How money rules infant adoption

Jane

Lorraine and I gave up our newborn daughters because we believed we would be our child's disgrace and they would be ours. Today, though, with 40 percent of children born to single mothers, politicians and celebrities having love children a-plenty, adoption as prime time TV entertainment, shame is not part of the equation. Adoption practitioners have new ammunition in their arsenals. We'll be writing about these over the next several weeks. 

First up is the influence of money although that term is never used. Rather, Catelynn and Tyler of 16 and Pregnant fame and thousands of other parents give up their children in order to give their children and themselves "the life they deserve."

Part 2: A relationship with my daughter goes awry. Reason unknown.

Jane and Lorraine sometime in the 90s.

Continuing the story of my relationship with my daughter, as she came and went over more than a quarter of a century. When the previous post left off it was March. 

(Copyright Lorraine Dusky 2013, may not be copied or reproduced in any form)

April. At American Adoption Congress’s 25^th anniversary convention in Atlanta, I am one of the keynote speakers. The AAC is comprised of adoptees and both first parents and adoptive parents, and stands for openness in adoption, including taking down the sealed-records statutes. I talk about the early days of this movement, and how far we still have to go. I do not gloss over the rabid opposition we faced then, and still do. 

Biology is irrelevant, judge rules in gay custody battle

Schollar and Altman in better times

If there is any doubt that in the mind of some, being the biological mother doesn't count for much--particularly if you are a lesbian parent--consider this: A Family Court judge has awarded full custody of a young child to her adoptive mother, instead of her biological mom, in what is believed to be the first such New York state case involving a same-sex couple.

From the New York Post: "Manhattan Judge Gloria Sosa-Lintner said, 'Although . . . [Brook] Altman is the biological parent, this does not give her an automatic priority over the adoptive parent. This is analogous to a father getting custody of his own child, where only the best interests of the child are paramount.'” Custody was awarded to Altman's former partner, Allison Scollar, who had formally adopted the girl.

Foreign Adoptions Aren't Plunging Fast Enough

Jane

“’The era of the boom time for international adoption, I think, has passed us by’” Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, told National Public Radio reporters Jennifer Ludden and Marosa Penaloza. To which First Mother Forum says: Good by and good riddence.

Since its peak in 2004, the number of foreign adoptions has plummeted from nearly 23,000 to less than 10,000 in 2010. Considering the known corruption in international adoption--and the 115,000 American children in foster care waiting to be placed--that figure is still obscenely high.

High number of adoptions in the US is a national disgrace

Jane

The number of domestic infant adoptions in the United States borders on a national disgrace. Each year somewhere between 14,000 and 25,000 American mothers lose their children to adoption. In today's day and knowing what we know about the effects of adoption, this is a tragedy.

The data is hard to come by. According a recent report of the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services,* data on voluntary domestic infant adoptions is not collected systematically. A 2003 study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention put the number at less close to 14,000, about one percent of children born to never married women. The percentage for single white women surrendering was 1.7 percent; for black women it is near zero.

Adoption Nation is No Country for Birth Mothers

Jane

Adam Pertman’s Adoption Nation: (second edition) is a grateful adoptive parent’s accolade to adoption disguised as a treatise. Pertman is the often quoted Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute,
but he doesn’t get it when it comes to birth mothers. As in the first edition, Pertman gives lip service to first/birth mothers’ pain but quickly diverts the readers’ attention to the stories of a handful of women who become “true believers in adoption” with “no regrets.” As a first mother reading this book, I could not forget that Pertman is an adoptive father of two.

Pertman minimizes the pressures and in some cases the outright corruption which cause mothers in the United States and abroad to lose their children. In his zest for all things adoption, he ignores the opinion of recognized child welfare experts--including that of his employer, the Donaldson Institute, that “”Every society, including our own, accepts that it is generally in the best interests of children to be raised by their biological parents unless they cannot or do not wish to.“*

Adoption is Not Gleeful; Fox's hit show tells it like it is

Jane

An adoptive mother who finds the adoption plot lines on Glee so offensive has started a petition asking for a Public Service Announcement that would offset the "harmful inaccuracies" the show perpetuates. Really, we wondered when we first heard if this--after all the inaccurate and nasty portrays of first/birth parents we've seen. What does this woman find so offensive on the Fox teen hit, FMF wondered.

It's about a birth mother who wants her child back. Quelle surprise! A cheerleader, Quinn (played by Diane Argon), is a birth mother who wants to get her child back from the adoptive mother; another character (born by surrogate) has had her real mother come back into her life. Well! How outrageous is that!?!

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.