Birth Mother's Lament: The Pain of Giving Away My Baby

From the upcoming memoir, A Hole in My Heart
by Lorraine Dusky
Copyright (c) (2009 Lorraine Dusky

Juno, the 2007 movie, made the title character’s learning she was pregnant into one long hip joke. Juno, the teenage character, takes a pregnancy test at a convenience store, and wisecracks with the store owner who responds with a rhyming couplet when it comes back positive, pre-go rhyming with eggo. Ha ha. To Juno, and the storekeeper, her pregnancy will be seen as a minor inconvenience, that’s all, the storekeeper and he knows she will deal with it in her usual wise-ass manner.

If that is the normal reaction today, how can I expect young people, say, my granddaughter, to comprehend what it was like back when her mother was born? When abortion was illegal and having a child “out-of-wedlock”—the phrase even sounds archaic, does anyone even use it anymore?—was a major scandal? Reviewers and the public loved both Juno, the character, and Juno, the movie, which played for months at a nearby theater. Or maybe it seemed like months, I wanted it so to go away. Because I couldn’t bear to sit through what I knew would be emotionally wrenching in a theater, I saw the movie on DVD, alone in my bedroom, tissue box at hand. It made me alternately livid and tearfully upset, as oh-so-clever dialog made light of one of life’s most traumatic experiences. Or at least, my most horrific experience. It made giving up the child on a par with learning one has not gotten into the college of one’s choice. I wanted to throw up, yell at the writer, shoot a missile at the television. The next day I came down with a cold. Compounding the distress the movie caused every single birth mother I know, the writer, a young woman and former stripper who took the uber cool name of Diablo Cody, won the Oscar for best original screenplay the following year. She said she wrote it imagining what it would have been like if she had gotten pregnant in high school. No comment.

Can giving up a child ever be so flippant and amusing as Cody/Juno makes it seem? The character Juno stays in school, wears tight t-shirts that show her belly button popping through as her middle expands, flirts with the adoptive father-to-be before he takes off. She picks out the parents of her baby from a penny saver. Drives over and meets them. Tells them, and the lawyer—their lawyer, she doesn’t need one—she wants the adoption, “old school,” no ties, that way, it goes without saying, she won’t have any responsibilities or expectation to visit. But it’s not going to be old school anyway because—hey! She knows who the mother is! She’s picked her out! The flirting father has split by this time. Yes, there is one tearful scene at the hospital after the birth, but mostly it’s all chillingly unemotional, cheeky instead of devastating. The final scene shows Juno and her callow, maybe boyfriend—someone with the emotional depth of a kiddie pool—singing together, lah-de-dah, life goes on as before.

Then, it was so different then, when I got pregnant with Jane. I came back from Puerto Rico and quit my job within a week. Made up a flimsy excuse that I had to return to Michigan because my father was sick. I had to leave the paper before I showed, nobody would have wanted a pregnant woman—single at that!—working at the newspaper. It was too scandalous to contemplate. Besides, for Brian’s sake, I could not be waddling around pregnant.

At first I cried, feeling oh-so-sorry for myself. But ultimately one has to stop and I pulled myself together and slowly but surely the “problem” became a baby. My baby. “It” became “he.” Our baby. Made from our love. We said, What a great kid he will be. In retrospect that sounds like two blowhards congratulating themselves on the great genes they’ve bestowed on their progeny, Hey, this kid’s lucky to be born. We couldn’t imagine anything but a perfect child with a good brain, an inquisitive mind, a long, lean body. A star pupil! An athlete! Surely someone wonderful. And once that bump in my belly become a real live baby—someone not a “mistake” or a “problem,”—I could not fathom how I was going to give him up. How anyone could give up a child.

Brian and I always called the baby a “him,” as if there were no doubt about the sex. For me, it was obviously wishful thinking. I can’t recall the exact moment when I knew I wished I’d been born male; it must have been during that argument with my father about girls and college. If I’d been born male, I told myself, everything would have been easier. I only saw demerits to being female. Boy or girl, if before I had cried and thought about killing myself because I was pregnant—yes that was the easy way out and my mind went there—now I was crying because there seemed no way to keep him.

