When you give up a child--Jane's story

Jane

When I was in the hospital after my daughter Rebecca's birth, I began crying inconsolably. I told a nurse/aide, whoever she was, I was afraid that the people who adopted my daughter wouldn't understand her soul. The nurse/aide shook her head puzzled; it made no sense to her, or frankly, to me either. But the thought did not leave me for some time.

Yet unlike other natural mothers, I never considered therapy. Losing my daughter was something I had to get over by gritting my teeth and trying to forget. A few days after my daughter was born in San Francisco in 1966, my social worker suggested that I find a job. Through a temporary agency I got a job within a month at Blue Cross to assist in Medicaid fraud investigations. I tallied procedures as a nurse read them off from bills doctors had submitted.

Dusky weaves the personal with the political

Janet Mason Ellerby

Lorraine's new memoir brings together her story as well as the larger tale of adoption in the 20th mid-century and the imperative for change. This is the message of  Janet Ellerby's engaging review of Lorraine's new memoir,

Hole In My Heart, published this week in the CUB Communicator.--jane

“Until I had answers, I would be stuck in a mire of remorse and recrimination...I could not move forward into my next act, until I found her.” Thus writes Lorraine Dusky in her compelling new memoir, Hole In My Heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption. She continues: “For mothers like me, adoption has no closure as long as we do not know what happened to our children.”

At the heart of Dusky’s memoir lie the emotional and psychological wounds natural mothers must endure after capitulating to adoption, whether open or closed. But closed adoption, Dusky argues convincingly, is especially egregious. It is not only exploitive and cruel but ultimately legally and morally wrong.

Jean Paton: A reformer ahead of her time

Jean Paton, the pioneer of adoption reform was not an activist; that was left to adoptee Florence Fisher, as well as our own first mother Lorraine Dusky, and many others. Although Paton was convinced that adoptees needed to reunite with their birth family to become whole, she eschewed behavioral scientists, she left it to adoptee Betty Jean Lifton and others to frame adoption separation in psychological terms. Paton was a visionary who saw beyond opening records and psychological cures for primal wounds, arguing for replacing adoption with guardianship, allowing children to keep their original identities and connection to their birth families. She was brilliant and courageous but also disagreeable and argumentative; her writings were often obtuse and verbose. In his excellent, lengthy biography, Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption, historian E. Wayne Carp uses her own words--she gave him access to all her papers--to tell her story.

It's 'Mother's' Day again. And 'Birth' Mother's Day too.

My daughter's Mother's Day card one year

Here it comes again, Mother's Day, impossible to miss because of the incessant ads that pop up everywhere, reminding us of our own fractured motherhood. I've been through the gamut of emotions about Mother's Day, beginning when I did not know where my daughter was, and my own mother did not even know my daughter existed, to those years after reunion when I spent the week preceding the big day hoping she would remember me in some small way. She usually did not. Oh heavy was my heart!

While I was feeling sorry for myself, I always imagined a big celebration going on with her adoptive mother--card, dinner, what-have-you. There were other children, and her adoptive father who was not likely to let any of them forget. I don't know if that was the case because I never asked. 

But one year, I got a wonderful hand-made card that said:
To my Other Mother. Inside it says: "I couldn't find a card that defined our relationship, but then all that truly matters is that I let you know, I Love You. Happy Mothers day LORRAINE, love

Do birth mothers/first mothers have the right to search?

Lorraine

NOTE: If you read the blog since last night, there have been several ads at the bottom.
Should first/birth mothers search for the children they gave up for adoption? Or should I say: Surrendered to forces greater than one's ability to resist--maybe we should start substituting that every time someone uses the damn phrase "made an adoption plan."

But the question remains: Do first mothers, or birth mothers, or whatever we are called have the "right" to search for our children?

Birthmothers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Shame

“A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP.” I read these words, engraved on a wooden panel above the door to the assembly hall, every day at Chicago’s Hyde Park High School. My 50th reunion is coming up next year. It’s time I begin stepping up to end unnecessary adoptions and keep families together.

I’ve been involved in lots of causes over the years, end the war, keep abortion safe and legal, encouraging Oregon’s governors to appoint more women to top positions. Other than appearing in an ad in 1998 for Oregon’s Measure 58 which gave adult adoptees the right to obtain their original birth certificates, I’ve stayed away from being publicly involved in reforming adoption laws. Standing up in front of strangers, confessing my birthmotherhood, has just seemed too hard. But now at age 67, I know I’m running out of time.

For the next few years and perhaps more, I’m committing myself to trying to change Oregon’s surrender law. This law allows a woman to sign an irrevocable consent for the adoption of her newborn immediately after she leaves the delivery room, exhausted from the delivery, experiencing hormonal changes, and likely still under the influence pain killers. The prospective adoptive parents may have been in the delivery room and she is under pressure not to disappoint them. Although the law requires that she be informed that the surrender is irrevocable, the explanation is usually provided by an employee of the adoption agency and may be couched in terms of the necessity of irrevocability to keep the baby from going into foster care.

While women considering adoption are entitled to three counseling sessions before birth at the prospective adoptive parents’ expense, the law does not specify any particular information be imparted The counseling as a practical matter may be directed to helping the mother deal with her loss rather than giving her the power to prevent the loss.

Oregon is one of the worse states in terms of protecting mothers’ rights but other states have joined the race to the bottom. Legislators across the country have accepted as true the adoption industry’s claim that giving up a child needs to be made “simpler.” As Prof. Elizabeth Samuels points out in a 2005 Tennessee Law Review article "Time to Decide," “Many state laws appear to value an increase in infant adoptions over the goal of encouraging careful deliberation.” Heck, even President Barack Obama in his Notre Dame speech said adoption should be “more available.”

Participating in this blog gave me the push I needed. Lorraine and I wrote an article for the Oregon State Bar Bulletin, responding to a glowing article about an adoption attorney who represented birthmothers. The attorney’s duties include obtaining his client’s signature on a surrender document and delivering her newborn child to the adoptive parents. The Bulletin refused to print our article (which we posted here) but it did print a shorter version in the letters to the editor.

Last month, a politically-experienced attorney who had represented a woman challenging the adoption of her infant son saw our letter and contacted me about working to change Oregon's surrender law.

Birthmother Delores Teller and I met with the attorney, who has brought about legislative reform on two other tough issues, and his good friend, a professional lobbyist. “What are your organizations? Who are your supporters?” they asked. “Surely women who have been victimized as you have would have banded together and demanded change.”

“Well, yes, sort of,” we responded. “There is CUB and Origins, and folks from Ethica are supportive, perhaps AAC would get on board. Maybe some adoptee groups.” “How many people are we talking about in Oregon?” they asked. “Not many we admitted.”

Ah, there’s the rub. We could have the best of bills, the best of logic, but if we did not have the numbers, we would get nowhere. Surely, if, as we claimed, thousands of women in the US were suffering from the loss of their children, they would have banded together and demanded reform. If they’re not telling their stories, politicians assume they don’t have stories to tell.

“It’s not that simple”, I whimpered. “Women are shamed into silence. We don’t have heroines. Feminists, who should see us as the victims of the patriarchy, are too busy adopting to care.”

As I drove home, the French National Anthem popped into my head. “Aux armes citoyens!” If we are going to storm the Bastille, we have to come out of the closet.

Here’s a challenge to our readers. Find out the time periods for surrender in your state and post them here. Your state statutes are probably on your state’s legislative website and you can access the information under “adoption”. And if you can’t find it, contact your state legislator or state senator and ask for help. Not only will he get you the information but you may be commencing the process of educating him about an injustice.