' [Birth Mother] First Mother Forum: April 2011

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Angry Someone attacks adoptees and first mothers!!! She/he is very very mad

Comment left today: 
Vroswell has left a new comment on your post "Adoptees to Get their Original Birth Certificates ...":

"The so called first mother's on this site get no sympothy [sic] from me. If you wanted to know your child you shouldn't have been too lazy too raise it. As for the idiotic adoptees on this site you should be grateful you weren't aborted, which is what's happening to a lot of other babies because selfish people like you keep pushing at these laws. Stop trying to invade and destroy the life of the very woman who chose to save yours!!!"

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

International Adoption Advocates Fight Back against decline in adoptions

Pacific Harbor Seals
Mother Pacific harbor seals leave newborn pups on the beach when they go into the sea to fish. Believing the pups have been abandoned, humans take them to aquariums or try to raise them themselves, often unsuccessfully. Mother seals returning to the beach to nurse search futilely for their babies.



I think of these seals when I read about international adoption. Thankfully, it has declined from a high of 22,884 in 2004 to 11,059 in 2010. Wide-scale corruption or other abuses has caused Ethiopia to join Cambodia, Guatemala, Nepal and Russia, in closing their borders while adoptions from China, the biggest supplier of babies, have been reduced.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

A First/Birth Mother remembers the first Easter after surrender, only days earlier

Four generations in 1996
Easter approaches in a few days, we celebrate the resurrection and spring with the symbol of birth: eggs, eggs, eggs galore. At my house nearly twenty friends will drink mimosas and lunch on beet salad and asparagus and eggy dishes and Polish sausage that's only made at Easter time and my mother's prune cake with buttercream frosting, and I will not really have time to relive in my mind that first Easter after I relinquished my daughter. That day I called my parents in Michigan to wish them Happy Easter--or did they call?  I can't remember. I do recall the day was long and I was empty and my daughter's father was with his other family.

I wanted to die.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Memo to Gov. Cuomo: Repeal the 1935 law sealing original birth certificates

Lorraine
It's lobby time in New York again, and this year the prognosis looks good and members of Unsealed Initiative, under the guidance of Joyce Bahr, are scheduled to meet with the governor, Andrew Cuomo, or members of his staff, to discuss the Adoptee Bill of Rights giving adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

What's wrong with fertile women adopting?

Jane

For shame, Tina Fey, having your second baby when you could be adopting! So proclaims Treva Bowdoin of “Hollywood Trends Examiner,” an online tabloid.

Bowdoin extols Mariska Hargitay, Katherine Heigl, and Sandra Bullock who have joined a long list of celebrities including Sheryl Crow, Jamie Lee Curtis, Calista Flockhart, Valerie Harper, Diane Keaton, Rosie O’Donnell, Michelle Pfeiffer, Steven Spielberg, Sharon Stone, Barbara Walters, and Liza Minnelli to, in Bowdoin's words, "give unwanted children a better life.”

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Learning Your Origins -- or not

Jane

When adoptee Wendy Johnson researched her origins, she learned her biological grandmother was either a heroic World War II spy or an unknown Filipino woman. Johnson, now 53, of Albany, Oregon, was told she was adopted when, at the age of eight, she asked her father why she had yellowish brown skin when everyone else in the family had white skin.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Finding the Families of The Lost Children of Nepal

Lorraine
Since I put the blog about Little Princes up on Friday, we have learned that
police have rescued 20 children from Mukti Nepal, a Maharajgunj-based orphanage, and arrested its operator after finding the children living in squalor and without enough food. The children range from five to fifteen. Six boys and 14 girls were kept in one room.  It seems clear that the orphanage was the dumping ground of one of the child traffickers in Nepal, and the deplorable conditions are often shown to Westerners as a sham to get money to "take care of the children." Instead, the cash goes into the traffickers' pockets and he looks for other Westerners to keep the money flowing. The following book review of Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal explains how child trafficking operates in Nepal.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Does God Care (about birth mothers) or Is God Dead?

April 8, 1966
“Is God Dead?” asked the cover of Time on Good Friday, April 8, 1966. On that day, when my co-blogger, Lorraine was grieving over the loss of her daughter Jane, born three days earlier in Rochester, New York, I was 5000 miles away in Fairbanks, Alaska embarking on a path which would bring us together decades later. If I had known Lorraine in 1966, I would not be a first mother.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Poem for my daughter on her birthday

For Jane

Every blonde head makes me sad
Greatly grieving,
thinking how
I simply told you
to borrow a life,
anywhere you could.

But I can not
calm myself
with drama and sorrow
for your new identity
dearly bought
would cost
the serenity
I supposedly sought. --lorraine

written in 1967, a year after she was born

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Some adoptees search, some adoptees don't

Jane and Lorraine in 1982
Adoption and adoption reform has obviously been a central focus of my life. I got involved with ALMA and adoption reform in the mid-Seventies, published Birthmark in 1979 before birth mother was the accepted language for women like me, found my daughter in 1981, and here we are today. I took a two-decade break from the intensity of it all, except for occasional stories or speaking appearances. But it has always been a major factor in my life, the maypole around which my life has revolved ever since my daughter was born in 1966.

Friday, April 1, 2011

How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives