Ancestry Shows Beg the Question: Don't Adoptees have the same curiosity?

Is anybody watching NBC's Who Do You Think You Are?

Is anybody who was adopted watching through the lens of "Why doesn't the rest of the world understand we want to know where we came from? Why are we denied the right to have a background that is meaningful to us? That means something to me?" I watched and thought: surely those legislators, those adoptive parents, those adoption attorneys, anybody who works for the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), any agency associated with NCFA, anyone who opposes less that giving adoptees their original birth certificates can see that ancestry is important. And if that's the case, why are we still so far behind in opening closed records? Why are adoptees still denied the right to know who they are, where they came from, whence they came?

It makes me nuts.

Last night I watched Lisa Kudrow trace down her family's history that led her to a memorial for those Jews hunted, killed and burned in a small village called Ilya where many were slaughtered in the 1940s. A weeks ago I watched Sarah Jessica Parker learn that one of her direct ancestors was accused of being a witch in Salem, but escaped trial and punishment because the religious court that tried the Salem "witches" was disbanded before she was brought to trial. On their faces, in the emotions they display, you can see how meaningful it is to have a connection to someone whose DNA they share. It's palpable, it's real, it's haunting. Next week, somebody else, some other family ancestral history, more tears and deep feelings stirred by the truth of someone's family history.

The show originated in Britain, where ancestors are more important socially and politically than they are in the New World; but we are all one under the skin. And we are all a part of who came before us, and in some profound way that knowledge is meaningful to our sense of our place in the world. Yet by and large the world denies adoptees this piece of their own humanity. Every legislator who votes against giving adoptees their original birth certificates steals a valuable part of that person and says: You don't need your ancestral knowledge: I'm keeping it under lock and key.

Why? Because I have to protect the sanctity of your adoptive family, your new parents who went to a lot of trouble--and paid a lot of money, in many cases--to get you, and you should be grateful they did! Or they imply, with a straight face, having convinced themselves that this is the right thing to do: I have to protect your mother. Your birth mother. She has made a new life about her and maybe her family, her husband and other kids, don't even know about you! Can't have you upsetting that apple cart, you ungrateful wretch.

It makes me mad. Eons ago, shortly after I published Birthmark, and was fair game for every jerk who was shocked! shocked! that I had the temerity and gall to write such an expose, I was at a dinner party at the home of a well-known restaurant critic. (We had chili and corn bread, since you ask.) Alden Whitman, who then wrote those long essay obits of the celebrated for the New York Times, sat next to me. As the evening wore on and wine loosened his tongue, he went at me mercilessly about having come out of the closet as one-of-those-women-who-gave-away-baby. I doubt he actually read Birthmark, but he was plenty pissed at me, and made no bones about it: What right do you have to write that book! What--well, there was no other complaint, it was simply: You ought to stay in the closet: forever. What gave you the right!@!

Now, this was a guy who had quite a reputation for hitting on the young women at the Times. We'd even had lunch once years earlier before I realized what he was up to. I'm sitting there that night thinking: so...You have a kid somewhere...? And now you are afraid of his coming back? I'm not going to say anything, but trust me, I'd like to, you prick, and would--if your wife were not sitting here also and we now have the whole table of ten mesmerized.

It was his wife who came to my defense. Alden, she said heatedly after listening to his angry barrage, What were we doing in Wales a couple of weeks ago? Mucking around old cemeteries looking for the graves of your ancestors? What are you not understanding? What are you not getting?

No answer. 

Finally the host cleared his throat and put on some music, and people danced. We never spoke about this again. He's dead, the fight goes on, someday we will succeed.

But not before many who search for their roots will die without answers.

Adoptees Who Say They Only Want Information Hurt Everyone

First Mother is feeling rather feisty this morning thinking about how many times she has heard adoptees say: I only want the information. I have a right to that, but, no, I don't intend to search for my birth mother. 

And First Mother got to thinking, then of course if a legislator hears that...he can say, with a clean conscience, so, We'll give them "the information, the updated medical information, the cultural, social and medical history and since they say, they don't need more than that, why do they need the name?  We have to protect all those birth mothers in the closet who have not talked about the child they gave up for years...and certainly don't want to be reminded...because they have never talked about it. So let's go with the "information."

