Talking out about adoption is not always easy. In fact, almost never.

Talking freely about about our children lost to adoption is something that does not come easy, no matter how open one is about it. Reading Stone Diaries recently, I came across a passage where the protagonist, Daisy, is glad to escape from her home town because everybody there knows her marriage of two weeks was not consummated. Her upper-class husband was a secret drunk who fell out of a third-story window on their honeymoon in France. Once back home, Daisy's doctor discovers that she is still a virgin, and tells no one but his wife, who tells no one but her best friend who tells no one but...and eventually this startling news reaches her ex-mother-in-law. Who blames the lack of marital consummation on Daisy, who must be "frigid." Daisy  then became a woman whose story enveloped her around like a coat she cannot throw off.

The shock of recognition hit me hard when I read that passage because that is how I often feel about my status as a birth/first mother. That I am a woman with a story. That precedes me into any situation. Sometimes I merely want to be a woman without such an interesting story.

So I often keep my mouth shut. Do I announce to casual strangers, like someone I might meet at work (if I worked out of the home) that I am a first/birth mother, walking freely among the non-birth mothers of the world? No. Do I tell a dinner partner whom I have never met before that I had a child who I gave up for adoption, and that I searched and found her, and now she is dead, when asked if I have children? Do I sometimes just say no? Depends. (Actually, it's easier now that my daughter is dead, because saying that my daughter died usually kills further questioning and only elicits sympathy.) Do I join a new group of people and introduce myself, if asked, Do you have children? as a woman who gave up a child for adoption, or a birth/first mother? No. That's a question I have dreaded ever since 1966, the year my daughter was born and I surrendered her.

I have to have some privacy about this. I have to not let my adoption sadness and grief and activism take over every aspect of my life. I can not handle being on a soap box every moment. Thank god for good friends, because with them, adoption is only a part of who I am.

If you are a woman with a story such as this, first and foremost most people go, Ohh that's too bad, and Ahh, how are you today? Where's your daughter, how did her parents handle this, did you regret giving her up, why did you do it, who is the father, why didn't you get married?  That takes up the rest of the lunch/hour/group session/afternoon. I do not want to be a woman "with a story," a story that precedes me everywhere, obliterates all other information about me. It's what Jane talked about in her last post.

Sometimes I just want to be a woman joining a reading club, a writer and magazine editor, someone with Francophile tendencies, someone who finds amazing stuff at the local thrift shops, a fan of Elizabeth George mysteries and Preston Sturgis movies, a lover of triple-creme cheese, Indian food, horseback riding, dogs and ballet. It is exhausting to be first and foremost an activist birth mother.

Some may think that because I wrote Birthmark way back in the dark ages of the open-records movement--and been interviewed about adoption reform literally fifty or sixty times in the media--it is a piece of cake to speak out all the time about adoption issues. Wrong. If I have to debate a gang of angry adoptive parents (who usually turn out also to be lawyers with their tongues sharpened), it's emotionally draining and exhausting. If people wonder why I sometimes are not overly sympathetic to adoptive parents without knowing more about them, it's because so many have been gunning for me over the years. One guy I knew slightly told me at a party that he knew people "who wanted to kill me." They lived in his building, he said, they were friends, and yep, they were adoptive parents.

On the day in 1993 that Baby Jessica/real name: Anna Schmidt was returned to her natural parents, Dan Schmidt and Cara Clausen, from the the DeBoers, the couple who fought in the courts for two-and-a-half years, I was the only one speaking up for the Schmidts on the then MacNeal-Lehrer Report on PBS against a group of about six people, including adoptive mother and Harvard professor, Elizabeth Bartholet. You bet that was exhausting. Similar hostile interviews were common after Birthmark came out in 1979.

On the other hand, having people know who I am (reunited birth mother, adoption-reform activist, writer) does make some encounters easier, since I do not have to explain this part of my life. People who might say nasty things about birth mothers are likely to hold their tongue if I'm within earshot. Prospective adoptive parents do not invite me to Gladney fund raisers. Yes, the agency urges prospective adopters to have them, and adopting parents I know held a cocktail party for that purpose. I was not on the guest list. They got a boy soon after.

