Adoption Under One Roof facilitates the column “Ask an Adoptee” in order to provide informed answers from an adoptee’s perspective, experience and knowledge base. The bloggers on Adoption Under One Roof recognize that we are all adoptive parents but not adoptees and would like to provide our readers with an opportunity to hear what adoptees have to say. We have several adoptees that have been kind enough to offer to participate in this column and we thank them for donating their time to our website.

If you would like to have an adoptee answer a question, contact us at aaa@ouradopt.com.

Dear Ask an Adoptee,

"If a mom is put in jail, can she lose her rights over her baby in Indiana?" 

Signed,

Worried

Dear Worried,

This question is vague in that it does not tell me which crime that the mother has committed or if she has been found guilty. There are certain crimes in which the parental rights will be involuntarily terminated. These crimes are found in this portion of the Indiana code. These crimes are murder, causing a suicide, voluntary/involuntary manslaughter, rape, criminal deviate conduct, child molestation/exploitation, sexual misconduct with a minor and incest. Most states usually allow a parent the opportunity to clean up their act so to speak. That time frame is usually a year from the date of birth of the child if the mother is pregnant.

Adoption Under One Roof has started this new column “Ask an Adoptee” in order to provide informed answers from an adoptee’s perspective, experience and knowledge base. The bloggers on Adoption Under One Roof recognize that we are all adoptive parents but not adoptees and would like to provide our readers with an opportunity to hear what adoptees have to say. We have several adoptees that have been kind enough to offer to participate in this column and we thank them for donating their time to our website.

If you would like to have an adoptee answer a question, contact us at aaa@ouradopt.com

Dear Ask an Adoptee,

I am desperate to find my older sister who was adopted at the age of six weeks of age. I only found this out recently, and it came as a huge shock as I am the youngest of the family.

Signed,

Desperate

Dear Desperate,

My first question in this case is the age of the adopted sister. I recommend asking your mother and father about this situation first. Find out what they know. Then I recommend going to the state and getting the adoptee's non-identifying information. Non-identifying information is the social, medical, age, and other such information on the adoptee. It will tell what type of family that the adoptee was placed in without giving out the identifying information.

Julia wrote Parenting Mistakes Saturday – Explain How Your Adopted Child Will Exit Family Living, Repeatedly back in October. It collected tons of comments (only 2 other blogs in our history have more comments). Among all the comments we received a suggestion from EriSycamore that we add an Ask The Adoptee section. We liked the idea and thought it would be a good balance to Adoption Maharishi blog which has focused on adoptive parent's questions.

So here it is... But for this to have value, we need people who were adopted or fostered to answer questions. And we need people to ask questions. We have things set up so that the questioner and the answerer can be anonymous.