"This book
is a 'must read'
for
every mother who lost her
precious infant to adoption."
Authors
Joe Soll
조살,
the author of Adoption Healing... a path to
recovery (one for adoptees and
one for mothers who lost children to
adoption and one for both) and co-author
of Evil
Exchange and Fatal
Flight is a diplomate psychotherapist
and lecturer internationally recognized as
an expert in adoption related issues and a
former adjunct professor of social work at
Fordham University Graduate School. He is
director and co-founder of Adoption
Crossroads in New York City, a non-profit
organization that helps
reunite and gives support to adoptees,
original parents and those who have
adopted.
Adoption Crossroads is affiliated with
more than 450 mental health institutions
and adoption search and support groups in
eight countries, representing more than
500,000 individuals whose lives have been
affected by adoption. Adoption
Crossroads is also dedicated to educating
the public about adoption issues,
preserving families and reforming current
adoption practices.
The director
and founder of the Adoption Counseling
Center in New York City, Mr. Soll is
also co-organizer and co-chair of the New
York State Adoption Agency Task Force; a
member of Matilda Cuomo's 1993 Advisory
Council on the “Adoption Option”;
conference chair and board member of the
American Adoption Congress and a trustee
of the International Soundex Reunion
Registry. He's a fellow of the American
Orthopsychiatric Association, the American
Association of Grief Counselors, and a
member of the Council on Social Work
Education, the National Association of
Social Workers and the National Academy of
Television Arts and Sciences .
Since 1989, Mr.
Soll has organized and coordinated ten
international mental health conferences on
adoption attended by mental health
professionals. He has been an expert
witness in court about adoption related
issues and has lectured widely at adoption
agencies, social work schools, mental
health facilities and mental health
conferences in the U.S. and Canada.
Mr. Soll has
appeared on radio and television more than
300 times, given more than 130 lectures on
adoption related issues and has been
featured or quoted in more than three
dozen newspapers, books and
magazines. He played himself in the
HBO original movie Reno Finds Her Mom. He
was featured in the 2001 Telly Award
winning Global Japan documentary,
“Adoption Therapist: Joe Soll" and in the
MediaStorm 2011 documentary
"Broken Lines" as well as profiled
in the International Museum of
Women.
His own
story as an adoptee has been presented
more than thirty times on Unsolved
Mysteries. He has walked the 250
miles from New York City to Washington,
D.C. six times to create public awareness
of the need for adoption reform. He
resides in Congers, NY and maintains an
office in New York City.
Karen Wilson
Buterbaugh is one of seven exiled
mothers whose personal experience of
surrender during the “baby scoop era” of
the 1960s was audio taped for
Everlasting,” a multimedia sound and video
installation by artist Ann Fessler.
The stories collected for this
exhibition, which showcased the
voices of mothers of loss from
the1950s and 1960's, will become part of
the women's oral history collection at
Harvard University's Schlesinger
Library.
In 1966,
Karen was first interred in two "wage
homes" with strangers, ironically without
wages, before being deposited as an
“inmate” at the Florence Crittenton
maternity facility in Washington
D.C. She completed her senior year
at the facility before giving birth to her
daughter, Michelle Renee, at George
Washington Hospital, Washington, D.C., in
July 1966. Both were returned to the
maternity facility and then separated on
August 1, 1966, after she and her baby had
spent ten days together in the facility’s
post-partum wing.
Thirty years later, she
hired an investigative agency to locate
her daughter, now named Maria. Contact was
made by phone through a friend in January
1997. Their in person reunion took place
in February 1998.
Karen has been writing
about adoption since 1997 and is the
author of two articles, “Setting the
Record Straight,” published by Moxie
Magazine (April 2001), and “Not By
Choice,” published by Eclectica
Magazine (January 2002).*
Her personal story of
adoption surrender, "Relative Strangers:
A Mother's Experience of Adoption
Loss" is scheduled for publication in
2004.