So if Roe is overturned? What happens to women who give up a child? In contrast to women who have an abortion.

Dusky's jacket photo on Birthmark
1979 

What happens to a woman when she is coerced--by society or circumstance--to relinquish a child to adoption?

Even though I know a significant number of these women do not wish reunion, a fact that was foreign to me but I've heard from enough adoptees to accept its reality--let's look at the emotional damage that the act of losing a child this way leaves in its wake. I'm fearful that if Judge Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed by the Senate--and he may well be--Roe v. Wade is in serious trouble. He's called the right for a woman to control her own reproductive system "settled law," which sounds comforting, but as far as I know, he's never added that Roe was "correctly decided," which apparently is key. In fact, I think he's likely to be the pivotal fifth vote on the Supreme Court that would overturn Roe, and give Trump's base what they are so anxious to have: control of women's bodies.

So with Roe in jeopardy--and already had to get in seven states that only one one legal abortion clinic--let's examine what happens to women who lose a child via adoption.

When all else fails, call us 'bitter and angry' first mothers

Jane

First Mother Forum has been getting flack from adoptive mothers and first mothers over what they claim to be our position on adoption and our characterizations of them. We're flattered we've caught their attention. Attacks are the harbinger of change.

We're also distressed because what our critics write is simply not true. We haven't denigrated all adoptive mothers or called them names as they accuse us of doing. Contrary to what they write, we are not against all adoption; in truth we have praised adoption as a loving act for a child who needs a family. (See What We Think About Adoption, link below)

Adoption, It Seems, Is Everywhere, coming to a screen near you

Friday night I happened to catch the opening scenes of a cop show called Flashpoint...and saw that the cops with big guns and even bigger cars (wearing bullet proof vests, no less) were chasing a young couple with a baby. The young woman was cradling the baby, the young man was calling him Owen...and I thought, "It's a story about a young couple who stole their baby back from the very nice adoptive parents. Shoot 'em!"

Right. Baby was two months old, they had missed the cutoff date for changing your mind by a couple of weeks...story ends with the biological father's suicide (just like his daddy, after his mother died, and he was raised in unhappy foster homes) and the happy rich adoptive couple (father says he is a lawyer, natch, their house is very big) ends up back with the baby, the natural mother presumably in the hands of the police. Could we fast forward to twenty years?

Next day, I heard an NPR story ostensibly about judging a book by its cover, but turned out to be an interview with a young woman (well, she was 27) in Seattle who was choosing among the piles of letters she had received from couples and women who wanted to adopt her forthcoming baby. Her fiance died, she got pregnant after a short fling with but did not want to marry him or otherwise have him in her life...so, adoption story number two. Could we fast forward fifteen years?

I hit a trifecta: The next day I got an email about a new series on WE starting this fall called Adoption Diaries...press release here: http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news.aspx?id=20090731we01 Can we fast forward five years and show the well-adjusted, happy birth mothers?

And there is another show on one of the cable channels called: Pregnant at Sixteen, with the adoption-themed segment (done in conjunction with the adoption-as-the-best-outcome-for single-women Mormons). This is the show that several of us active in adoption reform were contacted for when it was being made. I could not bear to watch. There is only so much I will put up with, and this looks mawkish beyond belief.

WE is also where the channel where we watch (usually by DVD) The Locator (see our previous post here) where searcher Troy Dunn finds people who have been separated, often by adoption, season three starting in September. On a recent show that reunited two brothers, the birth mother had refused to meet her first son, but his younger brother decided to initiate the search and reconnect, even without her blessing. Dunn said that this was also the case with his mother, who had been adopted at birth. Troy found her mother, but the woman refused to meet her; some time later, she was contacted (and warmly accepted) by a brother.

And apparently The English American by adoptee Alison Larkin has been picked up and will be a sitcom sometime in the future. Ought to be a million laughs, with a nutty irresponsible birth mother and proper English adoptive mother. Oy vey, I can feel the laughter burbling up.

Then of course, we have the adoption story line on Brothers and Sisters and the numerous times it shows up on Law & Order, all three varieties; and many a medical show where medical histories are missing, such as House. Apparently the world can't get enough of adoption stories.

Let us not forget the brouhaha over the movie Orphan.

It includes the line (I'm paraphrasing here so don't kill me if I have it few words off): It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as one as your own. It seems that a whole lot of people are screaming that Orphan will set back adoption, and mark adoptees as crazy killers, and there has been a petition, and a lot of media attention. Here is a snippet from pressofatlanticcity.com:

Among those signing [the anti-Orphan petition] was Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans. His group has launched a Web site - OrphansDeserveBetter.org - featuring a petition urging Warner Bros. to add a pro-adoption message at the end of the film and to donate a portion of box-office receipts to aid orphans.

Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, suggested Warner Bros. could improve matters by helping produce educational materials about the value of adoption.

