Should women considering adoption be warned about secondary infertility?

Advertisements designed to lure women into giving up their babies often ask them to think of the needs of infertile couples, to give the joy of parenthood to others. Ironically, the ads do not tell expectant mothers that they may suffer their own infertility after surrendering their child although this is a real possibility.

Well-behaved women rarely make history reports on a survey of first mothers in Western Australia (WA) which found that 13 to 20 percent of the mothers did not have other children. The study did not compare these numbers with the population at large. However, according to the Pew Research Center, in the 1970’s (when it’s likely the women in the WA survey gave birth) the childless rate in the US (likely similar to WA) was 10 percent for all women.

Although the WA study did not analyze individual cases, it did find that 60 percent of the respondents said that adoption impacted their decision or inability to have other children. This is consistent with what I have heard from birthmothers who did not have other children. Some attributed it to the inability to conceive but most said that they just didn’t feel right having another child or that they simply avoided sex.

Whatever the reason, women considering adoption should know that the surrendered child may be the only one they will ever have.

On a personal note, I remember reading in teen and women’s magazines before I gave up my daughter Megan in 1966 about birthmothers who did not have more children. I got the idea – I’m not sure how – but I think it was embedded in the magazine articles -- that subsequent childlessness was due to selfishness; these women refused to have other children.

The morning after Megan was born, one of the doctors stood at foot of my bed and commented in an off-hand way, “I hope this experience doesn’t discourage you from having more children.”

“Oh, no!” I exclaimed. I was not going to be (or at least appear to be) one of those self-centered girls who refused to have more children. (In retrospect the conversation reminds me of the line “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play.”)

Upon reading Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade the doctor’s comment and the magazine articles were put into context. According to the author, historian Rickie Solinger, the US government promoted adoption in the post World War II era as a way of increasing the white population. Social engineers encouraged single white girls to gave up their babies and then to have more children thus producing enough white babies for two families. (At the same time, policy-makers worked hard to discourage black women from having any babies.) White women who obstinately failed to have other children were thwarting an important goal of adoption.

I did go on to have three more daughters. While having more children did not make up for the one I lost, I believe it did blunt the pain.
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Lorraine here:

I did not have any other children other than the daughter I surrendered in 1966. Because I wanted a career in a traditionally male-dominated field--daily newspaper journalism--the times largely made that impossible as children and career did not mix easily way back when. Though had I married the young man I was in love with prior to the relationship that resulted in my daughter, I think I might have been able to see a different path, as he wanted children or at least, a child, and was also totally supportive of my having a career, even having no issue with my keeping my own name, rare for the times. However, that did not happen.

I also felt in the deepest reaches of my soul that I could not give one child away, and keep another. It seemed too cruel to the child given up. How could I keep one child, abandon another? I know that is faulty reasoning, but it is what I felt to be true. Whether that was an excuse to keep me from having another child to pursue my career or not is something I will never know.

However, soon after I surrendered my daughter to adoption, I met and subsequently married someone I should not have married, and was adamant about not having another child. I'm not saying this proves anything, but I would have to be among those counted for secondary infertility, as would Linda, who has blogged here in the past. I wrote about this in greater detail in my memoir, Birthmark. 

As a post script, after my daughter was relinquished, I was super vigilant about NOT getting pregnant again; the one time I was a few weeks late I was checking with a clinic to get an abortion ASAP. I was frantic. But it turned out I was not pregnant. However, I would never never have considered going through the pain of relinquishing a child again; without question I would have chosen an abortion. Your doctor, Jane, instinctively seems to have understood the sorrow that you were going through--and would encounter for the rest of your life. Which is more than I can say for a lot of people who are so against mothers who search.

A Neighbor Condemns Searching for our Children Lost to Adoption, a friendship ends

How do you educate a neighbor whose own mother more or less abandoned her to the realities of adoption today? In my case, you try, but you end up...where you started.

Some background here: A neighbor I'll call Yvonne is older than I (she is 80) and over the years we have become quite close. We've done countless favors for each other and she has called me her "youngest sister." But there was always this big black cloud in the room on a subject that, hmm, dare not speak its name: adoption. I've written before about what occurred between us, but I'll summarize here.

Although I knew adoption was a subject that I knew one had to tread lightly--Yvonne never met an adoptee who wasn't totally happy to be adopted, completely integrated into the family, etc.--I still did not know that we were a gazillion miles apart on the issue. When the hated movie Juno came out, I gave her a copy of my memoir, Birthmark, to read, hoping that she would understand the point of view of a first/birth mother more than she had seemed willing to in the past.

My POV: That I, a woman who surrendered her daughter to adoption, felt it necessary for my mental health to find that daughter. That I, as her biological/birth/first mother, did not want to interrupt her life with her other, adoptive, family. That I wanted her to be a part of my life too, in some fashion, but that did not mean she would turn away from her adoptive family. That in doing this, everyone recognized that Jane, my/our daughter was an integrated human being with a past that began before adoption.

