Natural mothers live dual lives

Jane

My surrendered daughter wrote something to the effect that "maybe everything is about adoption for my birth mother." I bristled at the remark.

I have a large life outside of adoption--with my husband to whom I've been married for almost 47 years, the wonderful daughters I raised and the two incredible grandchildren the oldest brought forth. I have volunteered with a program to introduce school children to the courts and I currently serve on a committee at my condominium.  I play duplicate bridge once or twice a week. I read a lot, mostly non-fiction. I go to concerts, plays (spent Thursday afternoon watching a local production of "Our Town"), movies, festivals, political fund raisers, and fun things going on in Portland, Oregon where I live. I have traveled on six continents. Lorraine and the other natural mothers I know also have full lives outside of adoption.

Yet the truth is, all of us who lost a child to adoption also have a separate life inside adoption. For many of us it was for years a secret life, existing only in our memories and imagination. Eventually the secret became impatient to be free and we reunited with our lost child and introduced her to our families.

Why adoption reform frustrates me

Daughter Jane and Lorraine, 1983

Because I have been part of the adoption reform movement since the mid-Seventies, and see how little progress has been made in the decades since, I am frustrated. In the Seventies, adopted individuals had full access to their original birth records in Kansas, Alabama* and I believe, Alaska. Oregon, New Hampshire, Maine, and, last year, Rhode Island followed suit. Several states in the meantime passed various legislation that still allowed another party--the biological parent--the right to control whether an adopted person may obtain his most vital document: proof of existence and parentage at the time of birth. Some states still even have adoptive parent right-of-refusal to grant this document to the individual to whom it pertains: the adopted person.

Amended birth certificates are basically falsified legal documents that perpetuate a lie for they are not a record of birth, they are a record of a "pretend" birth of a child to two people that child was not born to. When the laws that legalized such falsification were passed, from the Thirties and even into the Eighties, the claim was that it was done to "protect the integrity" of the adoptive family. If the

Do birth mothers have the right to know who their children became?

Lorraine

It's legislation time in all of the states and provinces where there is any activity regarding changing the laws. A partial list includes Rhode Island, Missouri, Montana, and of course New Jersey and New York, two states were we've been involved in the process.

But as an adoptee (Robert Wilson) wrote to me recently, why aren't we working for access to the new name and identity

Why Become an Adoption Reform Rabble-Rouser

Lorraine

"What Does Adoption Mean to You?

As many of you know by now, November is National Adoption month.  This month provides us all with the opportunity to educate, publicize and celebrate adoption.  I wanted to find out from the most important people in the adoption conversation – the parents, what adoption means to them.  So I posed that question to multiple adoptive parents I know,  “What does adoption mean to you?”   This is what I learned...."--National Adoption Center

Now before you go crazy, understand, Dear Reader, that we are coming late to the party