When your adopted child wants to visit her birth mother....

Marguerite Kelly

Washington Post columnist Marguerite Kelly’s advice to adoptive parents whose nine-year-old daughter wants to live with her birth parents is among the worst advice that fellow blogger Lorraine and I have read about adoption since we lost our daughters 46 years ago.

At one time we thought nobody could be worse than the late Ann Landers and Dr. Laura, both staunch opponents of open records and reunions. But then along came Washington Post writer, Carolyn Hax. She published a guest opinion by a grandma who regretted that her daughter had kept her child, the writer’s grandchild, totally oblivious to the pain and loss that adoption brings to mothers, children and grandparents.

Deconstructing the responses to Adopted or Abducted with kudos to the Crittenton Foundation

Lorraine, recently in DC

The morning started out with a bang with the first clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle today was: 2007 Ellen Page movie. Answer: JUNO, the most irritating movie about adoption known to woman or beast.

Then I moved onto trying to download the Dan Rather Report: Adopted or Abducted from iTunes for $1.99 and after giving Apple my name, my birthdate, answering security questions such as what was your first car (answer for anybody who wants to know my deep secrets, Karmann Ghia); your favorite car (MG); and where I had my least favorite job (ah! at that hash house where the owner drove me home one night and wanted me to put out, and when I didn't, fired me the next day, but there wasn't room for all that), my billing address, telephone number, a user name and a password with at least 8 characters, one Capital letter and at least two numbers! and no two of the same characters in a row, and my credit card number...I had to go back and re-register and ah ha! I kept getting error messages. Kinda like what I was hearing from my daughter's father when I tried to talk about keeping our baby...but then he would have had to get off his duff and leave his wife like he said he was going to. By the time he did, it was too late. Way too late.

In the Sixties: Was I 'forced' to give up my baby?

Lorraine at work, 2 years later. I was engaged to be married.

Was I "forced" to give up my baby? The question lingers in the air today because Dan Rather Reports produced a documentary, “Adopted or Abducted,” about forced adoption that will be aired tonight. Bloggers we know, such as Claudia, of Musings of the Lame, are included, and while Jane and I can't wait to see it, neither cable company that we use, on opposite ends of the country, me on the East Coast, she on the West, carry it, and so alas, we will have to see it later somehow.

But of course I've thought back about that time in the Sixties when I felt I had no choice other than to relinquish. My baby's father was a married man--and not married to me; I was so embarrassed that though I was less than a year out of college, I did not tell my parents, back in Michigan, while I hide in secrecy in Rochester, New York. Who even knew I was pregnant? Only a few: Patrick, the father, my lover; eventually our boss, the

Talking about ancestry to an adoptee, Part 2

Path to the family tree...or trees?                         photo by Ken Robbins

What's the best way for a birth mother to talk about ancestors to the adoptee? What does "kinning" mean? There are two discussions going on under the last two posts, but they are about the same thing: family connections, whether adopted or biological.

Commenter Maryanne suggested that when birth mothers begin talking about the family ancestors to a relinquished child in reunion, one could use the word "my," if they appear to be uncomfortable with "your" ancestor, as this seemingly disavows the adopted family and ancestral line the individual has heard about, and accepted, growing up. We agree.

What does "ancestry" mean to an adoptee?

Jane and Family on White House Lawn

On April 9, my grandchildren, ages six and nine, my daughter (their aunt) who lives in Washington and I participated in the White House Easter Egg Roll. About 35,000 people attended the event which has been held annually since 1878.  Easter Egg Roll participants come in groups of several thousand and stay for two hours. Because our tickets were for the late afternoon, we did not see the President or the First Lady, who were there in the morning.

The event was much like a neighborhood festival held in a local park.

Adoption in the Netherlands is "undutch" while America's love affair with it continues

The Netherlands

Relinquishing a child for adoption in the Netherlands is considered "inhumane, unwomanly, undutch, not done," according to Theodore, one of First Mother Forum’s regular readers who comments frequently from across the pond.

As in Australia, England and Wales, adoption rates in the Netherlands are dramatically lower than in the US.* With a population of 16.7 million, one eighteenth that of the United States, the Netherlands has approximately 20 domestic infant adoptions each year compared to 15,000 domestic infant adoptions in the US. If Americans were relinquishing at the same rate as in the Netherlands, they would have given up a fraction of the babies relinquished today--a mere 360 babies, not 15,000.  Why the discrepancy, we wanted to know. Theodore filled us in.