Jane had been to our house many times for extended stays of several months, but Yvonne and I were not more than nodding acquaintances then, and she had not met Jane until a couple years before she committed suicide; Yvonne knew one of Jane's daughters (one relinquished for adoption, one not) because she had spent several weeks here each summer when she was a child. So, Yvonne had some inkling of how our situation had worked out. She was kind to Jane's daughter.

Anyway, Yvonne said she could not stop reading Birthmark until she finished, wanted to get copies for her children, all now grown, and all of whom I know and like. Incidentally, none of them live nearby--the closest is about a three-to-four-hour drive away, the others several states away or across the country. When Yvonne became ill in the last couple of years, it was my husband and I who were the helpers on the spot, the visitors in the hospital, before anyone else got here. But understand our friendship was a two-way street; she has done many favors for us also. I took care of her cats when Yvonne went away; when we had a dog, she took care of him. We gave her books to read; she's wealthy; she's been generous to us. Her children seemed somewhat relieved that she had a good friend and neighbor a few doors away. It was a reciprocal relationship.  

Yet, adoption lay between us like a roaring brook we all agreed to step around without comment.

But there were times when that became impossible. Yvonne's very good friend from boarding school (who coincidentally lives a few blocks away) became an adoptive grandmother, twice over. Her husband once told me--after I told him I was a birth mother whose daughter had lived her for some summers, worked downtown at the ice cream parlor--that I was "their greatest nightmare." I said nothing.

One day, Yvonne, in a pique generated I think by a small amount of wine in her 110-pound frame, called me..."no more than a reproductive agent." I can only think she heard that phrase from the people who think I am "their greatest nightmare." (Read more here.)

Trouble ensued. Eventually we talked and I brought up how she might feel about her own mother who left Yvonne and her two sisters in the care of their American father in the states while she, the mother, went back to France and continued to be the aristocratic courtesan of the literati and social set there. (Her mother is actually quite well known in France, even today, as much for her sexual exploits and conquests as her writing.) For several years Yvonne did not even see her mother, and when she finally did, after boarding school days were over, I came to understand it was not a warm and loving relationship. Yvonne felt that it would have been different had the three sisters been boys. Though she won't really talk about those feelings, it's clear that her mother did more or less physically abandon the girls; Yvonne's older sister did not even see her mother for 17 years.

Anyway, a whole year passed in which we somehow avoided adoption. Until a few days before Mother's Day when she expressed the hope (by crossing her fingers and widening her eyes) that the couple who live between us, who must be in their late thirties to mid forties, are able to adopt, as she heard they hope to. Maybe it was the timing, maybe I have been quietly seething for the whole last year since her "reproductive agent" eruption (which she denies she ever said such words! The very idea!), maybe it was at last a recognition that we could not really be friends, but I said a few angry semi-incoherent words about how she did not understand anything about me, how international adoption was a hotbed of corruption and child-stealing, and I stormed out. I wouldn't say I had sleepless nights, but more than once when I woke up at three or four, I could not get back to sleep replaying over in my mind what I'd like to say to her. My husband, Tony, had the same reaction.

She called a few days later, as if nothing had happened. One time--on Mother's Day, no less--I was actually talking to adoption-reform pioneer Florence Fisher and took the call before I saw on Caller ID that it was Yvonne. Basically she had a message for Tony which I passed on. He did not call her back. The next time she called did not take the call,--she left a message as if nothing had happened.
One has choices, one usually has choices. This time I decided to try to say in a single-spaced two-page letter what I could never get out if we actually spoke. I also thought it would make more of an impression, she would be able to read and reread what I had to say. A few days later, she wrote back, seemingly not quite accepting what I said. I wrote back again, explaining further. Asked her to watch a few videos that I sent to her email address.

In short, while she agrees there may be the very rare (one) corrupt adoption agency, she can not believe that corruption is rampant. But then she wrote what it at the heart of today's birth-mother dilemma: that while she believes that "if and when a child is old enough it wishes to know its heritage her or she should have easy access to that information," she does not believe "that the birth parent should have the right to disturb and upset my family in search of their child or have a say in the way I bring up MY [her emphasis] child. In my opinion it is a one way street."

She goes on to say that this is the last time we should discuss this adding: "You have a right to your opinion, which by the way I understand, but I also have a right to mine." She ends by adding that one of her daughters and husband is coming for the weekend, and she knows they would love to see us. While I was writing this, she called and I did not answer; her message was: Could we come over for a drink at six?

I give up. Though she knows--and I have reminded her in this last go-round--that I found Jane and was reunited with her when she was fifteen with her adoptive parent's blessing--an action Yvonne condemns, she seems to think we can go on as before. We can not. I feel like while, say, someone freely admits she is say, a racist, she wants to invite me (not of her race) to dine at her table because I am somehow "not like the rest of them."