Brian said: You need to call the adoption agency.

I recoiled. How can anyone do that?

He said: You must.

And eventually, I did.

So by February, I was sitting with a social worker, a fortysomething woman named Mrs. Mura, pouring out my heart and liberally taking tissues from the convenient pop-up box on her desk. I could not see how we could keep him, I could not see how I could give him away to strangers, however nice they might be. Giving away a baby was a deplorable, terrible act. Unforgivable. A sin against nature. You know those documentaries on PBS that show animals who stick by their young after one is injured, downed by a lunging predator but not quite killed, and the mother needs to run with the herd if she is to save herself, but she stays anyway, pawing the ground, nudging her offspring, trying to make it stand and run away with her? Remember how the mother stays long after it is safe for her to be there? I would be the doe who cut and ran. I would be the doe who repudiated her mothering instinct, who left her fawn there to be eaten by the lions. Today when I see such a scene anywhere memory plunges into me like an ice pick wielded by a madman. I say nothing of course, not to anyone. I simply feel.

Then, I wept. Oh, I wept and felt sorry for myself, and for my baby. Yet I went forward, filling out forms on family medical history, his and mine. Going to the pre-natal checkups Mrs. Mura arranged free of charge. Religiously taking the vitamin pills the doctor prescribed. Eating little and not gaining weight—no one told me that I needed to. Like today’s hippest movie stars, my belly grew, my thighs became miraculously thin. As the months passed, I hid under heavy sweaters and sweat shirts when I went to the market. I did not walk baby proud with my belly sticking out. I stooped slightly, all the better to hide the bulge. And everywhere I turned there were women in the street with babies. In their bellies, in strollers, all coming at me like rocket fire.

One day, after I came back from my meeting with Mrs. Mura, I said: I can’t do this. Let’s find a way to keep her. I don’t think I can….

Brian said: No, we can’t do that. You have to do this. Give her away went unsaid.

There was no room for argument.

A daughter was born three days before Easter. More tomorrow.
Easter has always been a difficult time for me.

Birth Parents —an 'endearing' term for expectant parents?

Are a couple considering adoption for their unborn child in the same place as a couple who surrendered a child for adoption? Some Oregon attorneys think so.

An attorney posted a query on the Oregon Family Lawyers list about whether paying travel expenses to bring “birth parents” to Oregon whose child was due in August.

Being the somewhat obstreperous birth mother and attorney I am, I posted a response stating that a couple expecting a baby are not birth parents since the child has not been born, let alone surrendered. Calling them birth parents marginalizes and de-humanizes them. I noted that the term "birthparent" was coined by Lee Campbell, founder of Concerned United Birthparents in 1976.

This led to a flurry of responses. In general, attorneys saw adoption of the unborn child as a fait accompli once the expectant parents were in their office; there was no practical difference between expectant parents and parents who surrendered a child. Here are some samples of what they wrote:

“The term birthparent is commonly used for any biological parent considering or having placed their child for adoption. It is used both pre and post birth. And, at least when I and my clients' use it, it is one of the most endearing, loving terms out there. It does nothing to marginalize or de-humanize. In fact it does just the opposite; it makes that person's relationship to the child to be adopted very real.

I don't know specifically what Mr. Campbell, (he must be referring to Lee, assuming he is a male)or any other anti-adoption group, thinks of when they use the term but for us today it is a wonderful and honoring term.” (Incidentally, the writer is an adoptee as well as an attorney.)

And:

“The term "birthparent” identifies with a sense of feeling and humanity the place of the parents who give life to the child. If one wants to use a term that separates the expectant mother from the child, another term that is cold and without feeling is available. One can always call the life givers "biological parents.” (“Life giver? Biological parents?” They haven’t given life and aren’t parents, but no matter.)

And:

“It is unfortunate,… that in the decades of expanding civil rights, diversity, multi-acceptance and personal freedoms, we have concomitantly developed a narrow and faux sensitivity to the use of words, nominatives etc. which seems to elicit a censorship like obsession, exalting form over content and simply distracting from important productive outcomes by continually fussing about what "we call it". Unless something is simply inaccurate or boorish or indiscreet, let it be.” (Calling someone who has not given birth, a "birth parent," is not inaccurate?)

