What are the happy birth moms celebrating?

Note: For those coming here from Tyler Baltierra's Tweet, we have answered his rant against us and published it at a current post:   Tyler of 16 and Pregnant Tells FMF Off!

 (Below is the original post that he first responded to)

 November 18, 2012 8:39 AM

Lorraine

Open adoption or keeping the baby? We know that while overall very few teens--around one percent*--give up their babies for adoption anywhere anymore, the United States is far ahead of other developed nations in this regard. This is not a statistic to be cheering about--even if the impact of giving up a child in a fully open adoption does not lead to the depth of sorrow that we mothers from closed adoptions have dealt with. This is the perceived wisdom of those who compare the effect of closed adoptions versus open adoptions on the mothers who relinquish their children.

In the recent Donaldson report, Openness in Adoption, the authors state that the degree of openness generally does not affect their level of behavioral or socio-emotional adjustment [to being adopted]. The Minnesota-Texas Adoption Research Project study found, however, that higher degrees of collaboration in the adoptive kinship network [emphasis added] were associated with better

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.

Generation Gap: Do Women From an Earlier Era See Relinquishing their Children Differently?

Didn't know the blog was screwed up! Have been away from computer for more than 30 hours! Read below for changes, and er, a fix. Didn't know there was nothing there! --lo

So, do birth/first mothers who relinquished during the Baby Scoop Era, as I did in 1966, in general feel differently about their decision to do so than mothers who relinquished later on? The discussion going on in the comments at a previous post, No Relinquishment Regrets, indicates that they do. In general. And in reading other blogs (including at adoption.com or was it adoptionvoices?) which kicked me off for having an alternative opinion), it's not been lost on me that younger (birth/first) mothers, mothers who relinquished without the intense societal pressures that those of us who relinquished in the Fifties, Sixties, even the Seventies felt coming at us relentless as the rain do feel differently than we do.

I've poked around looking for research and it's sketchy. We start here with what British adoption researcher John Triseliotis  reported in 2005 in The Adoption Triangle Revisited (with Julia Feast and Fiona Kyle):

"Most of the birth mothers featuring in this study gave birth to their child, and parted with them, in the 1950 and 1960s when harsh attitudes, along with same and stigma, surrounded non-marital birth. As a result, and to maintain the secret, many birth mothers and their families built elaborate stories and fictions to disguise the pregnancy and birth, with many of them being sent to mother and baby homes or to another part of the country in order to conceal the pregnancy. It is not surprising, perhaps, that many came to feel that it had not been their decision to part with their child and suggested that it was taken out of their control."

[This is a hard nut for me, because on the one hand, I feel this way--that my choice was not really a choice, even if my parents were not directly involved, they were involved--and on the other hand, I feel that taking responsibility for one's act is leads to greater acceptance by one's found/reunited child. In my own situation, in time I was able to say to her that I--not society--gave her up. Simply saying: I'm sorry that you had to be adopted without caveats as in The devil, the times, my parents made me do it, leads to a stronger basis for a reunion of hearts and minds--and forgiveness. Just, I'm sorry you were adopted. I'm sorry I did not keep you.

Those few words eloquently express one's own responsibility for the child you gave up for adoption. Some may disagree, but I think most adoptees would like to hear those words at least once, even. As for forgiveness, we may feel pressures were so inevitable that we do not need forgiveness, but maybe adoptees need to feel they have the power to give it; however, if we say we were not to blame, how can they forgive us?]

To continue with Triseliotis: "A significant minority, however, were clear that the decision had been theirs. Because of the stigma and the absence of emotional support and understanding from the immediate family, or the child's father, and because the decision had been taken out of their hands, the great majority also came to feel lonely, isolated, abandoned, vulnerable, powerless and largely victims. Equally, some of their parents had found themselves torn between the wish to be supportive and the fear of shame. Furthermore, and because the pregnancy had become a taboo subject, it could not be talked about within the family and so no emotional support could be made available either.

[Which leads to older-era birth/first mothers not telling their husbands, children, etc., and makes for a difficult transition (or none at all) when the adopted person comes back into one's life. So--if you are reading this and have not told your spouse, your children...just do it. They may be hurt because you kept this secret from them, but in most cases, it will lead to a better understanding and the support you need. Just do it. A group from New York's Unsealed Initiative was back up on Albany lobbying last week, and again, they ran into someone who obviously had knowledge of some birth mother hiding deep in the closet and mentioned, when discussing the bill that would give adoptees their original birth certificates, how birth mothers are "fair game." Indicating that as "game" to be shot, they do not want to be found. When, in fact, most birth/first mothers hope to be rescued from a lifetime of wondering about their offspring.]

Triseliotis: "Some doctors, nurses and other professionals, e.g., moral welfare workers, were said to have shared the parent's and society's censorious attitudes, reinforcing both the shame and concealment of the pregnancy and birth. They, too, were said to without emotional support and saw adoption as resolving all the concerns and also providing the child with a 'good home.' This meant that birth mothers were again deprived of opportunities to express their intense grief and feelings of loss."

Hello...Yo, that is that how I felt. I only told one girl friend in Rochester [she drove me to the hospital, hoping I would not deliver in the car], one who was back in Michigan but we did not talk often, and Patrick, my daughter's father. Who saw adoption as the only solution.

But younger women do not approach giving up their child to be adopted with the same pressures, and by and large they do feel relinquishment is a real "choice," and thus are able to take responsibility that it is their own decision, and in making that decision, are genuinely of the mind that they are doing the best by their child. And while that does not change the maternal feelings of loss (that is hormonal, instinctual), it seems to have led to a lessening of the type of deep-seated and unending grief that mothers of my era harbor. From the Evan B. Donaldson 2006 report on birthmothers and their grief:

Current research on birthmothers concludes that being able to choose the adoptive family and having ongoing contact and/or knowledge results in lower levels of grief and greater peace of mind with their adoption decisions.

Women who have the highest grief levels are those who placed their children with the understanding that they would have ongoing information, but the arrangement was cut off. Such contact/information is the most important factor in facilitating birthparents’ adjustment, but only 13 states have laws to enforce post-adoption contact agreements in infant adoptions.

And from anecdotal evidence, those 13 states are not doing much to actually enforce the contracts. If an adoptive family changes their phone number and moves away, who is going to find them and haul their asses into court/jail? The local sheriff? And if the adoptive parents are pillars of the community, or otherwise "upstanding" citizens? And the sheriff is going to do exactly what?

Not much. I am taking the women at face value--that is what they are saying, that they are more at peace with their decisions than I was--but yeah, everyone, there is a part of me that has a hard time buying that.

And everyone, no matter when you relinquished, long ago or last week, give yourself a break tomorrow--buy yourself a flower, eat some chocolate, forgive yourself. afor the time being, we'll have to rely on anecdotal data. Stay tuned.

And despite everything, buy yourself a flower, have some chocolate, it's good for the heart. Yes, it's winter but spring can not be far behind.--lorraine