However, if someone has never talked to a first mother before (that she is aware of), and the situation allows, she is typically riveted in exploring every possible aspect of the story. She has a million questions, and so it goes for the next hour. I remember spending most of an afternoon at a friend's house one summer day and her sister-in-law was full of such questions as we paddled about in a pool. There was nothing to do but answer her questions; to do anything else would have been rude.

But if I can do so, and say, I'm at a social event and someone wants to launch into a discussion of the pros and cons of open records, adoption, my searching, whatever...I do what adoption-reform pioneer Florence Fisher taught me: She says, I am at a social event, I want to have a good time, this is such an emotional issue, I just can't talk about it now, OK? Smile broadly, hope for understanding. If that doesn't work, I add, You know, giving up my daughter was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and revisiting it now is like talking about the time I was raped. (I was.)

I put Florence's advice once to good use on a couple of occasions. Once I "helped" a friend's college-age daughter who was to argue that "adoption records ought to remain sealed" in a debating class (true story). At her father's request I sent her a packet of material (though what I sent argued for the opposite of what she was looking for) about sealed records. I don't know what her father was thinking, as he had already met my daughter, and knew that I searched for her. I did not hear from the young woman, or learn what happened in debating class. Several months later, however, here she was at a Christmas party. She introduced herself and a half hour later called me over and introduced me to another woman as, "This is Lorraine who wrote a book about adoption."

Gulp. Who is this woman? I'm thinking, Somebody about to adopt? Err..."This is a woman who wrote a book about adoption, too," the young woman making this awkward introduction said. "Bye." And then our go-between was gone.

Is this woman my enemy, I'm wondering now. Is she an adoptive mother against open records? About to adopt? What? It turned out that she had been a social worker (not an adoptive mother) who indeed had written a book about adopting for adoptive parents. We stared at each other uncomfortably. After hearing about her book, I said my piece about not talking about this at a party. We parted and have been cool to one another on the infrequent occasions our paths cross. We smile, nod, and turn away.

Being public about your status as a birth mother and lobbying for open records in Albany or Trenton or Boston or Philadelphia or Austin is a whole different ball game. You are with people of like mind, you meet legislators and their aides and tell your story succinctly and hope to open minds and hearts, and it is exhilarating, a great good feeling that gives back more than you give--even when you encounter the folks who will never vote for open records for adoptees and most certainly, not for first/birth mothers.

But sometimes someone I've just met strikes me the right way, and I end up revealing my story. I've told strangers in airports who turn out to be understanding and sympathetic adoptive mothers; I told someone sitting next to me at a dinner party and it turned out that she too, had given up a child many years before, and we spent the next hour talking barely above a whisper; I once told a man I met on a vacation half-way around the world and it turned out he was a birth father and now, with plenty of money, wished he could find a way to help his child, if he needed it. I could send him to college, he said. Just before Birthmark was available, I told a stranger in a bar in Sag Harbor, and he turned out to be adopted, and was excited with the idea of what I was doing. I never met him again. However, a few weeks later, he sent a dozen red roses to me on the set of the first media appearance I did for the book. I never knew how he even knew where I would be--the interview was in Detroit, where I grew up, it was not a national talk show.

I think about him now and then. I hoped he found whom he was really looking for, and she was gladdened in her heart. We birth/first mothers have to make the call every day: whether to tell or not. Speaking out and speaking up is what we need to do, but sometimes a woman gets weary and needs a little room.

Speaking Out Makes A Difference!!!

When I considered writing an article rebutting the adoption-promo piece in the Oregon State Bar Bulletin (“Family Man,” June 2009), I was nervous. Unlike Lorraine, who told her story to the whole world in 1979 in Birthmark, I was deep into the closet until my daughter Megan found me in 1997. I did appear in a 1998 ad for Ballot Measure 58 (giving adoptees the right to obtain their original birth certificates) but I quickly changed the subject if anyone mentioned it.

Frankly I did not want my colleagues to know that I had had sex with the wrong man at the wrong time and didn’t have the good sense to use birth control or have an abortion. I had never even been able to explain to myself why I, a middle class woman with a college degree, had become pregnant at 23. Being pregnant “out of wedlock” was for naive 16 year olds who hadn’t been taught the facts of life.

