Tuesday Term: Adopoliploitation

By on 6-29-2011 in Adoption, CCAI, Foster Care, Politics, Tuesday Terms

Tuesday Term: Adopoliploitation

This column is the discussion of a term used for child welfare or adoption. We made this one up to represent what we have been seeing in the media.

Adopoliploitation (ado-poli-ploitation)-“Ado” stands for adoption and foster care; “poli” stands for politics; and “ploitation” stands for exploitation.

This is when a political candidate chooses to place his or her adopted children (minor or adult) or foster children (current or previous) into their political campaign.

Example 1: This article  [International Business Times 6/22/11] Is Huntsman selling his adoptees for the GOP ticket? talks about a political video called Four Days .

“The ad shows a man (we assume it’s Huntsman) biking across a desert and reads in the corner: “Has seven children, one from India, one from China.”
The article states, “If Huntsman was trying to intrigue us, he succeeded. There are so many questions—
1)      What do the origins of his children have to do with his capacity to assume the presidency?
2)      Is Huntsman trying to tell us that he has intimate knowledge of two children from two countries slated by geopolitical and economic theorists to surpass the United States in a few years?
3)      Is he trying to tell us that despite fellow-Republican John McCain’s decision to blame Arizona fires on illegal immigrants, he’s not a raging bigot?
4)      Or is he trying to win American hearts by showing us that he’s adopted, in the fashion of so many Hollywood personalities?”
Example 2: Michele Bachmann, a member of CCAI , has stated in multiple venues over the past few months that she“raised 23 foster children” including three mentions in the Republican Presidential Debate . 

Advice

Even if your campaign platform is about adoption legislation, stick to the points of the legislation. We know that setting your adopted or foster kids as props scores more “heart points” for you than the ol’ kissing the baby in the greeting line of yore, but it is time to stop this exploitation.

Whatever message that politicians are trying to send, please stop holding out your kids as some “reason” to elect you. Continuous association of yourself with the adoption industry and foster care system will just make us ask questions about how ethical your process was, if you had any favoritism and your overall involvement with adoption industry players. Don’t even try to cry “privacy” when you keep putting your kids out there.

Just Keep the Adoptive and Foster Kids Out of It…and Your Biological Kids Too!

REFORM Puzzle Piece

 

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