How adoption agencies 'turn' vulnerable women into spokespeople for relinquishing

Catelynn and Tyler, spokespeople for Bethany

Is adoption in America a business? Yes, it is a billion-dollar a year business. How do you get more babies to satisfy the customers, the prospective adoptive parents? How do you get other women to give up their babies? 

You get still-stunned mothers who have relinquished their children recently--brand new birth mothers to jump in and convince others that they too can do the "right" thing by giving up their children to better fixed folks. Catelynn and Tyler of Sixteen and Pregnant and Teen Mom

Shining the light on 'forced' adoption at home and elsewhere

Adoption or Abduction May 1

Spurred by recent events in Australia, Canada, and Spain, Dan Rather Reports produced a documentary, “Adopted or Abducted,” about forced adoption. Rather, a former CBS news anchor, and his staff interviewed first mothers women from around the world including Americans Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy (Faux Claud), Carol Schaefer, Karen Wilson Butterbaugh, and mothers featured in Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away.

“Adopted or Abducted” airs Tuesday, May 1 at 8 p.m. ET on HDnet. Readers can find their local channel by going to Dan Rather Reports, hitting subscribe and entering their zip code and selecting their cable provider.

Would-be Egg 'Donor' imagines a child growing up with genetic strangers

Lorraine

SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST
Why would you not donate your eggs?  The profit is great--$10,000!--the risk seems at first blush small (if inconvenient), and you seem... magnanimous. So why not do it?

An awareness of what is lost when there is not shared blood led one young woman, Simi Lampert,  to change her mind about selling her eggs. Calling her a donor is such BS the head spins. Yet what she became aware of as she considered marketing her eggs is exactly what is ignored in adoption: how being with genetic strangers marks one as different. The other. Not from the same stock. Together but separate. From "Why I Couldn’t Donate My Eggs" on Tablet, A New Read on Jewish Life:

"My siblings and I were raised by my mother, who was an only child, and my stepfather. One of the things about my childhood that’s always bothered me, something I wish could be different, is that my step-cousins never really felt like my cousins. (Emphasis added.)

How a birth mother's No to adoption turned into a Yes

There is more yesterday regarding Bethany Christian Services (cough, cough)  and others who turn dazed new mothers who relinquished into recruiters, and so I am reposting her comment again for those who do not read the comments. See below the wonderful graphics---lorraine  

 

 From another give-up-your-baby-site...but guess what keeping your baby aka "youth parenting" looks like? Mopping the floor while clutching your child. Give him up and you are the happy college or high school grad. What me worry?

Former Bethany "recruiter" speaks up

First Mother Forum received this anonymous comment today, but it is too heart-breaking and revealing to leave to a comment that few will ever find. As I can hardly type for the time being* I thought I would post it because what this first mother writes about that occurred in the Eighties--when she relinquished--is still certainly happening today, as we have learned from following the Catelynn and Tyler story. So I am just posting this here today:

I relinquished through Bethany's "counselor" in the 80s. Just weeks later, I was recruited to speak on their behalf (on Q&A panels for potential adoptive couples).

Joyce Maynard's adoption "disruption"

Lorraine

Joyce Maynard’s writing—and thus her, because her writing is her—has always irritated me, perhaps irrationally. She was too famous for celebrating the banal. But when the news that she disrupted her adoption of two sisters from Ethiopia became public the other day, my reaction was not to rub my hands gleefully and think Aha! The great comeuppance for that navel gazer! Instead I hoped that her celebrity and this public admission about a disrupted adoption would help stem what often seems like the wholesale exportation of children from one part of the world to another by do-gooders of all political and religious stripes simply because they have more money.

Far too many of them think that they are doing something noble by taking these poor children from the over-crowded orphanage where they find them. People in my large social net have adopted from Guatemala, China, India, Nepal, Romania, and Russia. In truth, I am not close to many of them. And it is undoubtedly true that in many cases, they are saving a child from an uncertain and perilous future and giving them a home in which to flourish.

After the birth mother/adoptee reunion: Dealing with rejection all over again

Jane and Lorraine in Sag Harbor, circa 1996

The reaction to the post about my daughter that have stayed with me were with ones from first mothers whose children, now found, are not speaking to them. I mentioned the lapses in my relationship with my  own daughter's at the end of the previous post, Remembering my daughter on her birthday.

I usually don't write about her not talking to me much now because it's obviously no longer an issue. She is gone. I don't cry anymore because she won't speak to me; I have cried plenty, but now she cannot speak to me, except in dreams.

