If a drug-addict first mother turns her life around, PLEASE pass on it on to the adoptee

SEE TROY DUNN'S RESPONSE in next day's (May 25, 2009) post

The other night I watched several episodes of The Locator, the show that does as it sounds--finds people for people searching for them. Troy Dunn, whom we've written about before is "the locator," along with his mother and a staff.

One episode that made me crazy reunited a platonic Friend of a woman who had died of AIDS and the woman's daughter, who was three when her first mother died. First Mother had arranged for an open adoption--she had met the parents while she was in the hospital--and had Friend promise that he would stay in touch with her daughter and watch over her. While it is true that the mother had been a drug addict and a prostitute when she contacted AIDS, she completely turned her life around by the time her daughter was born, and, in fact, became an AIDS counselor. First mother was gorgeous in her photographs.

Friend, now a successful entrepreneur, had stayed in touch for a year or so, but then the family moved and left no contact information. Friend knew none of their family or friends, he was a young man, and admittedly did not make any effort to track down the adoptive parents. Now, two decades later, he wanted to keep his promise to his dying friend.

Troy Dunn found the young women still living with her adoptive mother. The adoptive mother said that it had always been hard for the young women to let people be close to her, and yeah, maybe meeting someone who knew her first mother might be helpful. Understand, this woman did know that well before the young woman's mother died, she was off drugs, and as Friend said, her first mother was a beautiful person who helped others dealing with AIDS.

The adopted woman was now introduced; she was morbidly obese. She had no memory of her first mother; she said she only knew that her first mother had been a prostitute and a drug addict, because that is what her adoptive mother told her.

The meeting of Friend and the young woman was staged in a library where Friend was reading to kids...as he met the girl's mother in a library. Not on a street corner where she was injecting herself.

I'm sitting there thinking that if this women had heard that her mother was more than a drug addict and a prostitute, she might not weigh 300 pounds today. (I've seen enough of The Biggest Loser to estimate her weight; she was 300 plus.) Troy Dunn, my brain is screaming, ask the adoptive mother why she didn't tell her that by the time she was adopted, her mother was clean, and had been for quite a while, and was actually working in a drug/AIDS program to help others? Friend made it clear that adoptive mom knew this. You think knowing this information--that her mother was clean and a good person--might have made a difference in the girl's life?

Troy Dunn, ask the adoptive mother why--since it was supposed to be an open adoption with Friend having continued contact--why this was ignored? Ask why she reneged on her promise to the first mother? Can't you at least clear your throat, raise your eyebrows, look away--do something--to indicate that her behavior is shoddy?

Troy Dunn, ask the adoptive mother if maybe the incomplete information she gave her adopted daughter might have been--uh, downright harmful?

No, instead of any of that, the woman was treated with kid gloves. Asked if it would be all right if her daughter met Friend. I wanted to scream at his asking for permission of the adoptive mother, when the young woman was in her twenties. Why did the young women need anyone's permission? Because we have to be watchful of the feelings of the adoptive parents, that's why.

Troy Dunn, why are you so solicitous of the adoptive mother's feelings when she clearly withheld information from her daughter, when she had ignored the promise to her first mother to let Friend stay involved?

"Your mother loved your very much," Friend told the young woman. "Your mother was a wonderful person who made some unfortunate choices for a while, but she turned her life around." He was able to show the young women both pictures of her beautiful mother (and she was beautiful) with clear eyes and no sign of a drug problem, as well as photographs of herself at her birthday party, and with her mother. In the pictures she is a happy, smiling healthy child of normal weight,

I know adoptive parents are by and large good people, that many of them take on problem children and turn their lives around, but I'd like to see the awful ones featured once in a while, and not just the ones who murder or beat or starve their adopted children, but the ones who inflict emotional damage as this adoptive mother so clearly had. I'd like to see some adoptive parents called on the carpet for less than stellar behavior on prime-time television.

We first/birth mothers take our lumps, all right; how about some equal-opportunity here when adoptive parents do bad things?--lorraine

Troy Dunn commented on our post and comments on the post, and I thought I would post it as blog rather than leave it as a comment.

Troy Dunn responds to First Mother Forum

Troy Dunn saw our post on his show The Locator, and had this to say about our blog and the comments:

Hi Lorraine,
Troy Dunn here. First let me thank you for having this blog as an outlet for others to share and communicate about this very important facet of life. Let me also take a moment (while I wait to fly to San Diego for my next case) to answer some of the questions posted here.

My goal whenever I enter somebody's life is to leave it better than I found it. I am not always successful in that effort but it is my goal. That includes everyone- first moms, adoptive mothers, adoptees, sibs, spouses, etc. It's a juggling act to say the lest but I do attempt it. There are certainly times when, as I am sitting and talking with people I am having internal conversations that include thoughts like, "I don't believe her" or "I don't think this is the whole story", or "I wonder why she is scared to tell me everything", etc...

BUT, I as I attempt to facilitate a reunion, I also try and determine what can I do to leave all relationships intact. And I also feel it is not always my place to be the "big news" guy to each person. Some things are better left for mother-daughter to discuss later naturally, as it comes up. It's never about the cameras for me, it's all about the healing, or the potential for healing.

Additionally, some of you mistake "permission for "respect". I do like to involve other family members in the process when possible so that the adoptee has a support system in tact when the dust settles. That's not always the case, but again, it's my goal. Triona mentioned my entry into the "search and reunion" space, as if it had happened recently, or perhaps for the show. The show only began in 2007. I have been trying to rebuild families and hunt for answers for adoptees since 1990 when I assisted my own mother in her search. I viewed the TV show as an opportunity to share the messages we all believe so important- one of which is that bio moms, (first moms in your vocab) are in most cases, heroes who made an extremely difficult and selfless decision and deserve their own brand of closure, answers and peace.

Let me repeat, I am not always able to deliver on that goal, but I will die trying.
Thank you all for your voices and I hope you will continue to let yours be heard. Not sure how long America will embrace our show, but I will still be here doing what I feel is right, long after the camera crew goes home.