I thought of my “unwed motherhood” as a personal failing, not because I believed sex outside of marriage was wrong (I didn’t) but because it did not fit with my preferred view of myself. I had spent years trying to understand why this had happened. If I could not reconcile my actions with the Jane I worked hard to present, I could not expect others to do so. Even after my reunion with Megan, I continued a dual existence: a professional woman, a wife, and a mother who most certainly would not have borne an illegitimate child who kept her mouth shut when acquaintances spoke positively of adoption; and a birth mother easily sharing her experience when in adoption circles.

Another concern was that both my husband and one of my daughters were members of the Bar and surely it would be embarrassing for them.

On the other hand, if we are going to do something about the injustices perpetrated on young mothers every day, we need to reach out to people who don’t know about us. At my age, it was now or never. So with some anxiety, I asked Lorraine to help me write an article to counter the rosy picture of adoption the Bulletin presented to Oregon attorneys.

After the Bulletin editor refused to print our article, we posted it here. I emailed the Oregon Family Lawyers’ and the Oregon Women Lawyers’ lists alerting them to the post. When the first responses came to my inbox, I just peeked at them, fearful of what they would say. After all, attorneys, particularly women attorneys, are in the “adopting class,” not the "surrendering class," people with means who pursue careers until it’s too late or single sex couples.

Much to my joy, I found only positive responses in my inbox. And, most exciting, an attorney who wanted to join me in reforming the Oregon consent law. He had represented a birth mother who attempted unsuccessfully to rescind her consent for the adoption of her son, signed within two days of giving birth while still in the hospital. Oregon has one of the worst laws in the country with no waiting period before which a mother may sign an irrevocable surrender. I’m meeting with the attorney and others soon to develop a bill and strategy.

Here are excerpts from the responses:

A legal aid lawyer:

"Right on. It would be great to get Willamette Week [a weekly tabloid with a long record of exposing the peccadilloes of powerful Oregonians] to do a story on adoptions from the birth mother and birth father point of view.”

An attorney whose wife is a birth mother:

“Keep up the fight for birth mothers; they have little or no voice and too few advocates.”

A Family Law attorney:

"Thanks for this article which focuses attention on the impact of the happy story of adoption (for the adoptive parents) on the mothers involved. I’m embarrassed to say that I never thought about this much before, but I will from now on.”

An adoptee:

“I liked the article – it must have been very hard to write. …Just wanted to tell you that I do know from talking to my own birth mother, how hard it was for her. … She says that me coming to look for her ‘made a bad thing come untrue.’ I feel so lucky that I get to know her, that everyone, me, my family, her other children, all have the chance to know each other. The attorney who brokered the deal actually gets the most demerits.… [My birthmother and I] discovered that he told a few lies to make the thing happen. Nothing that had a material impact on the overall situation in the end, but despicable nonetheless. I won’t say who it was as he still practices....

…. I want to tell you that, at least in my lexicon, the term “birth mother” confers not shame or denigration, but honor and sacrifice. The more I learn about how some babies ‘become available’ for adoption, the more saddened I am, for our society still needs for children to be adopted, it’s just getting shady and losing dignity. ….

Who at the bar should hear from people like me, objecting to the lack of balance?”

A litigator:

"I and my firm represented a birth mother who, after giving birth prematurely, changed her mind the minute her child was swept from her arms by the eager adopting parents, less than 24 hours after the birth.

We went to the court of appeals, making many of the arguments in this article, about Oregon laws allowing 3 days to rescind a consumer sales contract, but no time period for a birth mother to change her mind. Physical relinquishment finalizes the adoption. Period. …

Having been told by our court of appeals that it was for the legislature not the courts to decide whether Oregon's adoption laws deny birth mothers their rights(!), I could only tell our client that when her baby grows up and they find one another again, that she will be able to tell her she did everything possible to try and keep her.

This sad case still haunts me. I am so glad there is at least a forum on this issue…. Thank you for speaking to this issue of gross injustice."

Faith Ireland, a retired Washington Supreme Court Justice and birth mother whom we quoted in the blog:

"Thanks for the update. I continue to speak, where possible, about my experience as a birthmother and work to overcome the archaic and counterproductive shame which surrounds adoption. The point you make about poverty replacing shame as the primary reason for adoption is an important and often overlooked one.