And:

“Sperm donor and expeller would seem more descriptive.” (No comment.)

Thankfully, a couple of writers were supportive:

“Thank you for adding that. Little things like that tend to drive me crazy.”

And:

“I, for one, appreciate Jane's sensitivity and sensibilities. While I don't always agree, I applaud her intelligence and voice. Thanks Jane. …

As readers of First Mother Forum know, we have discussed the issue of using "birth mother" to refer to women who have surrendered a child in an earlier post. See previous posts:Natural, Real, Biological, Birth...Mother;

Natural and Real Language;

and more just the other day in a postscript as to why we are changing the name above but not the url, which has well over a hundred posts since we started blogging last August. And they are found at firstmotherforum.com.

But "birth mother" or "birthmother" is what people Google, even though many of us are trying to replace it with "first mother.”

Lorraine doesn't mind being called a "biological mother" by people who are not in the loop, but does get her back up when it's very clear people are talking about her or her daughter, whom she knew for 27 years! Or insist on calling her daughter her "birth daughter." Linda finds when she writes "birth mother" comes naturally.

I don’t get excited over whatever term is used to describe me and I can accept “birth mother.” However, I very much oppose calling a pregnant woman a "birth mother." It reinforces the message -- important to adoption attorneys and the adoption industry -- that she is carrying the baby for someone else.

And so dear reader, let First Mother Forum know what you think about referring to expectant mothers to be as birth mothers--I’ll pass it on the Oregon adoption attorneys.--Jane

The Dark Side of Overseas Adoption

Talk about birth mothers and adoptees not being able to get away from media adoptamania...on the way to getting a haircut on Thursday I heard part of Fresh Air on NPR, but in this case I was glad to hear what I did. Terry Gross was interviewing journalist Scott Carney, who had written a piece about a particular child who was kidnapped in India and sold into adoption in America. It's in the current Mother Jones.

Carney apparently located the parents of one child--Indian name, Subash--being raised in the Midwest and knocked on the family's door with photos, police and agency documents, and the story. Though the adoptive parents reluctantly listened, they are unwilling to open up the adoption to the boy's natural parents. The boy's mother, Sivagama, and father, Nageshwar Rao, do not want to uproot the child who has no memory of his native tongue or India itself. They realize is it probably too late for him to return to them. Carney says of the boy's (birth) mother:

After Subash disappeared [in 1999], Sivagama fell into a deep depression. Ten years later, she's still fragile, her eyes ringed by heavy dark circles. At the mention of her son's name, she breaks into tears, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her sari.

"Why should we pay like this," she pleads, "for what criminals started?"

Indeed. They only want their son to know that he was not abandoned and to have some contact with him. Even though the connection was made many years later, the boy's father picked him out of a photo lineup immediately. But the American adopters--yes, in this case I am going to use that word even if some find it offensive--refuse. Nor will they submit to a DNA test. They will not tell Subash what is going on. He does not know that on the other side of the world from Wisconsin--I'm guessing here but the adoption agency in this country was located in Portage, Wisconsin--there are two other people who love him and with whom he is intimately connected by blood. They are not genetic strangers; they are his natural mother and father.

Subash's adopters--solid, Midwestern folk--are abominable people. They are the kind of adopters who make me crazy, who only care about getting a baby or a toddler at all costs. They are the kind of people who do not want to adopt children languishing here in the United States because they are too old or not cute enough, or have some noticeable problem. They want fresh blood. Cute toddlers. Kids without "issues."

I am a birth mother who relinquished a child to adoption and I hate these people who go overseas and take possession of children who were kidnapped off the streets in India, Guatemala, China, Nepal, wherever. In their ignorance, they are just as criminal as the person who actually steals the child. If you buy an art work on the international market, honest people demand a clear provenance of how the painting came to be available; those who buy without such documentation can have the art work reclaimed without compensation. Yet one can purchase a child, and that is that. Subash's kidnapper has admitted to nabbing the infant when he was left unattended for a few moments very close to his home, and selling him for 10,000 rupees ($236) to an orphanage that paid cash.

