Annie Lane's damaging advice: When one child has an open adoption, and the other doesn't

So-wrong-about-adoption
Annie Lane

Annie Lane, a columnist with Creators Syndicate, offered up some noxious advice recently to "Anxious Adopter," who has two adopted children, a girl, 6, and a boy, 4. The boy's adoption is open and he visits his first/birth mother twice a year. The girl's natural mother, however, requested a completely closed adoption. There's the rub. The girl wonders why she does not have another family like her brother has. Lane tells the adoptive mother: "You might want to consider whether these visits would be good to continue in the long run. Are they good for your son? Do they confuse him?" Clearly a not-subtle recommendation that Anxious cut off contact with the boy's mother to spare the girl any disappointment, as well as to make life easier for "Anxious Adopter."

Should a natural mother be able to visit a child after adoption?

Where is my baby? 

"Working on a show: Should a birth mother retain visitation rights to a child she chose to place for adoption?"  That's the question over at Dr. Phil's Facebook page...and as I write there are hundreds of comments and nearly 500 shares.

The responses are all over the place, but a good number of them reveal the anger and ownership feelings of many adoptive parents, and even adoptees, to wit:

"No. You chose to put a child up for adoption and you have no rights after you sign that page."

Spence-Chapin out of the infant adoption business

Is that Grandpa or Dad on the right?

One of the best known and biggest adoption agencies in New York City, Spence-Chapin, is stopping infant adoptions which it has been doing for over a century. This change, not yet reported on S-C's website, is explained in an August, 2013 letter to the "Spence-Chapin Community," which a reader shared with First Mother Forum. Maud Welles, the Board Chair and Emily Forhman, the Executive Director, explained that the declining number of infants and young children available for adoption due to the "reduced stigma of single parent households, increased access to birth control, family unification programs, in-country adoption programs, and difficult bureaucratic or political policies" necessitated this change.

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

 

Veronica and her father, Dusten Brown

Oh, pity the poor Capobiancos. Practically weeping on camera how they want "their daughter," to "come home." The girl is question is Veronica Brown, otherwise known as Baby Veronica in the media.

Then Chris Cuomo on CNN is arguing the "legal rights" in this case this morning, and how it has been settled--thus, the father of Baby Veronica (now Toddler Veronica, as she will be four next month), Dusten Brown ought to just get with the program, and turn over his child to the would-be adopters. He nods to the another member of the New Morning show, Michele Pereira, whose family "has embraced" adoption. (How, I do not know.)

Joyce Brothers touted the advantages of being adopted

photo by Marty Liederhandler of AP

Pop psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers who died yesterday was a pillar of the old adoption mindset that we are still combating today. She was the Dr. Drew and Dr. Phil of an earlier era, and the first to dispense advice to the masses with the patina of a psychology degree behind it. She was syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, and her charming, reassuring demeanor appealed to television audiences. Reading a few of her old columns gives us a window on the world in the Seventies and Eighties.

In 1976, she "strongly" advised a woman who got pregnant by "mistake," and who wants to go to law school, to consider adoption. "Several studies indicate that illegitimate children who are adopted fare better than those who remain with the natural parent," Brothers wrote. "The adopted are generally more confident and better adapted socially. "

Can the media get adoption right?

Jane

"US could face a critical adoption shortage" wails the headline in the Salem, Oregon Statesman Journal over a January 11 USA Today article.* 

What's the cause of this claimed calamity?  "A cataclysmic implosion of intercountry adoption (emphasis added)" according to Tom DiFilpo of the  Joint Council on International Children's Services. In addition to Russia closing its doors, adoptions from China, Ethiopia, and South Korea have declined. Domestic production cannot make up for the shortage because, according to Jenny Pope of the adoption agency Buckner International, "as single parenthood becomes more acceptable, 'there are just not as many women placing their children for adoption.'"

Catelynn and Tyler--still grieving over the loss of their daughter

Catelynn and Tyler talk to Carly on her birthday

When Catelynn and Tyler relinquished their newborn daughter Carly to Brandon and Teresa Davis on the reality show 16 and Pregnant, Catelynn said as she left the hospital, “I’m at peace with my decision.”