A note from the Ethica rep in Oregon, Ansley Bernatz:

“This is an excellent article. What is happening here in Oregon is very similar to what is happening to women in Korea, so I understand your point all too well. It really is a human/women's rights issue rather than an adoption issue.”

Finally, I received requests from a couple of law professors asking for copies with the footnotes and references.

As for my husband and daughter, no problem.

Trafficking reports raise heart-wrenching questions for adoptive parents

An adoptive mother who found First Mother Forum offensive posted some inflammatory comments to the previous post about the Women In Hiding website we wrote about the other day. She, as have others before her, said that we were a bunch of angry women with issues and that we could not call ourselves "mothers," because, well, because we were not. She also wrote:

There are such hateful references on this blog, accusing adoptive parents of stealing and buying babies. It's disgusting that a woman who regrets her decision not to parent then attacks the very people who gave the child a loving home and 24/7 care.

Her accusations have been gnawing at me since, and then came a news story (11/09/09) from the Los Angeles Times about people, including, Mark Brown and his wife, Nicki Genovese, who are plagued with the thought that their daughter from China might have been kidnapped:

They had just returned to Los Angeles in 2005 after adopting a Chinese foundling in south-central Hunan province when they read the news reports about trafficking. Police had arrested 27 members of a ring that since 2002 had abducted or bought as many as 1,000 children in Guangdong province and sold them to orphanages in Hunan.

The story makes clear what we have been trying, in our small way at First Mother Forum, to get out to the world, that child trafficking does exist, and it exists not only for sexual exploitation, but also simply to provide willing Westerners who want children to "complete their families," a phrase that always makes me sick in the knees because it almost always refers to adopting. The Times story notes that A U.S. congressional commission that monitors human rights in China said in a 2005 report that "trafficking of women and children in China remains pervasive," with many infants and young children abducted for adoption and household services. According to an estimate cited in the report, 250,000 women and children were sold in China during 2003. (Not all go to Westerners who get them "laundered" through seemingly legitimate agencies: some are sold for child labor, others to wealthy Chinese families who want a boy, or, in some cases, a girl to marry their son, because the Chinese one-child-per-family law and the adoption situation not surprisingly has led already to a shortage of marriageable young women. The message here? Mess with Mother Nature and you get a stiff kick in the behind.)

China has cracked down on many family-planning officials and orphanage workers found guilty of trafficking, with some violators sentenced to death or long prison terms, according to Chinese news agencies. But according to Jane Liedtke, founder of Our Chinese Daughters Foundation, a nonprofit organization that offers programs and tours for families with children from China, the United States has treated China differently from other countries. U.S. families, for instance, are not allowed to adopt from Cambodia, Vietnam and Guatemala because of evidence of trafficking or other corruption.

"As a country, we should come out and say the Chinese government has to demonstrate what it's doing to prevent" trafficking, she said. But she added that it would be tragic to close off adoptions from China because "there are still way too many children who need help."

The Canadian government opened an investigation in October after The Times documented numerous cases in which Chinese babies were confiscated from their parents by local government officials and sold for foreign adoption.

Some adoptive parents "looked the other way" when they heard reports about child trafficking in Hunan province years ago, said Liedtke. Now that trafficking cases have been documented not just in Hunan but also in Guizhou, Guangxi and other provinces, "people say, 'Oh, I didn't know. My agency didn't tell me. If I'd known, I wouldn't have adopted.' "

To that, Liedtke responds: "Oh, yes, you would have. You wanted a child." 

Do I wonder if any of the children whose parents I know who adopted from foreign countries (two from  Guatemala, three from China, one talking about adopting from Ethiopia) have children who were stolen? You bet I do. I think about it all the time when I see the kids, some of whom I've bought presents for.

What do I say to people who think we are accusing them of "stealing" children?  I'm repeating here what I wrote at the blog because we are First Mother Forum  need to make clear where we stand on issues (as so many accuse of what we are not):

Dear Anon:

While you may feel that we accuse adopting people of "stealing" or "buying" their children, we are not doing that directly because they are not telling someone to go out and, say, kidnap a young child for a fee. However, this does happen--and happen often--in poorer countries such as Vietnam (where women were told they could not leave the hospital with their babies unless they came up with an exorbitant amount of money) and Nepal and India, where cases of outright kidnapping have been proven, and in China, where government officials are now on trial for extorting children from their parents.