Remembering my daughter on her birthday

Jane and Lorraine, 7/25/83  NYTimes photo

Today is my daughter's birthday, but of course the correct syntax is "would have been" her birthday if she had not died in 2007. What runs through my mind in crazy seemingly random fashion are images of the two of us together: the second time you came off the plane to visit Tony, my husband, and me in New York. You were planning to spend the summer with us. What a surprise to see that you had lightened your mousy blond hair (that was so like my mousy blond) to look a lot more like mine! Highlighted! Yes, I was thrilled to see that. You were my daughter, through and through. Was that the visit that we went to the Statue of Liberty and were the first off the boat from Manhattan and first up the stairs as we scrambled up to the crown? We both enjoyed that, and joked about it over the years.

I see us hanging out downtown in Sag Harbor, at the pier, with our first dog, Fred, a friendly female lab, and just, well, just enjoying the view with the water, the boats, the sunshine and reveling in being with each other, after so many years apart.

What can you write about adoption? And what is off limits?

Lorraine and her new accessory

What are the limits of what one can write about in regards to adoption personally, since after all, in writing anything at all, you are writing about at least one other person, possibly more. It's an issue that has come up not only at First Mother Forum but other blogs--and now The Huffington Post.

Last week a brave adoptive mother, Dina McQueen, wrote a revealing post about her four-year-old daughter from Ethiopia. In it she wrote of how, since McQueen had video of the girl's birth mother bringing the daughter, now named Aster, to the drop off, the little girl wanted to watch the video over and over and over again, and how she became inconsolable for a brief time after--though it seemed long to Mother McQueen. I forget exactly what the girl, Aster, called her video but it had some version of "birth mother" in it. Eventually, with time, love and patience, McQueen was able to calm the girl down and the post ended with the girl, at least for the time being, able to move on with her American mother to a sweet resolution.

What are the happy birth moms celebrating?

Note: For those coming here from Tyler Baltierra's Tweet, we have answered his rant against us and published it at a current post:   Tyler of 16 and Pregnant Tells FMF Off!

 (Below is the original post that he first responded to)

 November 18, 2012 8:39 AM

Lorraine

Open adoption or keeping the baby? We know that while overall very few teens--around one percent*--give up their babies for adoption anywhere anymore, the United States is far ahead of other developed nations in this regard. This is not a statistic to be cheering about--even if the impact of giving up a child in a fully open adoption does not lead to the depth of sorrow that we mothers from closed adoptions have dealt with. This is the perceived wisdom of those who compare the effect of closed adoptions versus open adoptions on the mothers who relinquish their children.

In the recent Donaldson report, Openness in Adoption, the authors state that the degree of openness generally does not affect their level of behavioral or socio-emotional adjustment [to being adopted]. The Minnesota-Texas Adoption Research Project study found, however, that higher degrees of collaboration in the adoptive kinship network [emphasis added] were associated with better

No Matter How Adoption is Done, Grief Remains for Mothers

“Putting an end to secrecy in adoption does not erase the grief or loss embedded in the adoption experience” according to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute March, 2012 report, Openness in Adoption: From Secrecy and Stigma to Knowledge and Connections. With that caveat, the institute strongly endorses openness in adoption because "ending secrecy empower(s) participants by providing them with information and access so they can face and deal with facts instead of fantasies.”

IF adoption is necessary, we at First Mother Forum concur that openness is not only better but essential in voluntary infant adoptions.

Update on state bills and meet my new constant companion

Lorraine yesterday in her sling, named Herman the Terminator

To update on all the noxious state bills regarding contraception and abortion that I wrote about in the last post: Some--if not most--of them have been tabled as women like us have pushed backed---in the state legislatures, on television, on Facebook, and on blogs. Many of the governors and legislators do have Facebook pages that were pretty lame until this got started; women have burned up some of the pages and the legislators have either taken theirs down or not let others comment. 

Meanwhile, in New York, we may actually be making progress on our clean bill this year. By clean I mean that it would give all adult adoptees their original birth certificates upon request. No birth parent veto.  When I get back from my "therapy evaluation" this morning, I'll be pecking out a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, explaining why pushing our bill (and without him, we can't get traction) is good politics across the nation. Cuomo wants to be president, make no mistake--and I want to let him know that backing our bill would be noticed by the adoptee constituency throughout America. If you have a connection to adoption in New York, please write to Cuomo, your local legislators, or Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. We need letters from first mothers, adoptees, adoptive parents. This is an equal opportunity effort. For more on the bill, see Unsealed Initiative, led by the tireless Joyce Bahr, a first mother. The letter you write might make the difference.