That peace was short-lived. As they are preparing for Carly’s second birthday, presented on Teen Mom, Catelynn tells Dawn, their counselor at Bethany Christian Services, “I’m definitely more at peace than I was a year ago [on Carly’s first birthday].” Tyler blurts out the hard truth, “Adoption is a constantly coping process. I don’t know when you fully cope with it” Catelynn adds “I think it goes on for your whole life.”

Tell Dear Abby: Birth mothers think of their children lost to adoption.

Jeanne Phillips ("Dear Abby")

In advising a brother not to talk to his sister about the baby she lost to adoption, Jeanne Phillips, aka Dear Abby, joins the sorry parade of media personalities whose ignorance about adoption is no barrier to giving advice on the subject. These charlatans include Marguerite Kelly, Carolyn Hax, Ann Landers, and deadly doctors Laura, Phil, and Drew. They mislead the earnest souls seeking help as well as perpetuate popular stereotypes about adoption.

Forced to be a Father

The other day Dr. Phil did a show called Forced To Be a Father, about dads who feel tricked into fatherhood. The two guys on the show were very angry they have to pay child support because they say they feel no connection with these children they didn't intend to have. One was a guy in Michigan who says his girlfriend said she was using birth control, and couldn't get pregnant, so he didn't use a condom, and then, bingo! pregnant she was.

He wanted the mother to give up the child for adoption. She did not. So now he pays $500 a month. When asked how he felt about the child, he said that he felt no more connection than would a mother who gave up a child for adoption.

Well.

You can see that comments do not pick up on that remark, but let's join the party and hit that hard.

The other reluctant father was a family guy who found out two years after that the one night he spent with an ex resulted in a child, and a paternity test proved that he indeed was the father. He has two other young kids with his wife. The wife is quite bitter over the $350 a month in child support they pay, and this father also does not want to see his child. Feminist attorney Gloria Allred argued that these fathers are not taking the child into consideration, and, should they so choose, could ask for, or sue for, visitation rights. But neither of these guys were heading in that direction.

Maybe they will soften in time, as happened in the case of a friend who is the mother. She had given up her first born, and when she got pregnant unintentionally sixteen years later, she decided to have the child and raise him. As a single parent. The man's mother did act as a grandmother, and eventually the father came into the picture, has a good relationship with his son, and I believe, paid for his college education.

Back to Dr. Phil. The show ended on a huge upnote when the actor/comic Jay Thomas (the love interest of Candice Bergen on her old show) told of his warm relationship with a son who had been given up for adoption twenty years earlier. Thomas said that he was initially dubious when the son contacted him (the young man's first mother made the first phone call), but after talking to him agreed to see him in a public place. Thomas invited his son to a show he was doing, and asked his best friend to sit next to his son. The friend told him afterward that it had been like sitting next to you twenty years ago!

Within two weeks, Thomas said, the young man--who wants to be a singer, and has just done an album--was house sitting for them, knew his other two, much younger, kids (eight and six, as I recall) and ... all was well. All was, in fact, great! He has so much in common with his son! His wife said, let's not tell the kids yet, let's go to therapy and do it that way. But Thomas, at a two-for-one margarita night/afternoon where he happened to be with the oldest child, blurted out the truth, and as soon as the child got home, told his brother, and all beans were spilled. It all worked out well for everyone.

The truth shall set you free. If only more first mothers--if only all first mothers and fathers--acted on that. Secrecy is what keeps many first/birth mothers from having a relationship. They have been lying so long with their secret, they are afraid to let the air in. I imagine that if I had never told my husband that I'd had a child, and she contacted me, I would freak out. If I tell him now, my thinking would be, it's an admission that I have been lying by omission for more than twenty years.

Dr. Phil's show that day ended on such an upnote--the kid looks like Thomas, you could see how they were kidding around that they got along famously--and I can only assume that it would encourage more people either to have the courage to either search for their first parents, or accept into their lives the child relinquished.

It's well worth watching the show at the site above, and do post a comment about that stupid, uninformed comment from the guy who resents his child.

Be well, stay warm. We're switching from oil to gas (cleaner and eventually cheaper) and it's taken a month so far. The gas company was supposed to be here today...but no such luck. At least it hasn't been too cold. Yet. I'm wearing several layers and drinking hot water with lemon. Life is so much worse in so many places in the world. I think of Afghanistan,where I support a "sister" through Women for Women International.

--lorraine