The Hague Convention that was so touted at the recent conference on international adoption at NYU, does nearly nothing to stop this type of child trafficking, Carney writes:

The Hague Convention on intercountry adoption, which addresses this type of criminal exploitation, was ratified by 50 countries—the United States signed on in 2007—but the pact is toothless, according to David Smolin, a law professor at Alabama's Samford University who has adopted two children from India. "The Hague itself has the weakness of relying on [the] sending countries to ensure that the child was properly relinquished," Smolin told me via email. "Receiving countries cannot afford to simply take the sending country's word."

Smolin is a hero to me. He is an adoptive father of two sisters from India who discovered that his children were placed in orphanages in Andhra Pradesh by their birth mother to receive an education—not to be sold into adoption. According to the story in Mother Jones, their illiterate mother was tricked into signing surrender papers and was later turned away when she tried to get the girls back. The girls, 9 and 11 at the time, had been coached to say their father was dead and their mother had given them up. After Smolin learned the truth from the girls once they learned English, he tracked down their mother, but six years had passed. The girls could not speak their native tongue anymore, and I believe he said they are now college students in America. (Smolin was also interviewed in the same segment on Fresh Air. I've tried to find it at the NPR site so we could link to it here, but have been unable. Help, please. If anyone can find it--it was last Thursday's program (3/12/09), please post the link below and I'll put it here.)

Smolin described the emotional meeting between the girls and their birth mother full of compassion for her, while Terry Gross, the interviewer, focused almost entirely the feelings of the adoptive parents. To her, the birth mother barely mattered. She apparently does not have the heart to comprehend that adoptive parents like the ones Carney wrote about are no better than kidnappers here in America who steal children because they can. Yet we give them no sympathy.

Smolin is now one of the nation's leading advocates of adoption reform. He says the Hague Convention is deeply flawed because it does not cap the fees paid by rich countries for children. In this case, ignorance is not enough of an excuse. Carney writes:

"If you don't sharply limit the money, all of the other regulations are doomed to failure," Smolin says.

Police, lawyers, and adoption advocates in India echo this sentiment. "If you didn't have to pay for a child, then this would all disappear," says Deputy Superintendent S. Shankar, the lead investigator in Subash's case (who requested that his full name not appear in print).

Yes, there are some children who need families and homes, but the demand has pushed the system way beyond need, since so much money changes hands, corruption and dealing in human trafficking--which is what this is--will not only continue, it will flourish.

As a final note, the Midwestern adopters above have two other children from India, most likely from the same agency in Portage, Wisconsin. The entire piece is worth your time, and you will also find at the site a follow-up interview with Carney about the latest developments, ie, more stone-walling from the adopters. There's also a place for comments, please add your own.

_____________________

The reason for a possible name change of FirstMotherForum has to do with letting our views be heard by people fresh to the concept of reunion and adoption reform. They know the word: birth mother. First mother may be more politically correct, but it's not what the world uses. Google birth mother (with our without the space between birth and mother, and you'll find lots of ads for adoption agencies looking to buy "birth mother" product. Ya know, a baby.

One more note, apparently one of the people on the committee in South Dakota who received our letter was the prime sponsor of the bill, Rep. Nygaard. Email him your thanks at

Rep.Nygaard@state.sd.us

Confusion in South Dakota: Open Records Die at Adoptee's Hand

First the Bad News:

The testimony of an adoptee on a legislative committee in South Dakota apparently quashed the open-records bill we had trumpeted yesterday. (Information is hard to get out of SD, so if anyone has new and better information, please post.) Not withstanding what we said earlier--when we thought the bill had passed--it did not.

And yes, you read that right, an an adoptee--who to the best of my knowledge is on the committee himself--killed the bill. Drives me absolutely crazy. It's a way of saying, Hey I prefer these chains and I am so incredibly grateful that was I was adopted, and I don't ever want to know anything about who I REALLY am, fully and completely, and so not only am I not going to look, not only are my feelings about being adopted subsumed under thick lawyers of gratitude and self-hating, I'm not going to make it possible for anybody to have that right!