God bless you all.

LORRAINE: Troy Dunn's explanation about why he doesn't castigate anyone involved (no matter what he finds) made sense to me. He isn't trying to be Dr. Phil, and that is a good thing. And although the adopted woman in the scenario above is certainly going to have questions of her adoptive mother, they are probably best left off camera. The story made it clear that her adoptive mother knew the facts about the birth mother's life turn-around. To those of us involved in adoption search-and-reunion and reform, of course the adoptive mother's sin of omission screamed out at us, but maybe not to us alone. I don't think you could have been watching and not had the same questions that I did

PS: For an interview with Dunn, read post at Mormon Mommy Blogs.

JANE: I like what Troy Dunn wrote for the most part but I believe that his characterization of firstmoms as "heroes who made an extremely difficult and selfless decision" perpetuates false images.

Firstmoms were not heroic Loretta Young types who as a tear rolled from the corner of their eye signed the paper assuring their child's happiness at the expense of their own. This makes a great movie scene but it's a myth. Firstmoms for the most part did not make any decision; they took the only option they were offered. Adoptive parents are not per se better parents than the mother nature designated. The trauma of being adopted outweighs the benefits of having married parents. And of course there is no guarantee that the adoptive parents will stay married; over fifty percent don't.

The Locator Starts Tonight!

Ah....The Locator, which we blogged about a few days past, begins tonight on WE. According to the review in the New York Times everything goes well, including the birth mother/adoptee reunion. Two half-hour segments are tonight, beginning at 9 p.m.; the first is a reunion of siblings; the second is a birth mother/adoptee reunion. Troy Dunn finds the birth mother even though an aunt, who arranged the adoption, wouldn't tell the girl searching anything. Boo on her!

And amazingly enough, Troy Dunn is indeed a Mormon (see Jane's previous post) who has written about child-rearing, his Mormon faith and his work....the review states that he's been so succesful finding people since 1990 that he is now able to take on free cases. That he is a Mormon who reunites mothers and children goes so against the tenants of the LDS--maybe we could get him to knock some heads at the National Council for Adoption, the enemy of open records and reunions.

Stay tuned. We're recording it tonight.

Review at
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/arts/television/06loca.html?ref=television

The Worst Adoption Agency in the World: Gladney

Troy Dunn, of The Locator, commented yesterday to the post about the antediluvian rantings of an adoptive mother over at Huf Po, when I mentioned that rumor had it that he did not take Gladney  (Center for Adoption) cases. Troy's--can I call you Troy? I'm beginning to feel like I know you-- comments are so revealing I wanted to make sure none of you missed them and so I am making them a post today: 

Hey ya'll,
Got a note from someone saying you had mentioned me and Gladney in the same post, so thought I would swing by and leave a quick comment on the topic.
We will on occasion work on Edna Gladney cases, but they have to have some data beyond that which is provided by Gladney files or non-ID.
The reason for our hesitancy is simple- the majority of the cases we have reviewed/researched/solved from Edna Gladney were stuffed full of pages and pages of falsified documents. While it is quite normal (sadly) for adoption agencies to falsify a few things in an adoption record, the Gladney files we have studied had been tremendously falsified, often times simply duplicated. I have seen several people all get the same photo-copied "non-ID" from Gladney staffers. I have located alleged birth mothers connected to Gladney cases only to discover she was simply a woman who's identity was used over and over, and has been located by multiple adoptees in search of answers, only to find intentinal dead ends built by Gladney staffers so many years ago. Makes me sad and angry all at the same time. Let me say for the record, I have no idea what Gladney's processes and procedures are today. The tradition of falsifying entire adoption files may be a thing of the past. Perhaps it wasn't even a "tradition". Maybe I'm wrong. ;-) All I can say is that in 20 years of working thousands of cases, I have NEVER seen as much falsification in any other agency in the U.S. as I have seen with Edna Gladney cases. Tragically, many of the adoptees who have come thru that agency have unsolvable cases since names, cities, hospitals and DOB's were faked in many cases. Perhaps they felt at the time they were right, but I stand here today to state- they were WRONG. And anybody who thinks lying to adoptees is "whats best for them" is misguided.
Have a beautiful Thanksgiving to you all. I do hope each of you are blessed to find that which you seek.
In your corner,
Troy
"The Locator"
www.wetv.com/thelocator

Open Adoption is "one free baby-sitting scam"....

Last night I couldn't help myself, I delved into that book that started the terrible argument with my friend Yvonne over whether or not the givers of life have any rights--any rights at all--to find out what happened to that life. And I read enough into The Brotherhood of Joseph by Brooks Hansen to realize how far--how incredibly far--we have to go before we are going to change hearts and minds among adopters. I know that word--adopters--invokes revulsion in many and I'll grant that it does seem like a cruel term, but Mr. Hansen says that when he hears a kid on the bus ask a girl if she's ever going to look for her "real" parents, the word evokes in him the same feelings as if he had heard "nigger" or "cunt." So for the moment, let me call him and his wife Elizabeth, ADOPTERS. Because that's what they are; for the record, he prefers "actual parents." He never says what he would prefer we first parents would be called. Actually, he would prefer us dead, though he doesn't say that. He doesn't need to.

A brief rundown of the story. He and his wife, age 36, want to be parents. Are desperate to be parents. Somewhere between the wife's age of 36 and 37 they hop on the fertility-industry train. Apparently they missed the biology lesson that says that after age 29 a woman's fertility starts to decline and .... keeps going down. After four years of the awful business--and it is pretty grim--and going into debt, they try a donor egg from a relative of the wife's That fails also. He admits freely that they wanted their own kid: "...we are a species, 'let's face it--that prizes the blood-bond uber Alles. And the law makes that pretty clear...Even distant grandparents can wedge a child from the arms of adopted parents just by showing up in court." (As if, but that's another story.)

