' [Birth Mother] First Mother Forum: March 2013

Thursday, March 28, 2013

OBC-access bill with 'birth mother' veto may become law

Jane
"This is not my biological mother's piece of paper," adoptee Nancy Retynski told the Washington House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday holding up her original birth certificate. "This is not my adoptive mother's piece of paper. This is my birth certificate and I have every right to it." As she left the table, Retynski broke into tears and the audience of applauded. Committee members were visibly moved.

Tuesday's hearing was on a bill (SB 5118) that would allow Washington-born adult adoptees to access their original birth certificates as long as their birth mother does not file a veto (variously called an affidavit of non-disclosure or contact preference which would be binding). Such a veto would expire only upon the death of the mother.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

While gay marriage is the talk, how about adoptee rights?

Lorraine
I can't be the only person who is following the news about gay marriage and gay rights that is the focus of the Supreme Court these last few days--it's on CNN and MSNBC and all the rest and the front page of the newspapers--but Lord, all it reminds me of is how far we have to go to give adoptees the right to own a simple piece of paper: their birth certificates!

Gay marriage is going to happen, whether or not the Supremes come down on the right side of history or not--but us? Adoptees can't get no respect! And forget about us first mothers! We signed the paper under the OLD RULES that allowed for no contact, no knowledge, no anything in relation to our babies, and those rules now are in place, no matter that we had no choice! I remember so well the social worker saying: If you don't agree to never knowing what happened to your daughter, we can't help you. I signed, under duress, a forced confession.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Adoptee legislator supports birth-parent veto in Washington

Jane (center) and friends showing solidarity in red in WA
At a hearing last week to give Washington state adoptees the right to access their original birth certificates, the unbelievable happened: Representative Tina Orwall, an adoptee, testified  that she was in favor of an amendment that would make a birth-parent veto permanent. Originally Orwall sponsored a bill in the state House that included an expiration date on such vetoes. The bill with an expiring veto (which could be renewed) had already passed the House, but at the Senate hearing Orwell changed her position to making the birth-parent veto permanent.

So who's driving this birth-mother veto nonsense?  None other than a birth mother Sen. Ann Rivers, who blocked a birth-certificate access bill last year

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Admission is a movie with a lot of heart: ♥♥♥♥


Lorraine
This is a review unlike any others you will read about Admission, the new drama/comedy starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd because the other reviews mention the adoption stories (there are two of them) as a sideshow to the main theme, when to me--just another woman who gave up a baby and learned how to cope--at least one of them was the main thread.

Fey, as Portia Nathan, is a straight-laced, boring, by-the-book admissions officer at one of the most difficult to get into colleges in the world: Princeton. She has been there 16 years, is in a dead-end relationship with Mr. Cliche English professor, whose idea of bedtime reading is Chaucer in Middle English, a quick bit that is in itself mildly hilarious. Portia is competing with another woman (Gloria Reuben) in

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Getting married after giving up a baby

Lorraine
After I relinquished my daughter to the great unknown that is adoption, after her father went back to his wife (for a couple of years), after I was tossed and turned by the emotional turmoil that hung to me, I met a young man and married him. He was five years younger than me and still in college. We met during the summer and married seven months later during spring break of his junior year. His parents were not happy, to say the least.

I'm not going to say that I was not in love with him; I was. But in looking back at that marriage, I cannot avoid the conclusion that I married him partly because I was so burned out and looked to marriage as a kind of salvation from feeling so bad about myself.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Who Should Search--Adoptee or birth mother?

Jeanette Winterson
"Do you plan to search for your birth parents" asked my impudent first mother friend at a reading by English writer Jeanette Winterson of her prize-winning 1985 novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.  Winterson brushed the question aside. "If they want to find me, they know where to find me" referring to her fame and her original parents in the UK.  Subsequently, though, Winterson did search and had a good reunion with her first mother, a story she recounts in her 2011 memoir Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Hard Realities of an Adoptee/Birth Mother Reunion



Lorraine and Jane, spring of 1982, soon after reunion in NYC
Reunions are at first ecstatic, then blissful, but then you may feel as if you are swimming in a witches’ brew of eye of newt and toe of frog.

From a short visit of a few days, our times together expanded to be whole summers. I imagined glorious walks on the beach, sunset horseback riding—you know, the really terrific stuff about being a mother. What a wonderful time we would have! Getting to know each other, enjoying each other’s company! What could go wrong?

Plenty, is the short answer. Just as mothers and daughters who are not separated have “issues,”

Monday, March 11, 2013

To stay in the closet, don't publicize being a 'maternal source'

Lorraine
There's always something. In this case, someone, who steps forward as we press for openness in adoption and unsealing original birth records that holds the identities of the adopted. Kathleen Hoy Foley is at it again, and yesterday's New York Daily News had a story about her sad plight of being "pursued" by her daughter, Elaine Penn of New Jersey, and how this is destroying Foley.

Foley claims she wants nothing to do with Elaine, was destroyed by being "found." However she is publicizing a book, or a second book, she is writing about her life and giving up a child for adoption who later is able to find out who she, Foley, is. If someone wants to stay out of the limelight, you would think that she would not write two books about it. The cover design of the first, Woman in Hiding, a True Tale of Back Door Abuse, Dark Secrets and Other Evil Deeds, is so putridity bad it is

Friday, March 8, 2013

Adoption is not a 'cure' for abortion

Peter Wehner
To recover from its "devastating loss" by not gaining the White House, the Republican party should "demonstrate its commitment to the common good by supporting civil-society groups working to expand adoption," as well as other reforms, writes Peter Wehner in Time magazine. Wehner, a former Republican White House staffer, doesn't explain exactly what he means, or how "expanding adoption" makes for a civil society.

Let us guess. As his current employer, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, bills itself as "Washington D.C.'s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy" it is a safe bet that he conflates expanding adoption with reducing abortion.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Today's new mantra: My Baby, Not my Child

Lorraine
The heart-breaking, or heart-warming, depending on your point-of-view, story of a 25-year-old first mother coed at the University of Iowa is making news as she decided to photograph and write about her decision to give up her baby. Though the woman, Callie Mitchell, cries a lot, though she cried a lot in the months leading up to the birth, and was ambivalent about giving up her son, at this point she seems quite at peace with her decision, and she and the adoptive parents, according to another report, are in touch much more than their original agreement called for. But first, the back story:

After she learns she is pregnant, Mitchell and her boyfriend plan to marry and raise their child. Her parents are overjoyed--she is 24 or 25, after all, she is not a teen. But things go bad between the couple after he learns that he may not be the father, and that she has lied to him. She thinks about adoption, calls an agency,