Well, above is how I look these days. Not photoshopped, no skill with blow dryer, no makeup. Au naturel. (And have you seen the ridiculous phot-shopped pix of Demi Moore for Helena Rubinstein? She's pushing 50, right? but looks 20. ) As for news of the limb in question, it will be months before it's up and running, good as can be. But I can nearly dress myself--but closing the bra strap is quite a while away. Apparently recovery will be months long, and how quickly I gain use of my limb again depends on how faithfully I do the exercises. So far, so good. Can't even drive, obviously, like this!

Jane is working on a new post reacting to the Donaldson report on open adoption and will be here soon.

So it goes.--lorraine

Unless invited, please stay out of my vagina

Which of these statements are true?

A. The sun revolves around Earth.

B. Masturbating gives you warts and makes you blind.

C. Abortions may cause breast cancer.

D. The Pill may cause prostate cancer.

E. Recreational sex is bad. 

Conceived in rape, but joined by a daughter's love

Jane

Katherine (Kathy) Stockton was born in 1960, blind, severely retarded, and physically disabled because her mother, Linda, contracted German measles early in her pregnancy.* Linda and her husband, Dale, divorced and Linda was left to care for Kathy and Kathy's older sister alone.

Following  doctors’ advice, Linda placed Kathy at Fairview Hospital and Training Center in Salem, Oregon. Fairview, opened in 1907 as the State Institution for the Feeble-Minded, was a hell hole when Kathy entered and was little better by 1979 when Kathy’s daughter, Amanda Campbell, was conceived through rape.

Improved reproductive technology: Will it reduce the demand for infants??

Jane

An essay in Portland Oregonian, "Grim message in fertility 'gain'" about the downside of improvements in fertility technology caught my eye. To Bonnie Rough, a Seattle writer and author of Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA, research finding that women could create new eggs via stem cells can be interpreted as "yet another attempt to fit women's reproductive lives into an unnatural stress system" where motherhood is dictated by the demands of the workplace. What leaped out at me was that the reasons women postpone trying to conceive are the same reasons other women give for giving up their babies. In spite of all the rhetoric we're hearing during this election season about helping America's working families, the fact is, our work places are not child-friendly.

"The Rescuer's Path"

Something about being a birth mother compels up to tell our stories. While many tell their stories in memoirs, first mother Paula Friedman has woven her birth mother experience into a piece of fiction; adoption is the vehicle for universal themes of acquiescence and conviction, love and loss, separation and reconciliation.

The Rescuer’s Path begins in Nixon-era Washington DC. Fifteen year old Malca Bernovski rides a horse through a park and discovers a severely wounded fugitive—antiwar leader Gavin Hareen, prime suspect in the bombing of an Army truck which killed three people.

Choice is largely a myth when it comes to relinquishing a child

Jane

SURRENDERS BASED ON MISINFORMATION ARE NOT CHOICES

"Julia,"* a 30-year-old married professional woman who learned her husband was having an affair gave up her new born son for adoption, a story that we have been writing about in the last two posts.  We wrote critically of her decision, but back tracked somewhat, recognizing that Julia was more sinned against than sinning. “Anonymous” commented that Julia was “a woman who has freely chosen to surrender, evidently was not forced to this choice. … Whatever happened to the concept of informed choice, even when another person's choice is not the one you wish you had made?” (Emphasis added.)

Since the infant adoption system in the U.S. does little to assure that mothers surrendering their babies are informed about the consequences, it's almost certain that Julia did not make an informed choice as Barbara Thavis, one of First Mother Forum readers, commented:

Mea Culpa to Julia and others who give up their babies today

Lorraine

I've taken some heat for being so harsh towards Julia* in the not-quite-infamous story in February Elle about being 30, a divorcing attorney, and getting pregnant with your husband just before you find out he is more than knee-deep into an affair with another woman who has no idea he is married. I was hard on poor "Julia," I admit. Reading the story was really triggering for me as this woman seemed to have the resources--family, friends, a husband in name--to keep her baby.

But she chose not to. And I said something that was well, quite brutal. I've been lambasted at alt.adoption on Facebook by someone who is screaming about "her choice" and more sympathetic but questioning comments have been left at the previous post for not being more understanding to a woman in a difficult situation that I certainly can understand.

