h♥le, cont.: Upon learning that birth records would be sealed--FOREVER

About to be swallowed up by the deep                             photo by Ken Robbins

“But we’ll be able to—find each other when he’s eighteen, right—or twenty one?” I ask matter-of-factly—it’s half a statement, half a question, surely that’s the case. I am talking to the social worker at Hillside Terrace, the euphemistically named adoption agency. Her first name is Helen, but to me, she is Mrs. Mura. She is in her thirties, not that much older than me. She is my confessor, my therapist, my authoritative conduit to adoption. Other than Patrick, and an occasional visit from my lone girlfriend in town, Christy, Mrs. Mura was my only outside contact for those last months. Christy works on the afternoon paper in town; she and I were both young, ambitious and from elsewhere when we landed in Rochester, but she’s busy with her own career, and I rarely hear from her.

I am holed up in my apartment, and don’t venture much beyond a nearby
grocery store, the pharmacy across the street, and the library a few blocks away.

When an adoptee says: I'm not interested in searching....

Lorraine and daughter Jane, in NYC a few months after they first met

"Have you seen Philomena?" one friend after another has asked me. "What did you think?" 

Yes, I saw it and Yes, I liked it, wondering what they are actually asking. Like what is there not for me to "like" about Philomena? My brother asked about the nuns, others have asked about the slamming of the Church, and I tell them that yes, it was like that in Ireland and not much damn better in the U.S. I have a first mother friend who was told by a priest that she had to think of her daughter as "dead." (They are happily reunited today.)

Let's put to rest the myth that mothers were promised confidentiality

Prof. Elizabeth Samuels

Legal scholar Elizabeth J. Samuels, who has written about the laws surrounding sealed birth certificates before, has published a new report in the Michigan Journal of Law and Gender that counters the "promised confidentiality" myth. In "Surrender and Subordination: Birth Mothers and Adoption Law Reform,"* she writes that an analysis of 75 surrender documents, dated between 1936 to 1985, from 26 states "definitively supports birth mother advocates' reports that women were neither offered a choice of nor guaranteed lifelong anonymity." And, since all state laws allow records to be unsealed under some circumstances without notice to first mothers, they could not have been intended to protect mothers.

State adoption consent laws: the ugly, the bad, the better, and the GOOD

Jane

The loss of a child to adoption can be a blessing according to a social worker with the Mormon-affiliated adoption agency, LDS Family Services, who has commented on First Mother Forum recently.  She says this is true of many of her clients. I have to admit this seems far-fetched to those of us, both baby-swoop era mothers and recent mothers, still grieving from our loss, as many of the comments on the last post indicate and birth mother memoirs and blogs attest to. We also know that birth mothers' feelings may change over time.