When the Guatemalan government investigated adoptions from a certain period of time in the Nineties, they discovered that over half of the more than 600 adoptions they looked occurred because the mother was killed for the purpose of taking the baby, or was kidnapped, to be sold to unscrupulous baby brokers who appear, to willing and anxious adoptive parents, as ethical adoption lawyers. Adoptive parents who willingly adopt from overseas without looking into why a country has so many children available then become part of the corrupt system, just as, say, people who collect stolen art without investigating its provenance.

Does that make the adopters liable? Yes. Yes. Yes. If you doubt this, simply do a search at firstmotherforum.com [it's it in upper right corner or the bottom of the blog] for "corruption in international adoption" or any of the countries mentioned, and you will be directed to the original source of these statements. You will find that you will end up reading publications such as Foreign Policy or Mother Jones, or directed to CNN and NPR. The stories do not get a lot of play in this country because the public does not want to know.

We have several adoptive mothers who regularly read this blog (see their posts above) and they know that we are not making this up, or accusing anyone directly of ordering someone to steal a child. But it happens. Adoption, particularly overseas adoption, is rife with corruption because there is a buck to be made by supplying the world with freshly-minted healthy babies.

As for adoptions in this country, religious organizations such as the Mormons and agencies with a strong Christian connection (such as Bethany) encourage women to give up their babies in large part simply to grease the wheels and keep the business of adoption going. You can even find websites that list adoption "situations" and show a price tag--white infants go for much more than African-American or mixed race babies.* Without "product," agencies would lose business and in fact, go out of business. And while you personally may be honoring your child's heritage and first/birth mother, many many adopting parents do not. In open adoption cases, they promise one thing and do another, and that is what happened to at least one of the people who has posted here. We do not hate those who adopt. We hate the system that takes babies from mothers and does not offer them the help they would need to keep and raise the child.

One last thought: you refer to the decision to relinquish a child as excruciating and selfless. Excruciating, right. Not selfless. And not "loving," as many adoptive parents like to say, and believe. If the most loving thing a mother could do was to give a child up for a better life, many, many poor mothers would be offering their babies freely. Giving up a child is totally an act of desperation, and surrender to what seems the obvious: that the mother does not have the money or the support system to raise that child. But she remains his or her mother for all her life. While you have been disturbed by much of what you read here, I hope this at least has made you rethink some of your assumptions. And if your son finds himself calling the other woman "mother," please accept that this does not diminish your role as "mom" and "mother" in his life. He knows he has two mothers, and I sincerely hope you can come to accept this with peace and equanimity.

peace to you--lorraine
__________________________________________
*With thanks to Osolomama for alerting us to this website. 

Korean Adoptees Fighting to Reform Adoption Laws in their Homeland

An amazing story out of South Korea the other day: Six Korean adoptees--adopted in other countries--filed an appeal with the Anti-corruption and Civil Rights Commission in South Korea last year to request a probe into irregularities in their adoption documents and possible illegal procedures at local adoption agencies, according to the JoongAngDaily in South Korea.  


These adult adoptees have returned to their homeland searching for their roots and in the process discovered that the agencies lied to their parents--birth and adoptive--about their adoptions, how they ended up at an agency and why, and what records are available. They are involved in a full-fledged battle to reform adoption laws and procedures, and amazingly enough, they’re getting help from some government heavyweights. If they succeed this would be the first case in the world we know of where adoptees returned to their original country and changed adoption practices through legislation.

The National Assembly in South Korea is taking up the issue, and the sense is that the country is embarrassed by the huge number of children that left the country during the great Korean baby scoop era: According to the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, 161,588 Korean children were sent overseas for adoption from 1958 through 2008. Korea is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of children behind China, Guatemala, Russia and Ethiopia as of 2007, according to World Partners Adoption Inc.
 
Again, if successful, the group of six will drastically change the landscape of domestic and international adoption in Korea. A lawmaker added that Korea “still has a stigma attached to it as one of the major exporters of children.”

There's more to the story, at the Korean newspaper website, and as a follow up to our report the other day about Korean adoption, we thought you might be interested. Hell, we thought this was amazingly interesting to anyone with any sort of adoption connection.