He then explains why an open adoption is repugnant: "Just because we'd been through the IVF wars and lost, that didn't mean that Elizabeth should always have to save an extra seat at the dance recital." He's incensed that prospective adopters could pay for the care and "late-night Whopper runs" of a pregnant woman who was considering giving them her child and then "change her mind, keep the baby, and not have to pay back the prospective couple one red cent..." He calls open adoption with its "update letters, report cards, scheduled visits, etc., "seem like one giant free baby-sitting scam."

So it's off to Russia to adopt where they get Ilya or Theo, I can't quite tell. And though the book seems to end there, I'm aware--remember, he's the son of friends of Yvonne, the adopting grandparents live in my little town and are people I occasionally run into at the supermarket or the ATM--they get a second child from Kazakhstan. Apparently the well-educated Mr. Hansen and his wife never read Cicero:

Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live forever as a child.

They want a kid that will never be able to have a relationship with any kin, or most likely, never be able to learn more about his ancestry than the adopters know and tell him. By choosing this kind of adoption, they are choosing to form person that can never know, never have a history other than the one they create.

I awoke early this morning in one of those aggravating mind frenzies, thinking, if this is what Yvonne ( see earlier blogs) thinks is not only possible, but preferred, if this is what informs the opinions of people like Aston (the moneyed class, let's be clear), if there are people like Brooks and Elizabeth Hansen, we have so much further to go than we thought. I try to be sympathetic to people who adopt, but lord, since there is no reciprocity evident in so many of them towards the women who gave their children life, it's kinda hard to be understanding of their plight. And feelings. (To make the book even more in my face, it's blurbed on the back by another friend, this one a writer and the adoptive father of a darling Chinese girl. She really is darling, I'm not being sarcastic.)

Which brings me back to The Locator. I've seen all four episodes and they have all been adoption-reunion stories, and no matter how much Troy Dunn charges for people who aren't his pro bono cases, these stories pack a wallop in a half hour, and the more people that see them the more we are going to change public opinion about open adoption, and open records for adoptees and birth parents.

The other day I got an email from a compatriot in the fight to open records and the basic gist of it was--tell stories. Tell stories about separation and reunion. Get to people on a gut level. You can quote statistics about "unresolved grief" from the Donaldson report on birth mothers, but that doesn't do as much good as one heart-breaking story of loss and reunion. So let me encourage all of your nay-sayers about The Locator, and its media commercialization of one of life's most basic stories--mother and child separation--to think about it in a different light. The more people who see it, the more we are going to be able to reach the hearts and minds of legislators, and people like Yvonne and Aston and their friends.

The Locator website at WE has a silly mind game, Troy Dunn's blog, a reunion registry (yeah, really), summaries of the episodes, but in the end, the television show reminds the audience that life does not begin with adoption, that the need to know one's past is universal, and only those who have been brain-washed not to think about the past, or have been too hurt to let themselves wonder, shut off this curiosity.

It's on in back-to-back episodes on Saturday evening, starting at nine p.m.

The Locator...is looking for you.

This just in from Women's Entertainment (WE), home of Bridezilla, Platinum Weddings, Extreme Plastic Surgery:

The Locator

Are you looking for someone important who you just can't find? Birth parent? Sibling? Lost Love?

Over the last two decades, The Locator, Troy Dunn, has found over 20,000 "unfind-able" men, women and children - be it an adoptee seeking their biological parents, someone looking for a lost sibling, or anyone with a heartfelt need to reunite for a personal and compelling reason.

Troy is currently looking for individuals who have a desire to be reunited to be featured in his new WE tv series, "The Locator". If you want to say: "I love you", "I'm sorry", or "Thank You" to someone you can't find, Troy might be able to help you do it.

Apply now on our website: TroyTheLocator.com

Well, it could be like Extreme Home Makeover,ABC's Sunday night hit. I wonder if the Locator would do it for first mothers/fathers? The show is advertising for people, as the copy above indicates from their website. I assume you have to be willing to knock on the door-- unannounced--of your birth parents and take what comes. While anything that gets across the innate unfairness of closed records (to both adopted people and birth parents) gets a star in my book--even that tacky short-lived but highly controversial "Who's My Daddy?"--this ought to also rate high in the ick factor of personal invasion.

We'll see, it would seem that the person found would also have to agree to his/her fifteen minutes of fame to be seen on camera. How do you folks feel about this? Anybody want to apply? Know someone who might? You never know...I believe the show is scheduled to start this fall. My husband said that he saw a promo for it that shows The Locator knocking on the door of a first/birth mother.

--lorraine

Adoption, It Seems, Is Everywhere, coming to a screen near you

Friday night I happened to catch the opening scenes of a cop show called Flashpoint...and saw that the cops with big guns and even bigger cars (wearing bullet proof vests, no less) were chasing a young couple with a baby. The young woman was cradling the baby, the young man was calling him Owen...and I thought, "It's a story about a young couple who stole their baby back from the very nice adoptive parents. Shoot 'em!"

Right. Baby was two months old, they had missed the cutoff date for changing your mind by a couple of weeks...story ends with the biological father's suicide (just like his daddy, after his mother died, and he was raised in unhappy foster homes) and the happy rich adoptive couple (father says he is a lawyer, natch, their house is very big) ends up back with the baby, the natural mother presumably in the hands of the police. Could we fast forward to twenty years?

Next day, I heard an NPR story ostensibly about judging a book by its cover, but turned out to be an interview with a young woman (well, she was 27) in Seattle who was choosing among the piles of letters she had received from couples and women who wanted to adopt her forthcoming baby. Her fiance died, she got pregnant after a short fling with but did not want to marry him or otherwise have him in her life...so, adoption story number two. Could we fast forward fifteen years?

I hit a trifecta: The next day I got an email about a new series on WE starting this fall called Adoption Diaries...press release here: http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news.aspx?id=20090731we01 Can we fast forward five years and show the well-adjusted, happy birth mothers?

