Adoption Posters at Abortion Clinics...Why Not Truth-Counselors at Adoption Agencies? We volunteer.

I missed an article in the New York Times over the weekend--Campaigning for Common Ground in Abortion Debate--even though I knew something was in the works because the writer, Sue Dominus, contacted me beforehand asking me if I thought open adoptions were a more humane option that a closed adoption for a mother who surrenders her child. Yes, is the short answer; but...is the long answer, they are typically not enforceable contracts. Anyway, Dominus' piece was about putting "consider adoption" posters in abortion clinics: She writes:

"Imagine this: a woman enters her local Planned Parenthood office and notices, in the bathroom, a poster that says: “Questions about adoption? We can answer those, too.”

"Such posters, which should be up in the hallways of at least 15 abortion providers in New York within the month, are produced by the Adoption Access Network as part of a campaign to make adoption a subject that patients and social workers alike feel more comfortable broaching in abortion clinics. The thinking is that all the clinics’ clients, whether they seem uneasy about abortion or not, should have a clear understanding of how adoption works, rather than just be handed a list of references — a list that essentially says, adoption is fine, but it’s not our thing."

I was too late to respond at the Times site, as the comments are closed, but another columnist, Amie Newman, managing editor of Reality Check, also joined the chorus of people who think the posters are a good idea. Newman wrote at Reality Check and republished at The Huffington Post, Pro-Choice and Adoption: Outside the Culture Wars: 

"...there is nothing wrong with posters on adoption or educating providers more thoroughly about what open adoption looks like. But adoption is not a "distraction" from abortion and, given the option, most women we saw at the health center seeking to terminate their pregnancies did not change their minds, even after being provided with more information about adoption - even open adoption (laws about which vary from state-to-state and is far from cut-and-dried)."

My response (expanded somewhat here): 

The Lifelong Trauma of Surrendering a child

How about a poster in an adoption agency suggesting that there is a better option--abortion--than the lifelong grief of surrendering a child to genetic strangers? How about having an abortion/adoption counselor on staff to talk to young women about the fact that you do not surrender a child to be adopted and "get on with your life" as before? I volunteer.

It has been more than 40 years since I surrendered my daughter to be adopted by total strangers, and though I found her when she was fifteen and we had an open adoption after that, I never got over the deep loss and emotional trauma of giving her up. I never got back my old life I never got over the pain and sorrow that adoption means to two people: mother and child. Neither did she.

Were her adoptive parents bad people? No. Was she anything like them? No. Did a sense of abandonment infuse her life, despite everyone's best efforts? Yes. Did she feel second best after her parents had biological children? Yes. Was she wrong in thinking that? Not from what I observed. Whose swimming meets did they go to, whose diving events did they not have time for? You guess. Did she look like them? No. Did her other mother come to hate me as our relationship continued through the years? Yes.

Putting up "consider adoption" posters in abortion clinics is absurd. The woman or teenager is at the clinic seeking an abortion because she has already made that choice and to force her again to confront it is no better than the medical procedures that at least one state has forced on pregnant women choosing an abortion: that they have a sonogram. [At least Newman above found that talking about adoption to women set on abortions rarely, if ever, had an impact.]

After reading comments here and elsewhere it appears that those who think the adoption posters in abortion clinics are a great idea are anti-choice people, hoping for a last minute change of heart, or those eager to supply  the market maw of those who would adopt. After all, available white infants are in short supply.

They should spend some time reading about what life after surrender is like for first/birth  mothers, whether in open adoptions or closed. And the woman/teen who is considering adoption for their children her child should be counseled that this child is quite likely the only child she will ever have. A large percentage of women who surrender a child to adoption never have another. As fellow blogger Jane has just written: Should women considering adoption be warned about secondary infertility?

Maybe adoption agencies would consider putting up posters advertising that fact? Ya know, I kinda doubt they will, even the supposedly cool ones like Spence-Chapin. 

Damn, the Dominus piece made me mad because the attitude was that the posters are such a great idea--but no thought of equal time for our side of the story. I know Sue; she's from the demographic of women who are the adopting class today: middle class, reaching the end of their fertility years and having trouble reproducing, and able to afford agency fees...and so they want to adopt. Trouble is...too few available babies. Since I know so many of those thirty/fortysomething women who adopted, I'm sure she does too.--lorraine

Jane here. I’ll support Planned Parenthood clinics talking about adoption when I see adoption agencies talking about abortion and nurturing. In other words, NEVER!