Can China be next? But we already know that six government officials are on trial there for offering for adoption to wealthy Westerners healthy girl children who should not have been available at all, who had parents who wanted to keep them. And then there is adoption corruption in Nepal, and Guatemala and India...where money is involved, child trafficking exists. And then there is the rush to have your children raised by "Christians" in Ethopia....does this give me a headache? Yes. Does this make me angry? Yes. Can this be stopped? Not so sure. Money talks. Money always talks. --lorraine

The Wacky Website of a Woman in Hiding (from her daughter)

O What a tangled web we weave...Remember Kathleen Hoy Foley, the birth mother terrible--oh excuse me, she wants to be called "biological source" or even better, "biological cunt"--who is loudly and publicly opposing open records in New Jersey after being contacted by her daughter?

Apparently it is not enough to be "outed" by your own flesh-and-blood, it is important to go further public and be in the papers, as the above link shows. Well, there's more--Ms. Foley has her own delectable website, Woman In Hiding, where she posts all sorts of venomous verbiage against adoptee rights, to wit:

Today these women [that would be us], many of them elderly [well, I am a grandmother of a teenager], face threats of being hunted down and found by stranger-adoptees [au contraire, I actually found my daughter] and the dread of their secret pasts being exposed to friends and family [I welcomed that], including their children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren [well, I hope my other granddaughter--the one my daughter surrendered to adoption in Wisconsin contacts me].  I was subjected to that naked exposure and it is an anguish unimaginable, practically unexplainable to those who have not suffered such inexcusable public humiliation.[Uh, really? You poor thing.]

Foley rants on in pages called "Mean and Nasty;" "Speaking the Ugly," and pathetically, under "Strategies," how to deal with the unwanted "stranger-adoptee" who might come knocking at your door after you hang up on them. As for what she wants to be called?

Birth mother—a slur that branded me a slut; a whore.  The label that blamed me for getting pregnant from rape.  The label that ignored the rapes; turned my torment into a hot and heavy teenage romance with me unable to keep my legs closed....Biological Source is a description I can force-feed myself, grudgingly accept.  It is, after all, the truth and nothing gets to change that.  However, I prefer Biological Cunt.  Biological Cunt speaks my personal truth.  It does not fake a smile and make nice.

She talks about her husband, Phil, who tirelessly campaigns against giving adopted people their birth right, as in, a name, and an original identity. It's all so sick sick sick but then, I guess we have to expect that people like Foley would pop up here and there. She could belong to the club of women seeking the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, with thanks to Pope for that great line. But most of them are institutionalized. I could go on but Osolomama, an adoptive mother extraordinaire and one of our regular readers, also wrote about Foley's folly at her blog and you can take it from there.

Well, amazingly enough, her daughter, Elaine Penn, rather than be abashed by her biological mother's scorn and outright rejection, is a staunch supporter of the legislation that would open records for almost all adoptees in New Jersey. After the Catholic Charities conception confusion of Phil Bloete, who thought he was reunited with his birth father, only to find out through a DNA test that they were not a match, Penn wrote this letter to Francis Dolan, head of NJ Catholic Charities, as he ponders whether or not his organization can support open records, as does, say, the archdiocese of Albany in New York.

I am a Catholic Charities Adoptee through  Trenton. Please help us convince Assemblyman Roberts to bring A752 to the Assembly Floor for a vote before 2009 is over.

It seems considering the recent news, it would be beneficial for Catholic Charities to help get this law passed. That way, your organization could focus on the positive contributions it can make to society, instead of draining your resources fighting old, worn battles. Bill A752 would give birth mothers a year to be able to black out their name, along with leaving medical history. It's a good compromise -- and this is the time for compromise.

I know something about your old fights because Kathleen Hoy Foley is my birth mother. She's been blasting away at me, my deceased birth father and Catholic Charities for quite awhile now. (I'm sure you've seen her in the Philadelphia newspapers and on CBS-NY news.) The sooner that this law gets passed, the quicker her soapbox gets taken away. These fights will no longer have anything to do with Catholic Charities.

Please consider helping us pass this Bill and finally having it behind all of us.