And there is another show on one of the cable channels called: Pregnant at Sixteen, with the adoption-themed segment (done in conjunction with the adoption-as-the-best-outcome-for single-women Mormons). This is the show that several of us active in adoption reform were contacted for when it was being made. I could not bear to watch. There is only so much I will put up with, and this looks mawkish beyond belief.

WE is also where the channel where we watch (usually by DVD) The Locator (see our previous post here) where searcher Troy Dunn finds people who have been separated, often by adoption, season three starting in September. On a recent show that reunited two brothers, the birth mother had refused to meet her first son, but his younger brother decided to initiate the search and reconnect, even without her blessing. Dunn said that this was also the case with his mother, who had been adopted at birth. Troy found her mother, but the woman refused to meet her; some time later, she was contacted (and warmly accepted) by a brother.

And apparently The English American by adoptee Alison Larkin has been picked up and will be a sitcom sometime in the future. Ought to be a million laughs, with a nutty irresponsible birth mother and proper English adoptive mother. Oy vey, I can feel the laughter burbling up.

Then of course, we have the adoption story line on Brothers and Sisters and the numerous times it shows up on Law & Order, all three varieties; and many a medical show where medical histories are missing, such as House. Apparently the world can't get enough of adoption stories.

Let us not forget the brouhaha over the movie Orphan.

It includes the line (I'm paraphrasing here so don't kill me if I have it few words off): It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as one as your own. It seems that a whole lot of people are screaming that Orphan will set back adoption, and mark adoptees as crazy killers, and there has been a petition, and a lot of media attention. Here is a snippet from pressofatlanticcity.com:

Among those signing [the anti-Orphan petition] was Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans. His group has launched a Web site - OrphansDeserveBetter.org - featuring a petition urging Warner Bros. to add a pro-adoption message at the end of the film and to donate a portion of box-office receipts to aid orphans.

Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, suggested Warner Bros. could improve matters by helping produce educational materials about the value of adoption.

"It has been a long time since a movie caused this much angst and worry in the adoption, foster-care and orphan-care communities, even before its release," Pertman said.

Obviously, the way we were portrayed as a group in Juno caused not so much angst and worry, because--hey, we're not good people anyway. We are the sluts who give away our babies.

Where were these people when Juno was such a hit? Where was the anti-Juno sentiment when we were subjected to a movie that portrayed birth mothers as a hip-talking teenagers who barely gave a fig that they were about to give up their babies to cool white women in swell houses? Why are adoptive parents typically portrayed as good, worthy people who of course deserve to have that baby at the center of the plot because obviously, they will give him or her a much better life than the first mother ever could? This of course was the subset theme of the long-running Baby Jessica De Boer/Anna Schmidt real life story. And twenty years later, Juno.

Everyone loved Juno (see earlier post), it ended up with an damn Oscar for best screenplay, adding insult to injury.

Where was the objection when Juno was released? Was it our fault that we didn't raise the objection ourselves, get a petition going, write to the movie maker and storm hip stripper-turned screenwriter Diablo Cody's house? Uh, well, yes.

But we first mothers are not an active lobby group, many of us are still hiding in the closet, and we don't have an active lobby of adoptive parents (and they are organized) to stand up for us. We are just the women who gave them our children, and a whole lot of those parents want us off the stage.

Besides, lots of people still want to think that we are Juno's sisters. Dammit, I'm not.

The Vietnam legacy of 'fatherless' children

Lorraine

Today I found a close kinship with the fathers of the children conceived in the years we were in Vietnam, as I read a long take-out about the search and reunion of those children with their American fathers in the New York Times. "It's like the mother who give up their kid for adoption," said George Pettitt of Wales Center, N. Y. "You just never stop thinking about it."

Whoa! This guy gets it, I thought. The piece--on the front page no less--tells us that Mr. Pettitt, 63, had a relationship with a woman when he was 19 and in Vietnam.Though he had not "meant" for her to get pregnant, she did. He returned home to New York, got a job as a truck driver, and raised a family. But when he retired in 2000, he "found himself haunted by memories of the child he left behind--a boy, he believes." Mr. Pettitt paid a man to find the boy in Vietnam but the trail went cold. A woman in Virginia called to say she thought her husband might be his son, but a DNA test proved negative.

The Adoption Cycle: Adoptees who have babies they relinquish

Copyright (c) Lorraine Dusky 2009

As I wrote a few days ago, I watched several episodes of The Locator in one evening, and the other one that is worth commenting about hit on a subject near to my heart. The search de jour was initiated by a birth mother who was adopted herself. As some of you know, my daughter Jane also had a daughter whom she relinquished for adoption that I've written about before. From the vantage point of a thousand-plus miles, after a period when we had not been speaking, I could not convince Jane to a) let the father's mother raise the girl, as the woman apparently wanted; or b) enter into an open adoption arrangement. Yes, we have heard about many such "open" arrangements that end up not as promised (and have written about them here), but at least one starts out with a name and an address at the time of the relinquishment and adoption.

No, Jane insisted, she would only have a closed adoption. No names, no contact, no responsibility.

The woman in this episode of The Locator gave up her child in a closed adoption also. Troy Dunn found her son, the reunion was great, and his three siblings were happy to meet him. When he first laid eyes on them, his joy was infectious: You all look like me, was his immediate and surprised comment. Not having been adopted myself, I can't imagine how wonderful that feeling must be. The young man had a band himself, and his siblings were all involved in some sort of music.

How many women of my generation and younger who were adopted had children they also gave up for adoption? When this happened to me (as any birth involves more than the mother, it involves families) I felt as if that no matter what I did, I had failed. It seemed painfully obvious that Jane was determined to repeat history. And then of course, I wondered, what about the generation after that? Could I protect my granddaughters from doing the same?

The occurrence of adopted teenagers and young women having babies they relinquish is one that is referred to in various adoption books, but since there is no adequate way to compile reliable statistics, how common this is no one knows. But those who have been around adoption for many years feel that it is not unusual, particularly in the early days of adoption reform before abortion was legally available. One would go to a conference, and run into an adoptee-birth mother here, another one there, a third one there.

