A Compassionate Thief

By Phil Foley

There was a strange twist to a news article covering a burglary at an office complex.

Looking for a lead the police questioned several homeless people in the area of the burglary.  The officer provided the homeless people with background information on the services provided by the organization targeted in the theft. 

The very next morning the officer was called back to the scene and was shocked when informed that everything was returned along with a note of apology.

After the thief became aware that the items taken belonged to an organization that helps victims of sexual assault, the thief was compelled to return everything.   It turns out that the thief had compassion for victims of sexual assault. 

Part of the trauma suffered by victims of sexual assault is the stripping away of their dignity. How many times do they suffer additional cruelty at the hands of an ignorant and judgmental public pointing the finger of blame at them for what they had to endure?

Many of those who find themselves homeless understand this type of judgmental cruelty. They understand the loss of dignity for things that are out of their control.  When  the officer solicited their assistance they were able to show compassion for others and rise up to encourage the return of the stolen items. 

Victims of sexual assault can help themselves towards wholeness if they work to understand the limitations the general public has when it comes to  knowing the personal journeys they were forced to walk. The general public, the politicians, the church and society as a whole seldom show the compassion they should to those who have suffered from atrocities and calamities they cannot/will not fully understand. Victims of sexual assault can work to overcome  the pre judgment’s our society, culture and religions place on them. 

Perhaps Elizabeth Cady Stanton,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Cady_Stanton  said it best with the following insight:  The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. 

 

If you suffer from the devastation of sexual assault, raise your voice, if only to yourself, to identify who and what was done to you. 

Jim Morrison said: Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it's usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Morrison

The Brutality of Philomena Lee

By Kathleen Hoy Foley and Philip Foley

In case you don’t keep up with Hollywood, Philomena Lee, adoptee advocate and blogger, once voiceless and faceless to the world, is now famous.  Made so by Judi Dench who portrayed Philomena in a movie about her trials at the hands of the totalitarian Irish Catholic Church.  Philomena, now an old woman in her eighties, was banished to a convent for the sin of becoming pregnant out of wedlock when she was a teenager in Ireland.  The Catholic Church forced Philomena to place the child in the closed adoption system.  The film tells the story of two consenting and willing adults forging a connection.

 

Philomena now uses her new-found notarity to brutalize other women as she was once brutalized by the Catholic Church.  By championing the cause of pursuing, stalking, tracking, and hunting down private citizens by stranger adoptees, Philomena advocates abuse of innocent, often times elderly, women.  Philomena enspouses militant tatics to expose the names and information of women who have lived with devastating shame and held desparate secrets for much of their lives.

Philomena’s situation is specifically her experience and must not be generalized and used to justify and encourage the criminal behavior of bullying and stalking old women.  Philomena ignores the significant issue of sexual abuse, the horror of impregnation by rape, the desperation of a girl impregnated against her will with no legal means of termination.  The confidential adoption process stood as the single means of rescue.  Those girls are now aging and elderly women being sought by the elderly Philomena.  It is woman on woman abuse.

No individual, no state, no church, no laws must be permitted to force a girl/woman to make public the most intimate details of her past, or forced to reveal and relive the most traumatic time of her life, or be bullied into apology for being a victim of an unwanted pregnancy.  Confidential adoption equals a catastrophic, unwanted, traumatic, crisis pregnancy.  Hunting down a woman because of what happened to her in the intimate confines of her body is ignorant, heartless, and abusive.  

Women In Hiding Press supports consenting and willing adults who have the adoption process in common forging a mutual connection.  We support a national/worldwide registry where biological sources and adoptees can mutually connect. 

Philomena was condemned by the Catholic Church as an undesirable, just like the aging and elder women she believes it is OK to hunt down, marginalize, harass and eventually destroy for selfish purposes.  As thinking adults we must remember what hunting down, marginalizing and harassing innocent people really is.  Elder women are often powerless and voiceless, as once was Philomena.  These women, victims of horrendous ordeals, must be protected with compassion, not threatened with destruction. 

So it is that Ms. Philomena Lee is outraged that the State of Pennsylvania is not currently willing to facilitate this hunting of elder and aging women because they will not open sealed, confidential adoption records.  Philomena stands outraged that the Pennsylvania legislation is thwarting her efforts demanding all access to the confidential past of elder women’s lives and screaming unfair!! Oh, the injustice of being hindered from exploding an old woman’s life to bits…

We are thankful to the legislators in Pennsylvania that have the wisdom to understand that sealed confidential adoption records were established for very valid and life affirming reasons.  We must protect the aging and elderly women who do not have the physical, emotional and/or financial resources to protect themselves from elder abusers like Philomena.  