If Corinna Lohser of the Spence-Chapin Adoption Agency and Cristina Page, founders of the Adoption Access Network, were serious about bringing “prochoice standards to the field of adoption” they would create an Abortion Access Network and train adoption agency staff to talk to their clients about abortion. After all, it's a lot easier to find an adoption agency that an abortion provider.

Lohser should take a look at Spence-Chapin’s website. The “Caring” in its tag line, “Adoption Service and Caring since 1908, is surely not code for abortion. Spence-Chapin is an adoption agency. Its website promotes adoption with happy birth mother stories and pictures of attractive couples waiting to adopt. The “choice” lingo is just another way to lure in pregnant women by recruiting Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers as runners.

It’s clear that while Page talks about options, the only one she really wants women to choose is adoption. Look at her language:

“Page also reminds us that applying pro-choice standards and a women's rights lens to the adoption experience means not just expanded rights and options for birth mothers but for those gay and lesbian parents desperate to adopt but often kept out of the pool by more religious-in-nature or conservative agencies. Developing a network of pro-choice adoption agencies changes family rights. Anecdotally, she tells me, pro-choice adoption agencies have an active pool of gay and lesbian parents wanting to adopt.”

Referring to pregnant women as “birth mothers” when they haven’t given birth let alone given up their child and referring to gay and lesbian couples as “parents” when they aren’t, shows Page’s mindset: With the right kind of sales job, pregnant women will “choose” adoption and meet the needs of Page’s real clients, gay and lesbian couples locked out of the Christian adoption market.

Significantly Page and Lohser say nothing about the other option, “nurturing.” The problem isn’t that abortion providers don’t talk about adoption. It’s that adoption agencies don’t talk about nurturing and don’t help women find resources so they can keep their baby.

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If you want to comment, click on: Pro-Choice and Adoption: Outside the Culture Wars
And have fun noting all the adoption ads at the bottom of the page. Cute. You can't win. They are why I can't take regular ads here, adoption agency stuff just pops up. Not cool.

Our Christmas Gift: No rise in adoptions during lean times

Christmas came early this year in the form of news that even in these lean times there has been no rise in adoptions. More women are keeping their babies.

New York agency Spence-Chapin even thought about hiring a new person to handle the expected uptick that never happened, according to Sue Dominus writing (12/19/09) in The New York Times: "We're somewhat surprised," said Helen Lauffer, associate director at Spence-Chapin. "But the numbers haven't gone up." If anything, she adds, "even fewer women have sought the agency's services this year." The same dearth of available product was also true of an agency in Vermont.

To which we say HOORAY! Women are keeping their babies!

The social workers quoted outright say that they expected an increase in available product, i.e., babies, due to hard economic times since it is a major factor why pregnant women give up their babies for adoption. At first glance the column is a straight-out report of the situation at adoption agencies today. Speaking of the rationale of why mothers surrender their babies, Dawn Smith-Pliner of Friends in Adoption of Vermont, said:

"...if some of these pregnant women felt their lives could be improved upon by being able to get on their feet and do well by themselves, and have the baby they placed be proud of what they'd been able to accomplish, then it's a different decision. It's a difficult decision, but something about it might feel good. But if the achievable goal, a half-decent job, isn't an option to work toward, then I might as well keep the baby--that's tangible. You wake up every morning and there's that beautiful baby."

RIGHT! You don't have to wait until you might someday be reunited--with the vale of tears and conflicting emotions that unleashes--so that your child might be proud of you.

That train of thought supposes this kind of resolution to a person being given up for adoption: Look, says a birth/first mother to her reunited child, I became a cool TV weather woman/rocket scientist, college graduate and none of that would have been possible if I'd kept you! Aren't you proud of me? Aren't you glad I gave up up so I could have a career? Somehow this rankles the blood. We wondered if this convoluted reasoning is possibly what is being fed to women today as an encouragement to relinquish their babies and make them feel better about doing it: that someday their children might be "proud" of them. Which we at FirstMotherForum find completely specious and the most absurd bit of reasoning we have ever encountered.

Adoption today, even with a promise of open adoptions, offers no guarantees: no guarantees that the adoption will remain truly open (see our numerous previous posts on open adoption) or that there will ever be a reunion, since in only eight states can adoptees reasonably except to obtain their original birth certificates with their original identities therein recorded. As for the post reunion period, they are so often fraught with anger and bitterness--to think that they would be mitigated by pride of one's birth/first mother's career following relinquishment--we can only throw up our hands in amazement.