Annette Baran, an adoption social worker and is one of the authors of The Adoption Triangle, confirmed my sense of this. Jean Strauss, whose memoir Birthright is about her own search and reunion, discovered that when she found her mother, she also found an adoptee. Straus later found her grandmother and reunited the two of them, and made a film of the reconnecting of the three of them.

In Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self by David Brodzinsky, Marshall Schechter and Robin Marantz Henig, the authors write of a complicated sexual expression for adopted teenagers: “Adopted teenagers who were born to teenage mothers may feel the cycle repeating itself in their own sexual behavior. Adoptive mothers who agonized over their own infertility may feel jealous and resentful of their daughter’s developing fecundity….Some [adopted teenagers]deliberately become pregnant to undo what they feel to be their birth mother’s mistakes. And some go in the opposite direction, shying away even from healthy sexual experimentation because they are so aware of where that landed their birth mothers.” (Incidentally, Being Adopted is one of my very favorite books explaining the dynamic of what it is like to be adopted.)

Adoptee memoirs came out after abortion became legal often contain include the authors' own abortions, and their rather quick and, all things considered, uncomplicated decisions to have an abortion rather than make a different choice. “I know my birth mother and I are alike in this,” Strauss wrote in Beneath a Tall Tree, “We return home form a hospital, empty and childless. I believe we both wish we could have made different choices, not about adoption or abortion, but about the choice of letting ourselves become pregnant in the first place.” (For me, Strauss's book was one whose insights were delivered without overt rancor.)

Sarah Saffian in Ithaka wrote: “…for me, a mistaken pregnancy myself, having an abortion had been a particular tragedy” though she gives no explanation that this affected her more than any other woman who had not been adopted. A few days later, meeting her boy friend, Saffian is back on track: “Refreshed by a few day’s distance from the experience, I said how relieved I was that it was over, that now we could ‘get on with our lives.’” Neither Strauss nor Saffian wrote that they was particularly distraught over their decision to abort—before or after. (Personally, I had trouble with Saffian's book. I know that it is brutally honest; let's just say that as a birth/first mother, I found it brutal.)

Adopted women having babies who are also adopted: It seems the saddest of all possible outcomes.

A Joyous Reunion

Oprah Winfrey’s reunion show Thursday was inspiring and refreshing.

“It’s a validation thing. When your birthmother looks for you, it’s validating that you were never forgotten. It heals a piece of you. It’s a gift, honestly.” Pam Slaton, an adoptee and professional searcher who reunited rapper Darryl McDaniels (DMC) with his mother, spoke these words as she sat next to a mother and daughter she had reunited the day before.

The mother, Linda, had given up her daughter 42 years earlier when she was 15. Linda had no choice; her mother refused to let her come home with the baby. Pam accompanied Linda back to Rosalie, the home for unwed mothers in New York City where she gave birth to her daughter in 1968. It was Linda’s first return, an intensely emotional experience. She remembered “the joyfulness of giving birth” and the sorrow of walking out without her daughter. “I knew the day I was leaving and I knew the last time I held her was the last time I held her” she said sadly.

Laura, Linda’s daughter, had tried unsuccessfully to find her mother. “I have lived all my life without a family. I have been dying for a family. My life was difficult. I used to think from the day I was born I’ve been rejected; that I haven’t been able to find anyone who cares about me…. When you’re adopted, you never know why the person gave you up. You never know if they decided that they didn’t want you. You were an accident. They didn’t care; you weren’t worthy of their love.”

There were no platitudes (“I’m grateful that my birth mother made the difficult decision to give me up. I never would have had this wonderful life.” “I knew I had to let her go. I made the right decision.”) It was just a mother and daughter who never should have been separated coming together, bringing with them Laura’s husband and three children and Linda’s son. (Oprah dutifully warned the audience that not all reunions end up this way.)

At the end of the show Troy Dunn “The Locator” admonished the audience about not delaying their searches (the reality of mortality.) “Think about the unloved ones in your life. There is still time to move them over to the loves ones list. There is no better time than today.”

Later that day I read on the Bastard Nation list that the South Dakota Senate had tubed a bill to allow adult adoptees to have access to their original birth certificates. I just wish these obdurate politicians had seen Oprah’s show.

Mormon Opposition to Open Records

When I told Rebecca, my surrendered daughter who is a Mormon, that her Church opposed legislation allowing adult adoptees to obtain their original birth certificates, she asserted that I was misinformed: The Church had no position on opening records; she insisted; it was only the old fuddy duddies who ran LDS Family Services who opposed opening records and they would soon be gone.

Contrary to Rebecca’s assertion, the Mormon Church does oppose opening records. Furthermore, it stretches credibility to believe that LDS Family Services would take a position which had not been approved by the Church. LDS Family Services agencies comprise 26 percent of the 197 member agencies of the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) the leading opponent of open records legislation. It sends emissaries to oppose open records at public hearings all over the country; it initiates letter-writing campaigns opposing open records. Without NCFA and its “official” sounding name, it’s almost certain more states would have open records laws by now. Make no mistake; LDS is the enemy of open records.

NCFA claims that it opposes opening records in order to protect "the principles of mutual consent and the option of privacy in adoption," but that’s just a cover for the principles of Mormonism, that is that your only family is the one to which you were sealed in the temple; this is the family with which you will spend eternity. Keeping records closed helps perpetuate the Mormon tenet that single pregnancy is sinful and ought to be concealed by surrendering the baby for adoption. Finally, it actively discourages adoptees from searching for their natural mothers, and makes searching seem like something that a good Mormon would not do. (Ironically, Troy Dunn, also known as “The Locator,” announces that he is a Mormon who searched and found his mother’s biological family in the opening sequence of each show. Go figure.)

Let’s look at how LDS beliefs and practices encourage and further sealed records. It starts with the Church’s reliance on abstinence only-sex education and includes the Church’s opposition to abortion, and insistence that single mothers surrender their babies. These same conditions created a baby glut in 1960's. There’s no hard data but it appears likely that without an aggressive adoption program, there would be more Mormon babies available than couples willing to adopt.