Closed adoptions are built on such fictions of identity that the web they weave afterward is a skein of lies: adoptive parents having trouble with the truth of the child's adoption; adoptees growing up and saying--out of hurt, out of anger, out of a primal wound they can't even reach verbally, out of fear of causing discomfort for their adoptive parents--I only want the information. What does "only the information" do to birth mothers? It reduces them to mere "reproductive agents," as an acquaintance of mine once called me. (See link for an engaging story about what some think of birth mothers.) I am a whole lot more than "information," but to be able to have my daughter be adopted legally in New York State, I was forced to go along with a closed-adoption law so heinous, so unjust in its intent that it violates all tenets of human decency.

First Mother has some sympathy for adoptees who say they only want information; she believes it is said defensively, in order to stem any possible rejection from one's birth mother, or to please their adoptive parents who fear any contact with the woman who shares their adult child's DNA, or to take some control over a life-changing situation over which they had no control. But this attitude is what has confused legislators. Especially those legislators, we believe, who have some connection to birth mothers in hiding, or adoptive parents who feel any intrusion by the pesky woman who merely gave birth to the child they have taken to the dentist, stayed up all night with, had emergency room runs at 3 a.m., talked to teachers about his boisterous behavior that they do not understand.

First Mother believes that all adopted people unequivocally should have their original/real/non faked birth certificates. And adoptees should stop asking merely for "information," and go to the heart of the matter: the birth certificate, with the real name, the real date, real time and place of birth. And take it from there. Search/find/reunite and try to be kind and forgiving. Not everyone will be happy with what they find, but at least they will have the truth. You can't have peace until you have all the pieces.

Here at home, First Mother is updating her kitchen, replacing 60-year-old dark brown, wood-grained Formica and a counter that is disintegrating, so she is busy collecting information about green countertops made from recycled glass, as well as Corian, granite, quartz, with the clear plan that she is going to do something with that information. First Mother is not simply going to file the information she is collecting. It will be put to use. First Mother will eventually have a new counter top.

First Mother also woke up with the thought this morning that birth mothers should also get the information: the last known whereabouts and name of the children they gave up under arcane, cruel and unusual laws we had no choice over. We could say we only want the "information."

But who would believe us?--lorraine

From Author and Adoptee B. J.Lifton via FaceBook:
Lorraine, remember that adoptees are in process. They don't really know what they want at first, and gradually as they move on in the search, they realize they want more than they thought they did. Eventually, they want the whole enchilada -- which means of course, meeting the mother and having a relationship with her.

Man Offers $1K for information leading to his family

You are almost sixty years old, your mother is going into a nursing home, and in cleaning out her home your 26-year-old daughter finds papers that show your name was changed when you were an infant.

You are adopted. You were not "Larry Dell" when you were born.

This after four decades of adoption reform, adoption in the news, adopted people searching? And your "mother" never told you the truth of your origins? To continue the fiction that she told herself, she lived the lie and kept you in the dark. What do you do now?

If you are Larry Dell of Brooklyn you advertise wherever you can and offer $1,000 to anyone who can give you information leading to can help him locate a blood relative.

Dell was born Louis Roth on Aug. 18, 1948, at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, according to the New York State Department of Health Adoption Information Registry. (Not sure how he got that information, but good for him.) He was his family's fifth child, and both of his birth parents--a truck driver and a homemaker--were 39 at the time he was born. His adoptive aunt believes his birth family lived in Bushwick or East New York, but she's not sure, said Dell, who can be contacted at larrydell@daddyoutpost.com. (Let him know where you heard about this if you contact him, please.)

This story, Adopted Brooklyn man offers $1K for help finding his family, in the New York Daily News today (3/14/10), really pisses me off. Pisses me off that this kind of hoodwinking still goes on. That people hide the truth from the person it matters the most to. That this is even possible today.

Once, when I was writing my memoir Birthmark, I was having lunch with a business contact and somehow we got around to adoption. He was an adoptive father and I poured out my story to him for reasons unknown. He said nothing, but later, as we were saying goodbye outside the restaurant, he turned to me and told me that a few years earlier, the mother of his (now adult) daughter had contacted them and had hoped to meet the girl. Did they tell her? No, he said, they did not tell her because although she knew she was adopted, she never talked about it. Or mentioned wanting to know her mother.