As a post script to this story, Penn was recently featured in a front page story in The [NJ] Star-Ledger:

Elaine Penn, a 45-year-old adoptee from the Trenton-based Catholic Charities, can’t get a passport with her current adoption certificate. Finalized in March 1966, well after her birth in Sept. 1964, it came later than the one-year gap the federal government allows in order to use adoption certificates as a form of identification.

And when she found a lump near her armpit after a mammogram several years ago, she wasn’t immediately able to provide her doctors with an accurate medical history. 

“I asked if it would help if the doctor knew my family medical history and she said ‘Absolutely,’” Penn said. “The insurance companies, they’re not going to pay for extra tests and treatments without a history.”

Unfortunately, attempts to contact Penn’s biological mother, Kathleen Foley, in 1998 were rebuffed, although Foley’s lawyer did provide Penn, who now lives in Howell, with a medical history. 

As regular readers know, I have little sympathy for those closeted birth/first/real mothers who will not acknowledge and meet the children they surrendered to adoption. If any of them are reading this, please consider what your rejection does to your child, who has already grown up with the sense of rejection that adoption can not help but infer, no matter how great one's adoptive parents are. I was struck by this once again in reading through a reunion story this morning, when a thrilled and relieved reunited adoptee Raymond Deschesne, of Boulder city, Colorado, says he blurted this out during his first phone call to his mother, Kathie Walker: he asked her what he had done wrong, why she let him be adopted. 

He added, I don't know why I said that, I was two or three months old when I was adopted. 

But there is hurt that comes before language, and that is the hurt that can not be erased. It can be accepted, but not erased.

Oh, my baby, my daughter, you did nothing wrong. Nothing at all. I am so very sorry that you were adopted. Like I told your daughter, my granddaughter, I made a mistake.


photo of Jane

 _____________________
A bill in New Jersey that would give adopted individuals the right to their own birth certificates passed the Senate with an overwhelming majority (31-7) but is stalled in the Human Services Committee of the Assembly. Speaker of the Assembly is Joseph J. Roberts, Democrat of Camden, who so far has refused to bring the bill up for a floor vote. (Live in his district? We need you to call him--now: 586-384-5862. Outgoing governor John Corzine has stated his support of the bill and will sign it if we can get it passed! The bill does have an out for people like Ms. Foley, as birth parents have a year in which to object, and their names will not be released, though updated medical information is asked for. The New Jersey Coalition for Adoption Reform and Education is holding a press conference at the capitol in Trenton on Monday, November 23rd. If you can attend, or otherwise lend your support, please contact birth mother Judy Foster (jfoster@optonline.net) or adoptee Pam Hasegawa (pamhasagawa@gmail.com). Anyone with a New Jersey adoption connection of any sort should raise your voice and act up now. This won't happen unless legislators hear from you. And you.

Korean Adoptee Meets Birth/First Family in Seoul

An addendum to yesterday's post about Koreans reuniting with their birth parents back in South Korea: The Harrison (Arkansas) Daily Times has a long story about the reunion of Willie Whitescarver, or Jo Kyung Nam, with his natural family, including his birth/first mother, Choi Chun-Hak of Seoul, in October. Willie, a 54-year-old building contractor in Harrison, took his wife, their three children and spouses with them to meet her family.

From the Daily Times: Now, at her home near Seoul, [Whitescaver's] 81-year-old mother is wearing a necklace her American son gave her, with half of a metal coin dangling from a chain, and back here in Arkansas, Willie is wearing a necklace with the other half of the coin. On the coins, the Mizpah blessing from Genesis is inscribed: “May the Lord watch between me and thee while apart from one another.” Willie gave the necklace to his mother as a gift during their visit.

 Whitescaver said he hopes to go back to Seoul to help the Holt International Adoption Agency and orphanage, which facilitated his adoption, to repair and rebuild its building, and after that, bring his mother to Arkansas for a visit. Meeting his birth mother was “the experience of a lifetime,” Whitescarver said.