Mormons marry and begin their families early. Thus they have fewer age-related fertility problems than the general population. LDS Family Services excludes gays, single people, and those who are not “temple worthy” from adopting. At the same time, Mormons eschew childlessness, putting pressure on infertile couples to adopt. Many couples, however, are reluctant to adopt if there is a likelihood that the child may reunite with the first family. They may turn to foreign adoptions where reunion with birthparents is often impossible.

The Church actively promotes surrender and adoption. Its monthly publication Ensign has frequent articles encouraging pregnant single women to surrender their babies. Each ward, an organizational unit consisting of about 200 families, has an adoption coordinator who identifies pregnant single women and counsels them on marriage or adoption. Each ward holds annual adoption promotion programs during Sunday services. LDS Family Services has adoption agencies throughout the country. (See earlier post. And post about Rebecca's hurtful email.)

Although Mormon adoptions today commence with some degree of openness, adoptive parents have the power to deny contact between the adopted child and his natural parents. A mother-to-be may meet the prospective adoptive parents at the LDS Family Services offices but they are not given each others’ names or address. Adoptive parents are required to send pictures and letters to the natural mother through LDS Family Services offices until the child is three. The natural mother may send letters and pictures as well. However, LDS Family Services reads the letters and may censor them or refuse to forward them to the adoptive parents. The parties can agree to meet and to continue contact after three years, but this means that the adoptive parents have complete control over whether this happens or not. If they wish to cut off all contact, they may do so; remember that the first mother was never given their name or whereabouts. At this point, the so-called open adoption can in effect become a closed adoption, just as surely as mine was in 1966.

As usual, as in the past, this puts all the power in the hands of the adoptive parents, leaving natural mothers once again at the mercy of adoptive parents, who could turn out to be just like the ones Lorraine wrote about in the previous post.

It seems obvious that Church leaders fear that opening records – giving adoptees the right to their original, first biological heritage -- would encourage reunions which would in turn discourage Mormons from adopting domestically. The inevitable result would be single mothers keeping their babies or placing them with non-Mormon families. But adoption by non-Mormon families would work against the Church’s fierce drive to increase its membership. Remember, one of its main goals is to increase membership -- that is the point of the two-year mission that all good Mormon men undertake. Additionally, if women kept their babies, the single-mother families might draw into question the Church's teachings that a proper family consists of a married man and woman and their children.

How do we combat this? Certainly it is an uphill battle, and with the LDS, we will never win in our lifetimes. But that means that we have to work all the harder to spread the message that the vast majority of first mothers desperately want to know the children they surrendered and pray for a reunion.

In a few days, I’ll post about reading my granddaughter’s blog – and learning that she has obliterated me from her “heritage.”

--Jane

Dark Ages Adoption Spewing over at Huffington Post

While the adoptasphere is abuzz with reaction to ABC's Find My Family--some of this is bound to reach the ears of legislators, so right on, I say!--over at The Huffington Post, nasty business is afoot in the form on a noxious column by an assistant professor of psychology, no less at Cornell Medical School. It's yet another frothing at the mouth of an adoptive parent, one Ms. Peggy Drexler.

Ms. Drexler sounds like a clone of that other professor of adoption fairy tales, Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard. (And people wonder why adoption reform, or birth mothers, does not get more support from the feminist community, or which I am most certainly a member. Ah, my dear, this is why. Feminists form a large group of adopters. But I digress.

"Adopting a New Attitude" could have been written in the darkest Dark Ages of adoption, anytime from the Forties onward. What was wrong with the piece? Let me count the ways:

1) To show that adoption is not, "second best," Ms. Drexler quotes another adoptive mother: a quick witted, vivacious forty-seven year old, "totally present," blond, fair-skinned, green-eyed woman who looks like she was a high school cheerleader. She is now an adoptive single mother by choice to three beautiful brown skinned boys she adopted from Guatemala ages four, four and a half, and seven.

Hmm. I guess both Drexler and the extremely cool blond, fair-skinned, green-eyed (so far, she is describing me) could have been a cheerleader (I didn't make the team) woman has three children from Guatemala. I guess Drexler has not read the stories about mothers who were killed in order to take their children to be sold to unscrupulous adoption brokers in Guatemala, or otherwise she might have chosen another blond, fair-skinned, green-eyed adopter. Or not come upon the story about the prospective adoptive mother who noticed that something was amiss with the papers the adoption lawyer in Guatemala presented her and called off the adoption. Now, that's a woman after my own heart. But I digress.

Yet what is going on here is that Ms. Drexler is making a saint of a woman who very likely has stolen children as the focal point of her story about how adoption is not Second Choice, which is the title of a very good memoir by adoptee Robert Andersen, M.D., that comes with blurbs from no less than Betty Jean Lifton, Joyce Maquire Pavao, and Annette Baran, good folks all, two of them adopted themselves.

2) I could hardly contain myself when I saw the "expert" she brought in to give gravitas to her piece: Mike McMahon, the director of the Gladney Center for Adoption. That's right, Drexler attempts to prove her point about how great adoption is and how we should "adopt a new attitude" about it by the director of the agency that has been a main proponent of sealed records and only reluctantly, when its business was going south because they were not doing open adoptions, did the agency change its tune, and yes, today, young maidens, you can have a open adoption at this nefarious agency. This is like asking the head of Goldman Sachs what's good about giving millions of dollars in bonuses to top performers with the government's bailout money. Really, Arianna, where is your critical ability? Not evident here.

Let's not forget that Gladney of Fort Worth is one of the leading adoption agencies in the country! It's where rich folk and movie stars have gone to get their American babies for generations! (Though today, they have a lucrative international market. From their website: The Gladney Center for Adoption is one of the oldest [Ed: 120  years!] and largest maternity homes and adoption agencies in the United States, placing more than 28,000 children in permanent homes and assisting more than 37,000 birth mothers. In addition to placing children born in the United States, Gladney's intercountry program is committed to finding permanent homes for children in other countries. Adoption opportunities are available in several countries around the world including Eastern European, Asian, African and Latin American countries.