The saddest story of all: Opting for adoption today

Not an adoptive mother

"Julia [the mother] left the hospital the next day without stopping in the nursery—the baby was in an incubator because he was five weeks early—but a few days later, she took a friend’s advice to visit her son to say goodbye in real life. 'My gut reaction was not to do it, but I drove to the hospital when I knew no one else was going to be there. And I just bawled uncontrollably as he slept. It was the worst thing I’ve done in my entire life.'"

That's from a story in February Elle about Julia,* 30, who decides to give up her child for adoption because: her husband was having an affair. Because she decides to divorce him. Because she did not want to raise a child alone, even though she had the support of her mother, who offered to take her in and help with the baby. And who is Julia?

Finding babies through Facebook. And your manicurist. And....

Jane

“Loving professional couple looking to adopt newborn. We want to build our family through adoption with love, laughter, fun and passion.” A typical baby wanted ad except that it appeared on Seth Edlavitch’s Facebook page according to "Adopting Through Facebook" on Parenting.com rather than the Sunday classifieds or The Penny Saver. 

Seth’s friends passed the notice along via the social media and voila! A friend of a friend called Seth about the pregnant wife of one her employees, Lisa. She and her husband had several children and wanted to place this baby for adoption. Seth and his wife, Melissa Segal, met Lisa; they hit it off immediately. Lisa had the qualities they wanted: her children were happy and healthy and she passed drinking, smoking, and other health tests.

Illegal Immigrant Fights for Custody of Young Son

David Stonner/Joplin Globe

Encarnacion Bail Romero confers with attorney Omar Riojas during a custody hearing

One of the nightmare custody battles got underway today--mother loses custody of her baby, another couple is allowed to adopt him, but mother wants her child, now five, back.

Guatemalan-born Encarnacion Bail Romero, who came to the U.S. illegally in 2006 while pregnant was working at a poultry processing plant  in Missouri in 2007 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers conducted a raid looking for illegals. Along with about 100 other undocumented

'Fessing up and running straight into a fresh adoption...

Lorraine spills the beans

Last week in Virginia I met a woman whom I immediately liked and as we were together over the course of several hours, I ended up telling her my involvement with the Big A. You know, it's always a question: to tell or not to tell. And stay silent and avoid the slings and arrows of misfortune that may come your way when meeting new folks. When she first asked what I wrote about, I said, "feminist issues," as I have a long history of writing about women and the glass ceiling and gender bias in the legal system.

As we were in Virginia, just as the nutty bill to invade women's vaginas with an ultrasound probe before they may have an abortion was the issue de jour, she was eager to hear more. She herself had been at a protest rally the morning before. Incidentally, Gov. Bob McDonnell (who initially said he would sign the bill) and the anti-women Republican-dominated legislature backed down.

Utah adoption laws becoming more hostile to birth fathers?

Jane

Robert Manzanares only wanted to nurture his new daughter. But for the past four years he has had to run the gauntlet of Utah’s byzantine anti-father adoption laws. Although the Utah Supreme Court ruled in his favor in January, he still faces more litigation before--if ever--he can have custody of his daughter.

Meanwhile the Utah legislature is on its way to passing a bill drafted with the assistance of the attorney who represented the adoptive parents in Manzanares’ case making Utah’s anti-father adoption laws ever harsher. SB 55 which passed the Utah Senate makes it legal for mothers-to-be to deceive fathers about their intent to place their baby for adoption.

How the daughter I gave up forever changed my life

Lorraine

When did I decide that I was never going to have another child, or more correctly, when I did I know that I never would?

As soon as my daughter was born.

I knew this in my bones. I didn't voice this to anyone, and at the time my daughter's father, Patrick, kept saying that we would be together. Later. After she was given up is what he meant.

An aspirin for birth control? We are not laughing.

Foster Friess

We at First Mother Forum are rather riled by the current controversy on contraception, and have felt the need to write about it, detouring for a few posts here about what is quite simply, bugging us like crazy. It's not enough the all the conservative religious leaders are lined up on the side of making it more difficult for employees of religious institutions to get birth control; now a wealthy investment manager, Foster Friess, and a major backer of Rick Santorum, has injected himself into the fray with a vulgar adolescent joke.

His prescription for birth control? An aspirin. "Back in my days, they used aspirin for contraceptives." he said. "The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly." 