I wanted to punch the bastard. 

If you are adopted and are reading this and you have never talked to your adoptive parents about your feelings about adoption and knowing the truth of your origins, do so today. If you are a first/birth mother and have buried your sorrow and never talked to your father, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts about wanting to know what happened because that part of your life is never talked about, do so today. When a searcher calls and gets your brother/sister/uncle, he is going to say: She doesn't want to know. She's never talked about it.

And the reunion you secretly long for may die right there. I hear from searchers that it's most often the males in a family who turn down an active search, and they may hold the only key to a birth/first mother's whereabouts. If not today--when? --lorraine

More Stench Coming from Ethiopian Adoptions through Christian World Adoptions

New evidence that the unethical harvesting of children in Ethiopia by American adoption agencies continues comes from the public broadcasting system of Australia, ABC. The Joint Council of International Children's Services (JCICS), the agency designed to oversee the activities of American adoption agencies, is comprised of--guess what? adoption agencies themselves, and so while the JCICS has supposedly completed in inquiry into the Ethiopian adoption practices, they are refusing to release the results.

Last year, we learned about a dysfunctional, largely unregulated adoption industry operating in Ethiopia, where children were being harvested from families, some of them middle class. The families and the children were told they were going to America on a study trip and would be able to return home, but in fact, they can not return until they are eighteen, and then they must find the means to do so on their own, often after living with families here who adopt them. ABC's program, Foreign Correspondent, found that Ethiopian mothers were being tricked into surrendering their children, and that children were being pitched to adoptive families as being as young as seven--when, in fact, they were teenagers.

Some children arrived in the United States believing they were only visiting.

Ethiopia has not signed the Hague Convention on inter-country adoptions, but many American adoption agencies, including the infamous Christian World Adoptions (CWA) are allowed to continue doing business with corrupt officials in that country, and claim they have no blood on their hands. When one adoptive mother, Lisa Boe, spoke out about the long list of serious, life-threatening problems of the child she adopted--whom she was told was healthy--CWA sued her. This was after she lost a first child to SIDS, and is devastated that the child she is raising might not live long. 

Another family who adopted three sisters encountered huge emotional problems with the oldest--the girl was thirteen, not nine, as the mother, Kate Bradshaw, was told. When she and her husband, Calvin, complained to a consumer watchdog, CWA's response was to claim the Bradshaws were unfit parents and tried to have both their adoptive and biological children taken away from them permanently. Kate Bradshaw said the problem was ultimately cleared up, and they did not lose their children. The oldest daughter, Journee, ultimately went to live with Kate's mother in Iowa Falls, and attends high school. Here is what Journee Bradshaw told ABC:

"I’m trying to make other people’s lives better, because mine was horrible. I don’t want anybody to go through the things I did. What happened just happened, you know? You can’t really change the past but you can change the future for yourself and others – that’s what counts."

American adoption-reform advocate Maureen Flately claims that JCICS is stacked with adoption agency figures and does a terrible job of regulating itself: "We've really let the fox guard the henhouse,"she said. Quoting from the ABC story:

"They are the 'big tobacco' of adoption. They are a trade association that nominally espouses the highest standards but which is harboring the very people who have been involved in some of the biggest abuses in adoption - and they haven't laid a hand on them. The JCICS has one goal and one goal only, and that is to avoid federal regulation of adoption.

"Here is one of the biggest pieces of hypocrisy in adoption. If they're Hague-accredited, why are they doing business with a country that isn't a Hague signer? The answer is that they know they have much more freedom to do whatever they want to do and to bully people in countries that aren't Hague signatories."

ABC has a 27-minute video on the child trafficking accounts from Ethiopia with interviews with three American families that have spoken out against the agency that arranged their adoptions, Christian World Adoptions, and anyone interested in international adoption--from any country but especially Ethiopia--should watch. It is an eye-opening, chilling look at what can only be called child harvesting that is being touted as saving the children from starvation and prostitution.