Our guy Mike was recently nominated for an Angels in Adoption by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, whose child a few years ago came from...you got it, Gladney. Even the name kinda creeps me out--Gladney, it sounds sinister, but maybe that's just me. Rumor has it that Troy Dunn of The Locator, who is kind of a Bat Man for birth mothers, will not take on searches emanting from Gladney adoptions because they are so hard, so closed are those records at this infamous adoption bazaar. So, Mike, whose livelihood depends on a thriving adoption market, is the "expert" Ms. Drexler uses to show that adoption is so peachy-keen: "To the people who persist in assuming that adopted kids are somehow flawed," she writes, continuing, "Sure, adopted kids are over-represented in counseling," [McMahon] tells me. "But they are also over-represented at the orthodontist, the dermatologist, all those things, because we [adoptive parents] want to give them everything we can."

So adopted people are not over-represented among the troubled in our population, though numerous studies show that to be the case, even more likely to think about suicide as adolescents--only because their parents are such good parents they pay more attention and get their kids more therapy? Wait one moment--even adoptive parents, those without blinkers on--have done some of these studies. Seems that Ms. Drexler is probably too busy being her daughter's "true mom," as she puts it, to bother with petty details like that. I'm not going to argue about her comment thus makes me an "untrue" mother, because that kind of niggling is what adoptive parents are always doing--nearly passing out, it seems, when they hear the word "real" in front of a reference to we who carried them and gave birth to our children.  (Understand, please, I am not saying that adopted people come into the world with problems, but that adoption itself is the problem that manifests can lead to feelings of rejection that may cause psychological problems. As one psychiatrist said in court one day when I was there to testify for opening someone's birth records--and he was an adoptive father himself: Adoption is always painful.)

3) Back to Drexler. Her column ends with the same old chestnut about how the writer is not threatened by her daughter's curiosity about "her adoption status," because she, Ms. Drexler, knows that to be a "bona fide mother" you have to be there for every 2 a.m. bad dream, go to the soiree at school and hear your child sing, and listen to their complaints about who was not nice to them. Though she doesn't come out and actually say it that we who gave birth were no more than birth canals [which is how I have seen us referred to at RainbowKids], that is what she is implying. As well as, by omission, ignoring the pervasive influence of DNA. Wait til her daughter is a teenager. I hope Drexler checks back in with us again.

4) The frosting on the cake? The biographical note states that Ms. Drexler collected her "data" and "patterns" for her book, Raising Boys Without Men,  How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and a finalist for a "Better Life Award." (Feminism at work, again.) She is currently at work on a book about fathers and daughters. Sounds like it is permissible in her world to have a father if you are a girl, not so good if you are a boy--but then on this issue, I am so old school. Comments are still being posted over at the Huffington Post, so please add your two or four cents. (I am there, just incognito for a change.) Drexler and the her editor need to read them. This is one of my favorites: 

I worked with a professor at Stanford on a project with adoptive parents. We asked them to assign a reason for why the kid did well or failed a test. This is called attribution theory. Briefly, the results were: If they did well, it was because they, the adoptive parents, helped them study. If they did poorly it was because of genes! 

---------------

Now I seriously have to get ready for tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day. Prepare that pie crust and cool it over night in the fridge! [I do make good crust, substituting a half cup of regular flour with Wondra.Which does wonders for flakiness.] Make that cranberry-lime-orange chutney! Make the pumpkin praline and pecan pie in the morning! Whip that cream with bourbon!
We are dining with friends, and those are my assignments. Ah, really, sometimes I wish I had a food blog. Since it would be nice to have a couple of adoption-free days, things might be quiet at the blog for a few days. Have a good day, y'all, and to those who are dreading it, remember, it's only one day.

'Baby Veronica' adoption will go forward

Dusten Brown and his daughter, Veronica. The Washington Post
Getty Images 

For Later Posts: 

Dusten Brown continues to fight for his daughter; the Capobiancos dig in deeper

Adoptive father John Roberts: Not impartial in the Baby Veronica case

Baby Veronica, now nearly four, will be taken from her natural father and returned to the couple who want to adopt her, Matt and Melinda Copabionco of South Carolina, following a 3-2 decision today by the South Carolina Supreme Court. Her natural mother, according to her attorney, is "over the moon."

This comes only weeks after a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that held that Dusten Brown, and his daughter, Veronica—both citizens of the Cherokee Nation—were essentially not protected under the Indian Child Welfare Act. After that ruling, Brown  attempted to adopt his own daughter in Oklahoma, where he has been living with her for the last 18

Even in 'modern families' the need to know biological heritage

Jane

Opponents of gay marriage often raise the specter of gays raising children they adopt or create through "modern fertility techniques" claiming that gays raising children would lead to the breakdown of the family, which would lead to the disintegration of civilization. Well, of course gays have been raising children long before recorded history. Those Greeks doing it in bath houses were often married with children. And gays like my late sister Helen married members of the opposite sex, had children, divorced, and taken up with a same-sex partner.

 Since the 1970's gays have adopted children both from foster care and as newborn infants. They have also created children through sperm and egg donations, IVF and surrogacy. With courts striking down gay marriage bans, it's likely that more gays will marry and acquire children. The critical question

If LDS Family Services ends adoption, it won't be soon enough

Lorraine

UPDATE BELOW
As we described yet another LDS Family Services adoption scam yesterday, one designed to cut out the natural father, it is merely one more in a long link of such fraudulent adoptions that the state laws were designed, if not to condone, to promote. In Utah the laws make it difficult--if not impossible--for a father to raise his child if the mother chooses adoption. It is apparent that social workers, LDS (Latter-Day Saints) Family Services, an organization with dozens of adoption agencies world wide, but most particularly in Utah, the seat of the Mormon religion, are not interested in ethical adoptions, but speedy ones instead.