Bishops bally-hoo over over birth control is a blow against my freedoms

Lorraine

So a group of old white guys aka, Catholic bishops, are having a major snit over whether they have to provide contraception to their workers of all faiths, as the Obama administration is demanding. Since a great many Catholic institutions--hospitals and universities--were already providing contraception to their workers of all faiths--including a good many Catholic women--this ought to be a no-brainer. And no problem. Instead the bishops are stomping around like a bunch of angry kids who have just had spring break cancelled.

The Catholic Conference of Bishops in the U.S. say including contraception as a benefit of their insurance policies this violates their faith, since contraception of any sort other than just saying No is against the rules. And it doesn't matter if the workers they are talking about are Catholic or not. The bishops don't want to let them have The Pill. Hell, if I'd had The Pill back in the day I wouldn't be spilling my

Washington representatives sell adoptees and birth mothers short

Birth Mother sell-out WA State Rep. Ann Rivers

Are Washington birth mothers in need of more protection from their lost children and the prying eyes of neighbors than Oregon mothers? Washington lawmakers seem to think so.

Since 2000, adult adoptees in Oregon have had unrestricted access to their original birth certificates (OBC) thanks to a ballot measure spearheaded by adoptee Helen Hill and passed by Oregon voters.* 

Cross the Columbia River into Washington, it’s a different story. Original birth certificates are locked up tighter than a miser's purse.

A second child doesn't replace the one lost to adoption

Jane

“You can go on to have other children.” As a young woman, I had heard these words in countless soap operas, read them in teen magazines and advice columns, as social workers urged young women into giving up their children for adoption. After I placed my first daughter Rebecca for adoption in 1966, I did go on to have three more daughters that I raised. The oldest of these Anne, was born five years after Rebecca and turned 40 last month. As our family celebrated Anne’s birthday, I reflected on the circumstances of her birth, so different than that of my first daughter.

Rebecca was conceived in Fairbanks, Alaska.  Several months before her birth I went to San Francisco where she was born and surrendered.  I knew no one there. My family was in Illinois and Southern California and I did not tell

What birth mothers can learn from Mimi Alford, President Kennedy's intern

Mimi Alford during her affair with Kennedy. She kept silent for 40 years.

Mimi Beardsley Alford, once a teen-age lover of President John Kennedy, has been all over the tube this week talking about how our boyish, young, handsome president seduced an intern four days after she joined the White House press room. There's plenty of dish in her interviews and in her book (ONCE UPON A SECRET: My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath) apparently, with some seamier stuff than just losing her virginity at nineteen on Jackie Kennedy's bed. Yes, really.

Writing the First Letter to your birth mother (or a sibling)

Lorraine

What to write in that first letter to your birth mother?--If that is how you decide to make the initial contact. It's your introduction to a woman you hope will want to know you, and with whom you may have a continuing relationship. It's an advertisement for yourself to the woman who gave birth to you--but hasn't seen you since.

Chances are, your mother has been hoping for this day all your life and will welcome you with an open heart. She may have already searched for you and been unsuccessful. She may have contacted your adoptive parents and been told to leave you alone. They may have even threatened her. Or she may have been afraid to search because social workers and her priest and her friends and maybe her mother or father, urged you not to. She may have been afraid that you did not know you were adopted, and that it would "destroy your world" if she showed up. She may have been told to "leave well enough alone." Or she may not know how to search, and otherwise be afraid to. 

Adoption is a critical part of women’s history

Mothers who lost their children to adoption deserve more attention in Gail Collins’ otherwise entertaining and informative account of the transformation of the condition of American women over the past 50 years, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.

Between the end of World War II and the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade nullifying laws prohibiting abortion, hundreds of thousands of mothers lost their newborn infants to closed adoption in a radical social experiment, the effects of which reverberate today in the damaged lives of these women, and often, their children and the fathers of their children. While women with unplanned pregnancies have more choices today thanks to Roe v. Wade and more enlightened mores, unnecessary adoptions continue.

How are gay marriage and adoptee rights connected?

Daniel O'Donnell

Today in the New York Times one can read about the marriage of Daniel O'Donnell and John Banta, who, under New York's newly passed legislation allowing gays to marry, tied the knot on January 19.

O'Donnell, Rosie O'Donnell's brother, is described as a Democrat "whose impassioned pleas in the Assembly chambers and Albany's private corridors were considered instrumental in humanizing the push to legalize same-sex marriage, as New York Lawmakers did last June."Later one reads: "Mr. O'Donnell's speeches on same-sex marriage were both comic and profound. 'I don't want a seat in your synagogue. I don't want a church pew,' one of them went. 'I want a license that all of your have....'"