The slick, double-talking "christian" attorney for CWA, Curtis Bostic, will make you ill. And it's all being done in the name of Christianity. Please take the time to see the video, at this link: Fly Away Home. And another shorter, but incisive, report comes from a CBS affiliate in Richmond, CNET-TV:


Watch so that the next time you hear that someone is thinking of adopting from Africa, you will be informed. Maybe you can save one mother from losing her child, and save one child from being harvested for families here who pay big money to fill their homes. I may be particularly sensitive to this issue because I live in a world where that nice young cousin of someone I know tells me at dinner that she is thinking of adopting: from Africa. What does CWA say about adoption from Ethiopia at their website? 

Our Ethiopia adoption program is one of CWA’s largest and most affordable adoption programs.

The cost, according to the CBS report is about $15,000. Harvesting children is good for business. --lorraine
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This link will take you to CWA's response to ABC where they basically deny, deny; and ABC's response. where they reaffirm their reporting. Telling is that the head of CWA, Tommy-Lee Harding.  has repeatedly refused efforts to be interviewed. CWA is based in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Should adoptees get a first mother's medical, cultural and social history?

Should adoptees, or their descendants, or the adoptive parents of a minor, be given "any family history" of the birth parents that is contained in that person's adoption file, unless the natural parents specifically ask that it not be released?

We think not. We are not talking about the original birth certificate with the names of the original biological parents--which ought to be given to all adopted people, no questions asked--we are talking about ancillary information collected by the social worker at the time. We are talking about the files of the birth mothers, with data and information and commentary collected by social workers around the time of relinquishment.

Last week the New Jersey Senate voted out of the  Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee a bill (S799/S1399) that would give adopted people and certain others access to the adoptees original birth certificate and "other related information." The vote was eight for; one against, and one did not vote. The bill overall is designed to give adopted people their original birth certificates' birth/first mothers have a year in which to file a veto.

I heard much of the testimony on line and it was riveting. The husband of one woman who is very angry she was contacted by her daughter made rambling plea for the records to remain sealed, railed against the state for releasing the name, as did the attorney for another birth mother, this one anonymous. We are always going to run into women I call the "crazies" in the birth mother community, women who refuse to acknowledge their children, and for them I am sorry for and at the same time angry with them. Your flesh-and-blood deserve to know who they are! And at the very least one face to face meeting!

Our longtime sisters in reform, including Judy Foster and Pam Hasagawa made statements, but it was Adam Pertman, adoptive father and head of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, who was especially eloquent. Adam made an impassioned plea noting that it was time to see beyond simply thinking adopted people only want or need their medical histories, adding that having their original birth certificate and the names of their biological parents represented a much deeper need and should be their right, not only for their psychological health and sense of well-being, but also making them equal to the rest of us who always had this information. Because he is an adoptive dad, his words have a great impact.

While we are hugely in favor of the bill, S799, there is one troubling section that is bothersome, and that is this:

(New section) a. An adopted person 18 years of age or older, a direct descendant 18 years of age or older of the adopted person if the adopted person is deceased, or the adoptive parent or guardian of a minor adopted person may obtain from an approved agency or the attorney who facilitated the adoption any family history information concerning the adopted person that is contained in that person's adoption file, upon submission of a written, notarized request to the agency or attorney.

...."family history information" includes medical, cultural and social history information provided by the adopted person's birth parent and maintained by an approved agency or attorney who facilitated an adoption.

The problem as we see it is that this gives someone else a file containing possibly all kinds of erroneous information about the biological parents. Say someone has an affair with a married man (who has three children) and falls in love with him and gets pregnant. And it being 1966, she does not get an abortion--she waits too long, she doesn't think she is pregnant--but surrenders the child. Well, give that information to a very religious family, and who is the birth mother? A slut. And that, my friends, is my own story, all explained in detail in my memoir, Birthmark. It is one thing for me to tell this to my daughter, as I did, but another for this information--just the facts, ma'am--to be passed across the desk by a social worker to say, my daughter's adoptive parents.

We also have heard of cases where the social workers misinterpreted the facts--someone's brother who smoked marijuana becomes someone with a mental problem; alcoholism in the family is disguised to make the child more attractive to the prospective adoptive family; a casual admission that one was in therapy could be seen as "serious psychological problems." And since the information is collected in a subjective manner by a social worker who has her own biases and predilections, anything said could be noted and written down through her filter. Mother did not cry a lot? She's cold and unfeeling. Mother cried too much? Psychological problems. Mother says she does not get along with her mother? Family history of disjunction. We have heard from some women who have seen their files; some are short and to the point; others are lengthy and full of material that sounds like gossip. You see the problem with releasing this information?