"It has been a long time since a movie caused this much angst and worry in the adoption, foster-care and orphan-care communities, even before its release," Pertman said.

Obviously, the way we were portrayed as a group in Juno caused not so much angst and worry, because--hey, we're not good people anyway. We are the sluts who give away our babies.

Where were these people when Juno was such a hit? Where was the anti-Juno sentiment when we were subjected to a movie that portrayed birth mothers as a hip-talking teenagers who barely gave a fig that they were about to give up their babies to cool white women in swell houses? Why are adoptive parents typically portrayed as good, worthy people who of course deserve to have that baby at the center of the plot because obviously, they will give him or her a much better life than the first mother ever could? This of course was the subset theme of the long-running Baby Jessica De Boer/Anna Schmidt real life story. And twenty years later, Juno.

Everyone loved Juno (see earlier post), it ended up with an damn Oscar for best screenplay, adding insult to injury.

Where was the objection when Juno was released? Was it our fault that we didn't raise the objection ourselves, get a petition going, write to the movie maker and storm hip stripper-turned screenwriter Diablo Cody's house? Uh, well, yes.

But we first mothers are not an active lobby group, many of us are still hiding in the closet, and we don't have an active lobby of adoptive parents (and they are organized) to stand up for us. We are just the women who gave them our children, and a whole lot of those parents want us off the stage.

Besides, lots of people still want to think that we are Juno's sisters. Dammit, I'm not.

Such a paradox is this conundrum

August, 16,1974, after reading the introduction to In Search of Origins: The Experiences of Adopted (1973, London) people by by John Triseliotis.


I think:
How is she? And the introduction
claims
the more adjusted
and happy
the less
she needs me.
Even in my ethereal form
of the void of the present silence
I want
that she be happy.
(however she perceives such).
Yet
O God
please I beg on the crusts of my soul
that she is searching
and curious.
funny--such a paradox
as is this conundrum.

Birth Mothers Happy to Reconnect

Hey Everybody, thanks for your kind posts--and the different takes on who is selfish. I had completely forgotten about adoptees being told that search and contact with their first moms was "selfish." What a crock! According to a small but rigorous study of birth/first mothers (93, some who were seekers, some were sought) in Great Britain, 94 percent of them were pleased that their son or daughter had made contact with them. Ninety percent said that the contact and reunion had been a happy and satisfying experience. After eight years, 70 percent were still in face-to-face contact, and 86 percent were still in indirect contact.

John Triseliotis, who headed the study, did an earlier work called In Search of Origins (1973) that was the first serious study to talk about the ramifications of being adopted and searching, as it was five years before The Adoption Triangle, our bible for opening records by Sorosky, Baran and Pannor.

What was fascinating in the current study was the differences Triseliotis found between the seeker birth mothers (32) and the sought birth mothers (61). Seeker mothers were found to have poorer physical and mental health, lower self-esteem; and were affected more severely by the loss of their child. Nothing surprising there. I certainly fall into that group, and to judge from what we read online, so do mothers who blog. I remember a good friend (a birth mother, but we were friends before we discovered this)always yapping at me about my low self-esteem, and how I let guys walk over me when I was dating after my first marriage (shortly after I gave Jane up) ended. Shortly after I found Jane, she paid for the same searcher and found her daughter; they remain in frequent contact and see each other regularly. Now back to the new research:

Triseliotis found that sought mothers were healthier: "on the whole and in spite of their sadness, [they] were not found to be significantly different from the general population, before contact took place." However, "79 percent of both groups reported guilt as one of a number of lasting impacts arising from the parting decision.... The guilt arose mainly from the belief that, irrespective of the circumstances, they had 'rejected' the child."

The numbers in Britain were identical to what the New Jersey Department of Human Services reported back in 2004. In a letter to a NJ senator, Dolores Helb, Adoption Registry Coordinator, wrote: "Despite the fact that the majority of parents we search for are not registered with us, 95 percent do agree to some form of contact with the adoptee. Though this percentage has not changed since 1996, newer technology has brought us greater success in the number of people we have been able to locate." (Thanks to Pam Hasegawa and Judy Foster for providing the above data.) Let me add that The Adoption Triangle and a companion book by Annette Baran are well worth reading for anyone in the triad.

And a personal note...Hi Mairaine, Aston was apologizing but I said I wanted to see him in person...and that didn't happen. Now I just wish I had had a ten-minute conversation with him on the phone and let it go. Yes, I've known him for a long time but he's not one of my closest friends. So it was time to not make a great deal out of it, talk over the phone, accept his apologies, explain a bit, and I did not do that. I kept asking for a face-to-face. He and his wife knew I was upset as soon as I sent her the email saying so. But I'm reading into my response that indeed, I was one of the seeker mothers who has deep reservoirs of grief and sorrow and am acutely sensitive about this issue.

Tomorrow I'll post about the cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine: Her Body, My Baby. Grit your teeth and read it.
Take care, y'all--lorraine