I am so steamed right now I can hardly type straight. So if you are reading this and if you are adopted or a birth, real, biological, natural, first mother, take a moment and write to the people below.

Let it rip! Let them know how you feel! Let this know that what they are doing is wrong and a flagrant violation of rights! Let them know that birth/first mothers were never promised anonymity! That most of us do not want it from our children! Tell them you were not promised "confidentiality." To most of us, that is a dreaded concept.

If you are an adoptee, tell them that the bill doesn't demand that anyone get their records, it just allows them to if they so desire. Tell them why you need to know. Just because works for me.

When I wrote my letter, I pasted all the emails into one and sent it to everyone. One email. That's all it takes. One. Do you have five or ten minutes (You know you do) to spend on giving adoptees their rights back, rights that were stolen when they were adopted? Your letter could be the one that breaks the back of some legislator who voted against this bill.

Do it now. Do it on your lunch break. Do it before dinner, but do it! Please.


Rep.Nygaard@state.sd.us,
Rep.Cutler@state.sd.us,
Rep.Dreyer@state.sd.us,
Sen.Jerstad@state.sd.us,
Sen.Dempster@state.sd.us,
Sen.Adelstein@state.sd.us

RE: SB153

To: Representatives Nygaard, Cutler and Dreyer
Senators Jerstad, Dempster and Adelstein

Dear Members of the South Dakota Legislature:

Open records bills will never pass if we are silent. I'm not going to post my letter because all need to sound different. You don't have to be a genius or a "writer" to make an impact, you just have to make your voice heard.

Okay, there is no good news about this other than...we are getting close--lorraine

PS: Over at Huffington Post, someone idiot has posted a commentary that Bristol Palin's little boy would be better off adopted. Right.

Dear President Obama: Open Sealed Records

Copyright Lorraine Dusky, 2009

Today there are approximately six million people in America who do not have the right to answer the question: Who am I? Who was I at birth? The state took that right from them when they were adopted as infants or toddlers. Only in eight states do they have the right to their original birth certificates. An active movement of adoptee-rights advocates is pressing for reform throughout the country, but the going is at a snail’s pace. At this rate, millions of people will die before the laws are changed, and changed they will be one day. Right is on our side.

Adopted people are not children all their lives. They grow up and need not only updated family medical information, but they need and desire to be whole and integrated individuals, and that includes having full knowledge of who they were at birth. As far back as 1971, the American Academy of Pediatrics stated in a position paper: Determining identity is a difficult process for someone brought up by his natural parents; it is more complex for the individual whose ancestry is unknown to him. Cicero said it this way: Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live forever as a child.

I am a birth mother and journalist who has written extensively about this subject for numerous publications, from Parent’s magazine to The New York Times to Newsweek to USA Today, as well as others. I am also the author of Birthmark (1979), the first memoir to break the silence of women who gave up their children to adoption. I have testified for open records both in Albany and in Washington DC before legislative committees. I relinquished my daughter in 1966 in Rochester. I am the New York representative of the American Adoption Congress, but I write to you as a private citizen today.

The main objection to giving adoptees their original birth certificates is the supposed confidentiality “promised” to the women who relinquished their children in years past when great shame was attached to bearing a child out of wedlock. The vast majority of birth mothers welcome reunion with their children – even if that child is the product of rape or incest. This is only one example, but it speaks volumes. When Maine passed legislation opening its files as of January 1, one of the leaders of the reform was birth mother Bobbi Beavers, whose surrendered child was the product of a rape. She and her son have been reunited.

Yes, there are some who wish to remain unknown to their children. But their number is small. Various studies both in this country and abroad indicate that only between three and six percent wish to remain anonymous from their children. Yet the imagined specter of these women in the mind of legislators continues to block open records at the state level. This small group of women should not dictate public policy, a policy that so dramatically involves an entire class of people, individuals who were never asked what their preferences were. You have to go back to slavery to find a similar situation in which two parties – the state and an individual – make a bargain that forever seals the fate of a third person.