Jane, for instance, decided she would act as unemotional as possible because she did not want the social worker to think that she might search. She had it in her head that they would send her daughter far away if the social worker thought that. As for myself, I wept buckets and was surprised! Amazed! when I was informed that I could not get her information--her new name and whereabouts--myself when she was eighteen. Yeah, I was naive. Yeah, I thought the law had to be humane.

We do not want to put up a huge barrier to this bill, because it is so vitally important to open records, to give adopted people their original birth certificates, but we are not in favor of having our files, written by a social worker we may have hated, simply released to our children. And we can't look at those files to update them, or correct them, or remove extraneous and false information before they are given out. The files, remember, have information not only about first mothers, but also other family members, and whatever a birth mother may have told the social worker about the father.

In fellow blogger Jane's case, her file was redacted by a social worker 20 years later when it was given to her daughter. So it was not just what was taken down at the time, but what someone thought should be released many years later.

We have worked with Pam Hasagawa for decades, have written numerous letters in support to NJ legislators, but we hope that she and the others who have worked so hard to open records will take our concerns into consideration and consider changing the bill to unequivocally give adopted people their original birth certificates, just as non-adopted people can obtain, but to exclude giving out files--our files--with information about the birth/first/biological mothers without their consent and right of first approval.
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 For a previous post that touches on these same issues, and the problems that releasing such information may cause, see Jane's blog: A Right To Human Identity Doesn't Go Far Enough. Our thanks to Mirah Riben for bringing this section of the bill to our attention.

Adopting from Foster Care: Helping Kids or Enabling Family Destruction?

We at FMF are quick to throw down the gauntlet to those seeking to adopt. “If you really want to help kids (rather than feed your own ego),” we say glibly, “you’d adopt a kid from foster care. It’s not only a humane thing to do, it’s free.”

One of our readers, Lori, took us on.

“Lorraine, WHOA there lady! I was a foster child and I can tell you that a lot of misinformation about the children in foster care is out there. It is worse than the misinformation about adoption. First, children can be placed in foster care for a multitude of reasons - poverty being the largest! Sound familiar? …

8 out of 10 families are completely destroyed and the children almost always languish in foster care because they are either too old or have mental health issues caused by the abrupt disruption of their lives.

I believe that some adoptions are good - but I also believe that we need to be realistic about all the children and parents we are talking about.”

There’s a lot of truth in what Lori writes. Adopting from foster care may simply allow over-zealous social workers to scarf up more kids. The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act in 1997 relaxed requirements that states make reasonable efforts to return children to their families and required states to put termination of parental rights (freeing children for adoption in social work parlance) on a fast track. The law also continued open-ended foster care payments to states while capping family preservation funds. The net effect: increases in adoption were more than offset by increases in the number of children in foster care according to the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, a non-profit dedicated to making the child welfare system “better serve America’s most vulnerable children by trying to change policies concerning child abuse, foster care, and family preservation.”

Overuse of foster care is nothing new. In the early 1970’s, as a young attorney, I represented parents whose kids were placed in the custody of the state. I saw few cases involving physical abuse. I did see lots of specious claims of neglect. Dirty dishes in the sink, unmade beds, over-flowing cats’ pans, more beer than milk in the refrigerator, kids with fevers and runny noses, all recorded by child protection workers as evidence of neglect. One social worker curtailed visits between my client and her child because the child cried when her mother left, clear evidence that visits were harmful; another kept a child in a “treatment” facility largely because his mother sassed the social worker; a third refused to place a child with her grandmother because the child would spend time in day care while the grandmother worked.

In the 1990’s I worked for a State office managing federal anti-crime grants. In its application for funds, one regional narcotics team boasted that officers called in child protection workers when the police found marijuana in a home so that the children would be placed in foster care as an additional punishment on their parents.