The story at the Daily Times page has photographs, including a shot of how the story ran in a Korean newspaper. In light of our discussion yesterday about educating adoptive parents to not feel rejected if their children seek out their natural parents (see Osolomama's comment) , we wish we had a comment from the adoptive mother, who lives near Whitescarver in Arkansas. The comments at the end of the newspaper story are all positive--you might want to add your own. --lorraine

Adopted from Korea and in Search of Identity

The hunt for the natural parents of Korean adoptees made news today with the release of a new report from the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. And there are a lot of people who fall into this category: From 1953 to 2007, an estimated 160,000 South Korean children were adopted by people from other countries, most of them in the United States, and they make up the largest group of transracial adoptees in the United States, according to BEYOND CULTURE CAMP: PROMOTING HEALTHY IDENTITY FORMATION IN ADOPTION.

Many of the 179 Korean adoptees with two Caucasian parents who took part in the survey said they began to think of themselves more as Korean when they attended college or moved to ethnically diverse neighborhoods as adults. And this surprising finding caught my eye:

An unexpected finding was that a high percentage (49%) of the Korean adoptees had searched as well and 30 percent had experienced contact with birth relatives, despite the common assumption that those adopted from Korea have little access to information about their families of origin.

Also from the report:

While most Korean adopted respondents reported achieving some level of comfort with their race/ethnicity as adults, a significant minority (34%) remained uncomfortable or only somewhat comfortable. Two factors were significant predictors of their comfort with racial/ethnic identity: self-esteem (those having higher self-esteem felt more comfortable with their race) and their scores on the MEIM (stronger ethnic identification predicted greater comfort with their race/ethnicity). Also, experiencing less racial discrimination and having higher life satisfaction were associated with greater comfort with their racial/ethnic identity. For Koreans, experiences of racial teasing - which were prevalent - also were associated with lower life satisfaction and lower self-esteem.

While the report goes on to recommend that adopting parents become better prepared to deal with cross-cultural issues, and we heartily agree with that, we also think that that is like making sure that the ambulance is at the bottom of the cliff. Instead of telling adopting parents how to deal with their children, we believe in helping women in poor countries keep their children, so that they do not have to deal with the grief and sorrow that invariably follows giving up a child, even if it seems as if it is to give that individual a better life. In a previous post, we talked about efforts being made to give support to single women in South Korea who keep their children, but it is not an easy road.

In reading the New York Times account of the report today (11/09/09)  I was struck by the common refrain of fear of hurting the adoptive parents. From Joel Ballentyne, a Korean adoptee and teacher in Fort Lauderdale:

“This offers proof that we’re not crazy or just being ungrateful to our adoptive parents when we talk about our experiences,” said Mr. Ballantyne, 35, who was adopted at age 3 and who grew up in Alabama, Texas and, finally, California.

Jennifer Town, 33, agreed.

“A lot of adoptees have problems talking about these issues with their adoptive families,” she said. “They take it as some kind of rejection of them when we’re just trying to figure out who we are.” Ms. Towns, who was adopted in 1979 and raised in a small town in Minnesota, recalled that during college, when she announced that she was going to Korea to find out more about her past, her parents “freaked out.”
“They saw it as a rejection,” she said. “My adoptive mother is really into genealogy, tracing her family to Sweden, and she was upset with me because I wanted to find out who I was.”

Quite frankly, this gives us a headache. We also recall that about a year ago we posted the story of a woman searching in South Korea, and posted the photograph and referred to the story in the Korean newspaper. The adoptee saw our post and freaked out because she was afraid that her adoptive mother would see the story. How can adoptees get across to their adoptive parents that searching for their identities before they were adopted is, quite often, totally separate from their feelings--good or bad--towards their adoptive parents?

After all the years we have been involved in adoption reform, after all the television shows and interviews in the media about search and reunion, after the movies and television dramas showcasing reunion, why must adoptive parents still look upon this search for roots as a rejection? That is where the education needs to be: adoptive parents need to understand that in adopting a child they are not taking in a blank slate, a tabua rasa--an erased mind--but a fully formed individual with a mother and a father who bore them, no matter how, and whose DNA they carry, no matter what; dozens, hundreds, nay, thousands of relatives and ancestors, and a rich history that goes back through the ages. We must make adopting parents understand that the need to feel connected to that identity and culture is normal and natural. To not be interested in one's own roots is the unnatural, is the killing of curiosity--always seen as a sign of intelligence in any other realm--and signifies a cutting off of oneself from the tree of life in the most basic way.

Given that the comments we see all the time that amount to--I'm afraid to let my adoptive parents know I'm searching--we have our work cut out for us.