Adoption in the Air

Is there ever a way to get away from adoption?

Not in today's world.

Two Sundays ago I read the New York Times's Modern Love in the Style section (To Nurture Again, With Courage), and discover early on that it is the story of how a woman feels when her two-year-old daughter adopted from China is ill, as this girl is a replacement for her natural daughter who died a year or so earlier. Okay, I'm thinking, that's got to be weird, growing up knowing that you only ended up in that family because--somebody else died. I think about writing a letter, but you know, sometimes I am just tired of it all.

That night, or the next, I watch Criminal Minds and come upon a story about a nutjob and his just-as-sick dying wife who pay someone to abduct blonde, blue-eyed girls of child-bearing age whom they lock up in the basement, impregnate and hope for a boy to replace the boy-child who died several years earlier. If a girl is born, she is left at a church and put up for adoption. (Shades of China, right?) The nutcase couple have already given away a couple of girls, the guy has killed the teenagers who were unfortunate to give birth to girls, but the investigators can amazingly enough trace one of those kids (through DNA left on the corpse which has been dug up, yes, it's icky but that's modern science) to the real grandparents. (Real, I said, real, yes I did.)

You, dear reader, can already see where this is going. Do we have another Baby Anna Schmidt/Jessica DeBoer/Anna Mae He case on our screens? Will the grandparents sue for custody, ripping the child from the loving arms of the strangers who have given her the only home she knows? The script contains a bit discussion about the grandparents' legal right to their offspring, and what's in the best interest of the child, should not the child stay in her stable home? Someone says that the grandparents would probably not have any trouble getting the kid back, as they are her biological grandparents, and I'm thinking, What planet do you live on, scriptwriter? No problem? And the kid is....what six or seven? Have you read about these kinds of cases in the last twenty years? Now I'm hooked, for sure. No changing channels til I see how this plays out.

Of course, by the hour's end, the secret basement jail is found, the young mother who just gave birth to a boy still there is happily reunited with her child immediately, but the darling blond boy found upstairs watching television when the cops came in? Who is currently being raised by the nutjob parents? Mom is dying (stage four breast cancer), dad is clearly going to prison. Is the boy going to go "into the system?" No, we have a tidy ending to make everybody happy. Fortunately, he is also the offspring of the aforementioned grandparents, sharing their DNA, and the fade out shows them meeting him while a voice over informs us that the adoptive parents of their other grandchild has agreed to some sketchy idea of visitation. Whew!

 Yesterday afternoon a friend who is the health honcho at Consumer Reports sent me a press release from the University of North Carolina informing me that children adopted from overseas have no greater disabilities than children adopted domestically:

For immediate use: Monday, Oct. 26, 2009

UNC study: Disability rates similar for internationally, domestically
adopted children

CHAPEL HILL - Children adopted from overseas have disability rates similar to those adopted from within the United States, according to new research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Results of the first national study of disabilities among internationally adopted children appear in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics. The study's authors are Philip N. Cohen, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Carolina Population Center, and Rose M. Kreider, Ph.D. of the U.S. Census Bureau.

Cohen and Kreider examined data from the 2000 U.S. Census for about 82,220 internationally and 972,200 domestically adopted children with sensory, physical, mental and self-care disabilities. They found that disability rates for internationally adopted children (11.7 percent) and domestically adopted children (12.2 percent) were more than twice the rate for all children aged 5 to 15 (5.8 percent).

Other findings related to international adoptees' gender, age at
adoption and country of origin included:

* Girls (10.2 percent, compared to 13.7 percent of boys) and infants (7.2 percent, vs. 15.2 percent of children adopted at ages 2 to 4, and 9.9 percent of children adopted at ages 5 to 9) were less likely to have
any disability.
* Disability rates for Chinese and Korean adoptees were noticeably lower than that of domestic adoptees (3.7 percent and 7.1 percent vs. 12.2 percent); however, the rate was close to twice as high among children
adopted from Romania (21.1 percent).
* Internationally adopted children were significantly more likely to have sensory disabilities (2 percent vs. 1.4 percent), but less likely to have mental disabilities (9.7 vs. 10.9) than children adopted from within the U.S.
* Internationally adopted boys; children aged 8 to 13; those who lived with single parents; and children with non-Hispanic white parents were most likely to have a disability.

Cohen, the parent of two daughters adopted from China, said he hoped the finding that international adoption by itself does not constitute a greater risk for disability than domestic adoption would dispel some
stereotypes about international adoption. 

(Okay, a comment--What stereotypes about adoption? We are pelted with pictures of adorable girls from China, cute boys from Ethiopia, sweet girls from Guatemala.)

"I hope it will help prevent alarmism about international adoption," he said. "The information is important for health, education and social services professionals as well as adoptive parents, and it may help policymakers assess the risks and challenges these children face and identify the resources necessary to address them."

Cohen said all adopted children face risks, but parents and service providers can prevent and respond to those challenges. "Children in need of families are our youngest, most vulnerable citizens," he said. 


Last night on the Wendy Williams Show, the Times said that The Locator, Troy Dunn, would be a guest. But I could not even find the "Wendy Williams Show" on the tube so I missed that. But give me a few hours. I'm sure I'll run into an adoption connection before the day is out. I'm going to see Capitalism in a few hours, but I'm sure something will come along. 

But I think I'll avoid having a burger afterward at the Corner Bar where a paper placemat in the past featured an 800 number for women with babies to relinquish to call.--lorraine

What does "ancestry" mean to an adoptee?

Jane and Family on White House Lawn

On April 9, my grandchildren, ages six and nine, my daughter (their aunt) who lives in Washington and I participated in the White House Easter Egg Roll. About 35,000 people attended the event which has been held annually since 1878.  Easter Egg Roll participants come in groups of several thousand and stay for two hours. Because our tickets were for the late afternoon, we did not see the President or the First Lady, who were there in the morning.

The event was much like a neighborhood festival held in a local park.