Despite the evidence, still the myth – that of the poor, woebegone “unwed mother” who has never told a soul, let alone her husband – persists. It is in her name that the National Council for Adoption, a coalition of adoption agencies opposed to open records, the Church of the Latter Day Saints, some adoption attorneys, argue to keep records sealed and sued in state courts. But the lawsuits, filed in both Tennessee and Oregon, have failed as the higher courts recognize the validity of adopted individuals seeking their identity papers.

The secrecy-seeking woman is a smoke screen, and obscures what these organizations really want, i.e., to cling to outdated closed adoptions—they can charge more for them! And they do. Despite what we know about the need to know, despite our best efforts to educate the public, despite what common sense dictates, some prospective parents still want closed adoptions and sealed records, and they are the ones who fund the organizations fighting to keep records sealed.

Yet the evidence is clear: no one is harmed by giving adopted people their original birth certificates. Oregon has had open records since May 30, 2000; according to the Oregon Center For Health Statistics website, as of May 31, 2007, 9366 unamended—i.e., original—birth certificates were requested, while 84 women have filed a “no-contact” preference, 79 of them filed when the records were first opened. That is fewer than one percent. Other states with open records are Alabama, Maine, New Hampshire. Tennessee and Delaware allow a mother to file a contact veto; Alaska and Kansas never sealed the birth records of adoptees. Open-record states report no problems due to this policy.

In 1980, the then U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare came to a similar conclusion after holding numerous hearings of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers and other experts around the country. The Model Adoption Act the agency issued stated:

“There can be no legally protected interest in keeping one’s identity secret from one’s biological offspring; parents and child are considered co-owners of the information regarding the event of birth….The birth parents’ interest in reputation is not alone deserving of constitutional protection.”

While other provisions of the act were passed, this provision died at the behest of a powerful senator from Texas, the late John Tower. He was an adoptive father.

But beyond the fact of the small numbers of women seeking anonymity from their own children, you will find no legal precedent written into law in any state of the country. The relinquishment papers birth mothers signed contain no promise of anonymity.

New York’s law is probably typical. Dating from 1935, and passed at the behest of the then governor, Herbert H. Lehman, it contains no promise of confidentiality given to the women who surrendered their children. In fact, many of us, including myself, argued with our social workers about this implied premise of the law when we were signing the surrender papers. We were told we had no choice, if we were to go ahead with an agency-sponsored adoption. In short, we simply capitulated as we had no power to do otherwise.

Worth noting is that Gov. Lehman was an adoptive father. Presumably, this outdated law was passed with good intentions – to assure that families formed by adoption bond, and it was thought then this was best done by severing ties to the past. Presumably, the intent of the law was in the best interests of the child. We now know this simplistic view of adoption doesn’t work.

And understand this, no matter how sorry a group we birth mothers were at the time we gave up our children, we and the times have changed. We are different now, and we deserve no special treatment, not when the state affords no such protection to any other group of people. Many people wish to bury their past and hide their previous marriages; men, including priests, do not wish to be named as fathers in paternity suits, yet the state does not take it upon itself to offer the protection of privacy to them; nor should the state be in the business of “protecting” a minute number of birth mothers from embarrassment, especially as it comes as the cost of trampling the rights of others.

Opponents of open-records often show up to testify and claim that adoptions will go down, and that abortions will go up if the records are unsealed. This is untrue. In the open-records states of Kansas and Alaska, adoptions are proportionally higher, and abortion rates lower, than the national average. Indeed, Kansas has significantly lower abortion rates than the four surrounding states – all with sealed records. Please note that the National Council for Adoption actually has collected these figures, but their spokesman frequently ignores what he knows and makes this specious statement when it testifies, simply because he can. He lies.

Opponents of open records also argue for registries matching parents and adoptees, rather than releasing birth data. But most registries were set up with enough restrictive provisions to make them largely ineffective, and that certainly is the case here. In New York more than 18,000 adoptees, birth parents and siblings have registered since December of 1983, but the “success” rate is fewer than four percent! Offering adoptees a registry is a poor excuse for denying them their original birth certificates. Being able to own that piece of paper surely would seem to be a right that the Constitution guarantees for everyone, once the plague of slavery was abolished.