Should birth mothers shut up and stay in the closet?

Lorraine

Are birth mothers encouraged to stay in the closet?  

Damn straight they are. Coming off the philosophical pap of Professor Kimberly Leighton last week on the Diane Rehm show*, the other day at the "I Love Adoption" page on Facebook, I ran smack into a poem called Emotions. It is our understanding that the I Love Adoption page, with its more 4,972 "likers" at this writing is administrated by "The Adoption Center." A quick perusal of the website of The Adoption Center yielded no physical address, no last names of anyone, and only 800 phone numbers, so their location requires more digging but a source tells me they are situated in my least favorite state, Utah. Where signing away your baby can be done as quick as you can have 'em.

When adoptees' Right to Know becomes a philosophical debate, adoptees lose

Diane Rehm

Birth mother privacy has been in the news of late, beginning with a Diane Rehm on NPR show that ostensibly was about DNA analysis that leads to connecting adopted people to their families. And that show came after a New York Times front page story about DNA analysis two days earlier. Sometimes it is third cousins who can connect, because they have also had their DNA decoded, but third cousins lead to second cousins and they lead to first...and a body might be able to connect the dots back to one's original mother.

Holy Cow! Uncles are shocked, children faint, husbands leave! Horrors! goes the collective gasp from the people who see all rights as equal competing against other rights. (One wonders what they would have done during the era of slavery, but never mind.) Competing-but-equal rights regarding human identity was the opinion of the self-styled expert, Kimberly Leighton, there to discuss adopted people's right to search-and-connect after DNA matches. Leighton says near the end of the show that she is an adoptee who searched and found, something I missed on first reading of the transcript.

High number of adoptions in the US is a national disgrace

Jane

The number of domestic infant adoptions in the United States borders on a national disgrace. Each year somewhere between 14,000 and 25,000 American mothers lose their children to adoption. In today's day and knowing what we know about the effects of adoption, this is a tragedy.

The data is hard to come by. According a recent report of the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services,* data on voluntary domestic infant adoptions is not collected systematically. A 2003 study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention put the number at less close to 14,000, about one percent of children born to never married women. The percentage for single white women surrendering was 1.7 percent; for black women it is near zero.

Open or closed: Losing a child to adoption is painful

An adoptive mother asked recently whether those of us in the Baby Scope Era would have had less pain if we had had an open adoption. (The Baby Scoop Era is the period between World War II and Roe v. Wade when a large number of single middle class white women lost their infants to adoption because of the stigmas placed on unwed mothers and their children.

When my relinquished daughter was born in 1966, I thought that it would be wonderful if  I could have some continuing contact with her. I envisioned a secret child whom I would communicate with through a trusted friend.  I fancied myself like the Bette Davis character, Apple Annie, in the 1961 film Pocketful of Miracles. Annie, a disheveled old woman sold apples on a street corner  to support her daughter hidden in a Spanish convent. 

To understand ourselves, we must know where we came from

Maternal Grandmother Agnes

Where do we get our talents, our drive, our sense of ourselves? Last night at dinner a woman asked me if I had had a good relationship with my grandmothers, and I had to say, one died before I was born and the other was sickly most of the years I knew her. She died when I was fourteen, and because we did not live in the same town, I never knew her well.

But then I found myself telling my dinner companion more about my grandmothers. The one I did know, Agnes (photo at left), was divorced from my grandfather, a rarity and a scandal back in those days--the Forties and Fifties--and especially a scandal among Polish Catholics, who are among the most conservative and steadfast Catholics anywhere. I barely knew the man she had been married to, my grandfather, nor did I know know why my mother seemed not to like him, or why we almost never visited him. I remember that at his funeral--when I would have been about fourteen--my mother and her older sister were dry-eyed and grim, a younger sister was full of tears. I wondered why there was such disparity in how they were reacting to their father's death.

To Tell or Not to Tell (the unvarnished truth), that is the question

 The truth--who has claim to it? When do you have to tell someone the Truth? When you know something and they don't but maybe it affect their live? Ah, the internal conundrum.

A few months ago we included a notice about The Ethicist column in The New York Times in which The Ethicist (the name alone would freak me out) told a man who had fathered the girl across the street that he had no right ever to tell her he was her father, unless her mother, and her legal father (who thought he was her biological father) all agreed beforehand. The Ethicist came down on the side then of withholding the truth from the individual. You can see this probably did not sit well with First Mother. 