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2451155/Philomena-Lee-To-think-nuns-told-son-searching-me.html#ixzz2yyPvqwty

Mutual Consent and the Burger King Baby

By Philip Foley

Personal stories like this cause me great concern.  First because they are “Personal.”

Another  concern is that they perpetuate the myth of Love and Loss and always use the misnomer of Birth Mother.  Ms. Deprill’s mother is Brenda Hollis, the woman who nurtured her from infancy and is still supporting her today.  Ms. Pochek, woman that gave birth to Ms. Deprill, was the victim of a horrific violent crime, placed in an impossible situation and made the only decision she believed available to her 16 year old self.

Both Ms. Deprill and Ms. Pochek made the mutual personal decision to meet.  This is their choice and should not in any way imply that other victims impregnated by rape want to make that choice.  Again; “Personal Choice.”

http://www.today.com/moms/very-overwhelming-woman-dubbed-burger-king-baby-reunites-birth-mom-2D79511811

Thousands of women in this country now in their 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond experienced catastrophic pregnancies when they were teenagers and with no other options available, were forced to give birth.  For many of them, being rescued by the confidential adoption process, gave them their lives back.  Giving birth does not make a girl a mother.  Though our society chooses to see it differently.  Birth mother—a term forced on girls impregnated by rape is completely offensive. 

Being hunted down by an adoptee, being publicly exposed to family and friends; while being subjected to the condemnation it promises is a devastating trauma.  Kathleen and I have emails—all anonymous—from such women drenched in pain.  One woman’s husband divorced her after an adoptee showed up at their door.  Another woman’s beloved brother abandoned her for the adoptee.   

    

While our country is in love with the romance of happy endings, flesh and blood elder women are being terrorized by threats of being found, with many of them forced to endure those threats materialized.

There are many other people in both Ms. Deprill and Ms. Pochek’s lives that will be impacted by their mutual personal choice.  

I hope it all works out for them.

Do These Women Get Paid To Speak this Insanity?

By Philip Foley

If it wasn’t so tragic, I would have to laugh at this insanity. Do conservative women really believe this nonsense.  Do they really want to be chained to a male for support.  Do they still drink the kool aid.  With all their education and privilege they still do not recognize that they are their own authority. 

Read this LA Times Article by Robin Abcarian and make up your own mind.

Blame women's unhappiness on feminism? Sure, say conservative gals

http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-ra-feminism-women-conservatives-20140403,0,5693630.story#ixzz2xvUwHond

An all-female panel discussion at the conservative Heritage Foundation which chose to "celebrate" Women’s History Month last week by inviting a trio of professional women to trash the very movement to which they most assuredly owe their status in the workplace

One of the panelists, Columnist Mona Charen stated the (here we go again) happiest women are protected and supported by men "during those times in their life when they are having and raising children."

"Feminism," she said, "disdains this natural urge in women, urging them to rely only on themselves."

You may also be interested in reading Kathleen’s blog from July 3, 2013 PAULA DEEN, LANCE ARMSTRONG & KUMBAYA

This passage reminds me of what Ms. Charen and the others are trying to sell us.

It’s so romantic reminiscing how her great granddaddy’s slaves were treated just like family, isn’t it?  Except for the manacles…  Oh, don’t let’s think about that.  Pass the fried butter, sweetie pie.  We can’t bother ourselves with the truth…it’s so…so…unappetizing.

The War over A Woman’s Reproductive Rights Continues in Texas

By Philip Foley

 

Health clinics offering abortions in Texas filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday to block a new state rule that could shut down more than half of the state’s remaining providers this fall, forcing women seeking an abortion in southern and western Texas to drive several hundred miles each way or go out of state.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/us/texas-abortion-providers-lawsuit.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

An unwanted conception is a militant invasion into a girl’s body, a woman’s body; biological warfare waged inside her skin.  It is physical and psychological attack.  Every cell plundered.  Every breath conscripted.  Her intimate organs battered, conquered.  Assaulted by her bodily systems.  Her external self disfigured.  Permanently scarred.  Her spirit brutalized by overwhelming shame.  She is cast aside while forced to inhabit a body turned enemy, tethered to a carcass that no longer belongs to her.  The agony of this physical and psychological violence endured by girls and women impregnated against their will is drowned out by the shouts of moral accusers, disregarded by cowards, and contorted to fit inside the sugarcoated fantasies of the naive and ignorant where such girls and women are forever imprisoned.

This excerpt is from Kathleen’s article Adoption= Crisis Pregnancy: To read the entire article go to our Blog of January 30, 2013