However difficult it has been to change hearts and minds, change is coming. A 1994-95 Cornell University survey of adoptive parents in New York found that 78 percent actually favored open records. Enlightened adoptive parents and grandparents are sometimes our staunchest supporters in state legislatures. Adoptive father Sen. Lou D’Allesandro led the charge in the New Hampshire Senate in 2005 that opened the records in that state.

For myself, I went around the law. By going underground and paying some stranger $1,200 in 1981, I located my daughter nearly a quarter of a century ago, and enjoyed a relationship with her and her parents for 26 years. She died in 2007.

I ask you to let other adoptees have this same right and find a way to give adopted people the relief they seek. They want only to be treated like all other citizens: to have the right to the information of their birth. They were never asked what was in their best interests in this singular event of their lives. Birth mothers never were promised the secrecy and anonymity from our own children so many would continue to foist upon us. For the vast majority of us, the law as written only continues the cruel and harsh punishment that surrendering our children initially heaped upon us.

Bills to open the records have been around since the Seventies, but have been blocked for years. It is time to let the truth of one’s origins be everyone’s birth right. It is time to let adopted individuals—who never asked to be adopted, who were never asked what was in their best interests—to enjoy the same rights as the rest of us. You can right this wrong by pushing for federal legislation that gives all adopted persons the right to know the answers to life's most primal questions: Who am I? Who was I when I was born? What is my story?

Cordially,

Lorraine Dusky, first/birth/original mother

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

Are Birth Mothers Motivated by Selfishness?

As National Adoption Month draws to a close today, I find myself irritated with myself that I let the thoughtless remarks about birth mothers who search from an acquaintance get to me as much as they did. He basically said that birth mothers searching and longing for a reunion was motivated by selfishness, and selfishness alone. Our deep-seated guilt and continuing sorrow over abandoning a child to genetic strangers? Oh, well. His attitude, I would guess, is formed by the many adoptive parents he knows as well as that lovely movie, Juno.

An email response to his wife alerted both of them that the heated discussion about adoption that we had in September got out of hand and hurt me deeply. He called on the cell the evening before Thanksgiving just as my husband and I sat down to dinner. He was apologizing, but I did not actually think he knew why he was doing so. I said, let's get together, we just sat down to eat...

The meeting never happened. He did have a busy Thanksgiving weekend at his house, but his house in less than a half-mile away, and he has no kids demanding time and attention. He may have thought I wanted to berate him and dissolve into tears, and while I told myself I expressively did not want to do that, He didn't know that and I was insisting we meet in person. Now I am sorry I set any kind of pre-condition. I assumed we were better friends than we were. My mistake. I just need to let him move out of my life. Or at least, move away from the place where he can upset me so much.

I've been attacked many times over the course of the last three decades when I published the first birth mother memoir, Birthmark. And I've always been able to brush aside the fusillade, even though my adrenaline is coursing through my veins. Talking about adoption for me is never merely an intellectual exercise; it's always intensely personal and strikes my core.

But Lordy, even writing about this incident again feels like too much messaging of my sore ego. Now he's probably on the way back to the city in this miserable rain; I just want to drop this whole thing and move somewhat away from him (not as easy as it sounds, given our multiple connections), but be able to sit next to him comfortably at a dinner party. But when he asked: What part of the pie chart of a birth mother who searches is 'selfish'?, I wish I had quickly responded: "What part of the pie chart of adoptive parents who are against a birth mother making a reconnection is 'selfish'? The woman gave the adoptee life, doesn't she have any rights? How did all the rights move over to the side of the adoptive parents? The condition of anonymity was not requested, it was imposed on birth mothers."

What this contretemps taught me is that here are a lot of people out there who really really think our curiosity about the children we lost to adoption--what we feel is so much more than that word conveys--is motivated only by base and selfish reasons. We've got some educating to do. In that respect, I ought to be grateful to this man. Now I know how he, and many, many others, feel. To them, open adoption is pretty much unthinkable.

Now the good news: In the Zanesville Times-Recorder, columnist Lori Law writes of adoptive parents who make the birth mother a part of their lives. And in the Fredericksberg Free Lance-Star there is the story of an adoptee who was happy to be found by her mother. So progress is being made.

Happy Adoption Month...Well, I don't know if I'd go that far.
--lorraine