.nfb.ca/film/foster_...

Incorrigible: A Film About Velma Demerson

Incorrigible: A Film About Velma Demerson

In 1939, Velma Demerson was sentenced to one year in prison for her relationship with a Chinese man. Decades later, she fought against injustices suffered by her and other "incorrigible" women in Canada.
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www.knowledge.ca/program/inco...

Incorrigible Trailer Want to hear an unbelievable story? Let us tell you Velma’s. In 1939 Velma Demerson was jailed for falling in love with a Chinese man. Pregnant and without…

🧵🥚Want to hear an unbelievable story? Let us tell you Velma’s.
Many pregnant women and girls, like Velma, were incarcerated under the Female Refuges Act in institutions such as industrial refuges, the Andrew Mercer Reformatory, and even maternity homes. Full story in thread. 1/2
vimeo.com/728649147

Economic ideology of the child-saving movement: women’s reformatories & prisons functioned as institutional pipelines within a system that controlled, institutionalized, and redirected labor & lives, including using their children as a supply for the placing-out system. 🥚
archive.org/details/proc...

🥚Ontario’s Children’s Aid Societies frequently used the Female Refuges Act to secure babies for adoption. Hidden behind disclosure regimes such as the Child and Family Services Act and the Youth Criminal Justice Act are thousands of women unjustly incarcerated, their children taken for adoption.

He was right — vagrancy laws were used frequently. Equally scandalous, they jailed mothers and enabled the adoption of their children. To date, no research has examined the link between vagrancy laws and forced adoptions. 2/2

🧵In Ontario, Canada, the scandalous Female Refuges Act was amended in 1958 but not fully repealed until 1964. Dymond claimed the repealed sections were unnecessary because they were “adequately dealt with in the Criminal Code.” 1/2🥚
#FemaleRefugesAct
#Incorrigible 👇

City of Hamilton under fire by local tiny homes companies for ordering shelters made in China | RCI City staff say they bought $35K homes from newly formed MicroShelters Inc. due to short timeline

No different today! From poorhouses and tramp houses to #TinyHomes and MicroShelters: modern rebrandings of the same enduring impulse to manage, contain, and marginalize poverty instead of ending it.

ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/...

"Often amounting to little more than shacks, these houses provided the bare basics, like mattresses and firewood, to people in towns near railroads, and generally weren’t publicized since communities didn’t want to advertise their charity toward vagrants." 2/2

Poorhouses Were Designed to Punish People for Their Poverty | HISTORY In a time before social services, society’s most vulnerable people were hidden away in brutal institutions.

🧵Any different today?

"For men on the move, there were alternatives to poorhouses: the tramp house. These tiny, temporary homes were erected for vagrants and itinerant people—often men—passing through communities." 1/2

www.history.com/articles/in-...

History shows that when children are transferred—through placing-out or adoption—abuse follows. Orphan Trains, British Home Children, Convict Orphans… what about kids of incarcerated women in Canada? No one has studied this.
Hidden history!!🥚
www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/...

With Challenges Come Needs | Adoptees United Inc. With AU's pro bono Citizenship Clinic at or near capacity, we need help to address ongoing challenges

Please donate to the Citizenship Clinic based in Minneapolis!

"...those costs support our continued commitment and work to provide free legal assistance to intercountry #adoptees, who may not have US citizenship or may lack proof of that US citizenship."

adopteesunited.org/with-challen... 🥚

Listing of a few BLACK-MARKET adoption schemes.

freepages.rootsweb.com/~msroots/mis...

YouTube video by Human Nature Tales Who Rode The Orphan Train, and Why ? Stories in History-

The program ends with referencing it as the CHILD TRAFFICKING movement. We should all dig deeper because it didn't end when the trains stopped running.
- Georgia Tan & Bessie Bernard, black-market baby rings.
Let's keep researching our history, she says!! 1/2
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQYU...