TITLE: Pros & Cons of Searching

DESCRIPTION

The decision to search or open up a relationship with birth family is a very personal decision. It is a complex topic with pros and cons to consider. Often, adoptees are faced with making the decision on their own. In this month's We The Experts: Adoptee Speaker Series 4 adoptees will be sharing their personal journey of how they came to decide “To Search or Not To Search”.

PANELISTS

Melissa Guida-Richards is a transracial adoptee. She was adopted in 1993 from Colombia to a family in the USA. She is an author and host of the Adoptee Thoughts podcast who has written essays about finding birth family on Huffpo about finding half-siblings on 23andMe, and her experience as a late-discovery adoptee. Find her on Insider, Level, Zora, Electric Literature, and her next book, THE WHITE SAVIOR MENTALITY, will be out in Fall 2021. She is excited to be on this panel to talk more about the nuances of searching for her biological family.

Suzanne Bachner is a domestic adoptee and native New Yorker, adopted into a closed adoption through Louise Wise Services. Suzanne’s award-winning hit play, The Good Adoptee,(TheGoodAdoptee.com) about her search for her origins and first/birth parents in the face of NYS’s sealed records, has toured across the US and has been part of law and life-changing adoptee rights advocacy. The Good Adoptee is currently being produced as a groundbreaking virtual theatre. As a once ambivalent and then completely obsessed searcher, Suzanne is passionate about empowering and supporting her fellow adoptees in their searches, stalls and decisions not to search.

Stephanie Oyler, a transracial adoptee, adopted out of the US foster care system at the age of four. She is a licensed master social worker, therapist, speaker, and writer. She currently leads the clinical support to all members of the adoption constellation pre-and-post adoption for her county's adoption unit. At the age of 18, Stephanie began the process of initiating the process through her adoption agency to reunite with her first family. She was in reunion with her first mother for almost 12 years before her mother passed away. She found her extended paternal family through Ancestry.com and is now in reunion with her paternal Aunt. Stephanie is also the founder and owner of Adoptee LIT, LLC which provides consultation and education to families impacted by adoption. She looks forward to speaking on this panel about the pros and cons of choosing to search or not and why she ultimately made the decision to find her first family.”

Shelise Gieseke is a transracial Korean adoptee raised by a white family in rural Minnesota. Shelise has volunteered and worked for Adoption Mosaic intermittently since 2009. She has also served as an editor for the blog and online magazine Land of Gazillion Adoptees (now dormant). Shelise is the only adoptee in her family. Her older brother, older sister, and younger brother are her parents’ biological children. In 2011, with the help of the adoptee organization G’OAL, Shelise traveled to Korea with her husband to search for her Korean family. While in Korea, she was able to visit her Korean adoption agency, view her original intake paperwork, and she also appeared on a Korean TV show. However, she did not find her Korean family. Shelise enjoys writing, speaking, and engaging with members of the adoption constellation about the adoptee experience.