My husband, Jay, is a criminal defense attorney. He is appointed to represent parents in dirty house cases about six times a year. The State charges parents with “criminal mistreatment I, a felony, for each child and places the children in foster care. Since the parents face a prison sentence if convicted, they typically plead guilty and receive probation. After they clean their house, the State returns the kids. These cases are really about conduct that offends middle-class sensibilities. It would be cheaper and less traumatic for kids if the State sent in a housekeeper or a home ec instructor.

I’ve read about children starved, beaten, sexually abused, and murdered in foster homes. I’ve seen documentaries about modern-day Georgia Tanns who falsified evidence to convince judges to terminate the rights of mothers. Georgia Tann, our readers may recall, was the mother of closed adoptions and the notorious Tennessee Baby Thief who worked with a corrupt judge, stealing children and placing them with the rich and famous including Hollywood stars Joan Crawford, Bob Hope, and June Allyson.

Who’s behind all this ripping kids from their homes, putting them into foster care, and fast tracking them into adoption? Well surprise, surprise, it’s those who are getting the bucks: Corporations with contracts to provide foster care, foster parents, and adoption agencies with contracts to place the children.

All this being said, some parents cannot care for their children because of death, mental illness, incarceration, drug addiction, or zero nurturing skills. Sadistic parents, step-parents, and partners of parents exist in every community. Long term foster care is no answer for these children. Every year thousands of children “age” out of foster care with no family and no resources. Prisons are filled with former foster children.

Adoption would benefit these children who have no family. Unfortunately these children are the least likely to be adopted.

What to Call a First/Birth Mother in an Open Adoption

What should a child in an open adoption call his natural/birth/first mother?

It's a question posed by a prospective adoptive mother, who is considering adopting the child of a friend, with the intention that the child will be raised with full and complete knowledge of his biological mother, who apparently will not be a stranger in this home. The mother, Hayley, hopes that the child can be raised with the love and support of both families. Amen to that. But what to call the two different mommies?

"Birthmother" and "Firstmom" are demeaning, and obviously not what a little kid is going to learn to call someone. Likewise "Aunt" is demeaning and wrong; "Godmother" suggests someone else, and besides, is little Johnny supposed to say, "Godmother, I'm hungry" or "Take me to the park, Godmom!" or "Don't like white milk, Birthmom, want chocolate!" when the birth biological natural mother is visiting?

The question is, can two women share the moniker "Mother," or "Mom?" At first, I thought, maybe not, but then I wondered what children of two gay parents teach their child to call them? Since the argument has been successfully made that at least on a birth certificate, a child can have two parents of the same sex, I would imagine that "Dad" in the home works for both of the male parents, and "Mom" works for two lesbian mothers. Maybe one is called Daddy Bob and the other Daddy Joe? And when one is gone for an extended period, maybe the "Bob" or "Joe" is dropped?

So, Hayley, if you do adopt and are the child's primary care-giver, you will undoubtedly be Mom and Mama and Mother; how about MammaJo (or whatever the natural mother's name is) for the other mother? I have known one of my grandchildren (daughter of my daughter whom I surrendered to adoption) since she was born, and while I was Grandma when she stayed with us for extended periods during the summer, once she hit puberty she changed over to what her mother, my daughter usually called me, Lorraine. I admit I was hurt at first, but decided to live with it, though I always signed my emails "Gramma Lo," which the teenager she is converted to "Glo." And I decided I liked that. Glo. My step-grandchildren, who have a lot of grandmothers as they are happy to tell everyone, call me Gramma Rain. Works for me too.

While Jane called me Lorraine and referred to me as such to her friends and family, she would sign her notes and cards, "Your daughter, Jane." And some cards were addressed to me as her "Mother." It's only a name, it's only a word, but yes, it does mean a lot. I can only imagine that being willing to share the title of Mom or Momma-- with the child's natural mother would be noticed--and appreciated--by the adopted person, especially she grows older. And then she can make a choice on her own.

What about you, dear reader? What do you think the child's mother, who will apparently be a part of his life after adoption, should be called? Please give us your thoughts.--lorraine, aka Glo. Also Gramma Rain.
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(For more on questions posed by this thoughtful prospective adoptive mother, see: When Should You Tell a Child He's Adopted and We Want to Have a Family. Is Adoption Ever a Good Solution? )