Her attitude is pervasive in society and more so, here in America, I believe, than elsewhere because we are a culture are tied into the myth that the past is of little consequence, that we can make and remake ourselves into whatever and whomever we want. It's why I feel so hopeless in combating attitudes like hers and that of another "friend" who attacked me over a year ago for searching for Jane. Attitudes about openness have changed on one level, but in many quarters, and by many adoptive parents, not towards us birth/first mothers. We gave the children up; it does not matter that the anonymity was coerced (which I painstakingly explained to Yvonne); we signed the fucking papers and so there it lies. We can live lives of misery and yearning, that's too effing bad--as Yvonne put it, it is a one-way street.

I do know I do not want to be around her anymore. I do not want to be the pariah among her thoughts. Our friendship is over and out. Eventually, I'll stop being upset.

The evening calls. I have a cous-cous salad (healthy and delicious!) to make to take to an afternoon croquet game and barbecue with friends; my husband's nephew by marriage, a tree guy, is coming tonight with his wife and two toddlers to take down a dead tree in the back yard tomorrow, and I'll make them a splendid lunch, with shrimp and clams. Life continues. And the next blog will be about good news from my other granddaughter, Lisa. There is a silver lining.--lorraine

We Survived the Holidays but are Mad as Hell

We survived the holidays with scant abrasions on our wounds. Only a few people continued to offer their condolences over my daughter's suicide two years ago, thank the lord, because each reminder demanded a change in tone--Oh, remember you daughter died around this time of year, they are thinking and so they say just that...Why Yes, I do remember, I would imply in tone and look, but I'm thinking, You know, I don't need to be reminded, I think of her quite often, really, and I miss her like hell, and can we just get on with life and not have you think of  THAT every time you see me at the holidays?

...I know people's tongues are loosened by the merry spirits, but hmm....I'd rather not be reminded in the midst of merry-making, thank you very much. People mean well, I know, but there are times when one (that would be me) would rather be just a friend, not an acquaintance with a story trailing me around like a tattered boa I can't quite drop, it's always there.

But in the meantime, the newspapers around the country are filled with reunion stories, from Long Beach to Montgomery, Alabama but still the New Jersey clock continues to run out on the bill that would give adopted people the right to their original birth certificates. The New Jersey Senate passed the bill in 2008, but to become law it needed passage in the Assembly within two years, and now it is clear it will die because the Speaker of the Assembly, Joseph Roberts, refused to let the bill out for a vote, even though the Assembly had to votes to pass it! With a super majority, no less! Even though we flooded his office with letters! A Mommouth College poll showed that the public--75 percent--is for giving adoptees their birth records and right to know who they are.

What's wrong with you, Joe? Have you no decency? Have you no compassion for the thousands of people adopted in New Jersey who had their rights stripped from them at birth? We get quite heated up on the issue, because, because, well, Roberts and his ilk in New York and every other state are on the wrong side of history. And I'm mad as hell.

Yes, those few natural mothers who fear their own children would be able to file a non-disclosure form, for up to a year, and their names would be blocked out from the searching adoptee, but other states with similar laws (Tennessee and Delaware) have had only a minute number of people asking to remain anonymous from their own children, a concept I understand intellectually but emotionally can not fathom. Why would any mother not want to know her child? The mind boggles.

In Oregon, birth parents may file a no-contact form, but the number has hovered in the low eighties of those requesting no-contact for several years, while more than 9,000 original birth certificates have been requested.Who are these women, I wonder? How did their mothering instinct become subverted?

I dunno what's wrong with the world. And while we can't even get the open records for adoptees passed in New Jersey, and New York, where the painstaking step-by-step, legislator-by-legislator work continues, I'm having dreams of throwing opening the records for us first/birth mothers too--as in, why the hell not?

In Canada, our fair neighbor to the North with egads! universal health care, the four provinces (out of ten, along with three territories) that's nearly a quarter of the provinces in number if not in population) allow birth mothers the right to see the adoption court orders, and so they are privy to the names of those who adopted the children they bore. Imagine that. Over her in the backwards U.S.A., the collective mind goes pretty much gaga over that thought, and when we work for open records we don't even bring it up. Are we too brain-washed?  To polite to upset the applecart? Alberta's law has a non-disclosure veto that either side can file, but in British Columbia, Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador the door is open to birth/first mothers as well as the adopted.

Here we are more likely to struggle with the attitude that seems to me to be nearly universal among the unknowing: that we mothers HAVE NO RIGHT to search, because we will be disrupting a happy person (and his [adoptive] family) who does not want to be disturbed with their real identities and mothers coming back. Of course we know that is hogwash, but we have gotten into some pretty sticky situations ourselves with acquaintances who brand us selfish for searching. (As in, what part of your pie chart was selfish when you went searching for your daughter?) Those folks are the ones who want to take us out to the woodshed and give us a good thrashing for having such radical thoughts.

I realize I'm rambling on, and getting worked up over this and Christmas is not really over. Time to wash my hair and take off for the movies for several adoption-free hours. --lorraine

Note: The records are sealed in the three territories also.