In truth, my daughter may have been proud of me in some sense--I did become the journalist I was on track for when I became pregnant with her, and it's unclear how I would have done that if I had kept her, but that sure did not stack up as equal to the why-didn't-you-keep-me? undercurrent that was always and forever the big rock-candy mountain of conflict between us.

To go back to the idea that women are keeping their babies because they can have this concrete and rewarding relationship with their own flesh and blood, Ah yes, we get that: There is a baby,  your baby, and not the lifetime vale of tears that trails women who give up their babies. Oh, yes, we first/birth mothers get up every morning, get dressed, put on makeup, have our lattes and go out to meet the world. We laugh, we cry, we make love again. We have jobs, husbands, sometimes other children...but we do not forget. We never forget. Some of us might hide in the closet, and those of us older might keep the baby we gave away as a terrible secret from children who come after, or even our husbands, but the baby that is gone remains in our hearts. You do not have a baby in your body for nine months, a baby who carries your DNA, and forget.

Several reasons are noted in the Times column for the decline in available babies: the greater acceptance of single motherhood (thank God); and a changing marketplace. More birth/first mothers may simply be connecting with adopting parents through the Internet, allowing them to pay more expenses in exchange for a baby than is possible through regular agency channels. That also leads to greater possibilities of fraud, as some cases have been reported, and of course, borders on baby selling. 

The piece conveys a tone of gee-this-is-too-bad-for-all-those-nice-couples-who-want-to-complete-their-families-with-someone-else's-baby, as Dominus quotes a plaintive prospective adoptive parent about how long they have been waiting:

"It's like the longest pregnancy ever" said Lynne Berman, a Friends client who lives in New Jersey and has been waiting for more than two years. "You set these ultimatums. You think, 'This will be the last Mother's Day, or the last thanksgiving.' But then another one rolls around."

From our perspective, it would have been refreshing to see that plaintive tone balanced with a quote from a young mother who kept her baby and is happy she did.

One last piece of deconstruction: one of the agencies, Friends in Adoption, located in Vermont, has a
client base of adoptive parents mostly in the New York area. That factoid means this: poor rural girls and women from an area of lower contraceptive use and curtailed abortion services add up to a good product-supply location to meet the high demands of the New York market.

We know that some, particularly prospective adoptive parents and adoptive parents who chance upon FirstMotherForum might be offended at our choice of words, that is, using "product" where "baby" would suffice. But we interchange these words precisely to make a point: that adoption is a business today just like any other, subject to the laws of supply and demand. The only difference is that the product being exchanged is a living person, not an inanimate object. We use these words to make people aware that adoption has gone from a service to take care of babies without other options to a business to supply people who want children. And in the process, a lot of "do-good" feeling gets intermixed so that people with the best of intentions end up only increasing the pressures on the world's poor to give up their babies. They do not consider that for every happy adopting parents, somewhere a poor mother grieves. They do not think of helping the woman keep her child by supporting both of them, they think of increasing their own joy by taking the child. But that ignores the fact that they are leaving behind a woman not only in the same dire poverty that led her to offer up her child or children, but now they are leaving behind a poor woman who daily grieves for those children.

Not long ago, we were in touch with a family who was considering from Ethiopia, but with a certain amount of persistence and good will, they were able to locate the mother or mothers in question. At this moment, we are not sure of the outcome, but hope to be able to fill you in at a future date. But on the international front, we can report that due to heightened attention to corruption in international adoptions, that number is also declining. Thus just in by David Crary of the AP:

The number of foreign children adopted by Americans plunged more than a quarter in the past year, reaching the lowest level since 1996 and leading adoption advocates to urge Congress to help reverse the trend.[Italics added] Figures for fiscal year 2009, released by the State Department on Thursday, showed 12,753 adoptions from abroad, down from 17,438 in 2008 — a dip of 27 percent and nearly 45 percent lower than the all-time peak of 22,884 in 2004.

Adoption advocates may be clamoring for "Congress to reverse the trend," but we are not. What is Congress supposed to do? Hold up aid to poorer countries in order to allow more babies to go through the adoption mills? Mills that have promoted, either knowingly or unknowingly, kidnapping and corruption in international adoption?

The world doesn't get it yet. But we will keep on writing about the abduction of children and corrupt practices that fuel international adoption until we take our last breath. In the meantime, we thank Ms. Dominus for brightening our day, just a few days from Christmas, one of the worst times of the year for many who have relinquished.
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In the interest of full disclosure, we know and admire Ms. Dominus from our previous incarnation as a feminist/humor/advice columnist (with my husband) at Glamour where she helped edit our monthly offerings. We hope she takes our deconstruction of her column in good humor --lorraine