People say the strangest things to first mothers

Lorraine

As a birth mother you hear the strangest things. And just as adoptees have "trigger" words and ideas that are upsetting, here are a few situations and words that trigger us:

We tell our found or reunited children what a terrible experience giving up them was, and they listen intently, seem to comprehend our pain, but later we hear them saying or writing something to effect that that adoption is such a great institution and they are "glad" they were adopted. We hear: I am so glad you worthless, lower class, fill-in-the-blank person did not raise me. I am so relieved that you didn't get your clutches on me and I was lucky enough to escape. This attitude has found its way into more adoptee memoirs than I can count, starting with Sarah Saffian's Ithaka  and continuing through The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Holmes.

Romney urges single woman to give up her baby--or be outcast from LDS

Lorraine

Mitt Romney, as a leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, pressured an unmarried woman to give up her unborn child to be adopted. That revelation comes from The Real Romney, a new book excerpted in the February issue of Vanity Fair.  In the book, co-authors Michael Kranish and Scott Helman tell the story of one Peggie Hayes, who had a long-time connection with the Romney family.

Hayes had joined the church with her mother, and knew the Romneys so well that as a teenager, Hayes baby-sat for the Romney boys in Boston. In her last year of high school, however, her mother abruptly moved with her daughter to Salt Lake City. Peggie married, moved to Los Angeles, had a daughter, divorced, and eventually moved back to the Boston area, where she made contact again with the Romneys. She stayed a member of the Mormon church.

When "best interests of the child" violate reason and decency

Jane

Last week Harry’s Law presented the familiar drama of a child adopted illegally and his natural parents suing for his return. We know from the beginning that the judge, lacking the Wisdom of Solomon, will rule for the adopters (the most perfect of couples), citing the best interests of the child.

The Harry’s Law segment had a contemporary twist: the aggrieved couple is Chinese. Their child was stolen by corrupt Chinese officials and given to an African-American couple. The Chinese parents come to the United States and sue for return of their child. The judge, an African-American who had been adopted as a child by a white couple, rules for the adopters, repeating the old platitude about how it’s not about the rights of the parents but about the rights of the child. To overcome any lingering doubts the TV audience might have about the correctness of the decision, the Chinese girl is shown happily singing and swaying to Gospel music along with African-American children.

Neither a rape, nor time, erases this first mother's love

Lorraine

Many of you have privately sent me a link to the story about the 94-year-old birth mother, Minka Disbrow, who was contacted by her 77-year-old daughter and their six-year-reunion since then. Though it is old news by now, I keep finding links to it in my mailbox. Even my husband, who rarely forwards adoption stories to me, got into the act. Minka Disbrow, the mother, is celebrating her hundredth birthday, the Associated Press did a story about the reunion and relationship with her relinquished daughter who reached her six years ago. The ages of the women involved make people sit up and take notice. I love Minka Disbrow because she is a brave women indeed. 

Part of the story that is almost overlooked is that the child, now named Ruth Lee and the mother of a retired astronaut, was the product of what could have only been a brutal rape.

Hollywood celebs beget babies any way they can

Having children via surrogacy and adoption continues to be popular in the world of fantasy and entertainment. Sixty-eight year old Robert De Niro and his wife, 56-year-old wife Grace Hightower, became the parents of a daughter, Helen Grace Hightower, via a surrogate this past December. De Niro has three other surrogate produced via surrogate, a son with Hightower ands twin sons with former model Toukie Smith.

Rickie Martin, Mathew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, Elton John, and Nicole Kidman have all become parents in the past few years thanks to women who "donate" their eggs and women who carry the babies.

Why First Mother Forum is moderating comments. Again.

Lorraine

THERE IS AN IMPORTANT ADD TO THE BLOG, READ BELOW...SILENCE HURTS US ALL

Late last night, after an upsetting day, an adoptee who follows this blog--and has her own blog--emailed me and suggested that many of the comments at the previous blog post would most likely be upsetting to my granddaughter.  I had a vague feeling like that myself, and was quite anxious about the blog all of yesterday as the comments veered into analyzing from assumption and were often wrong. Then I would have to answer the assumptions and presumptions and questions, and in doing so reveal more about the situation than I felt comfortable doing on a public blog. Seeing War Horse in the evening did not distract me as I love horses and this is an disquieting movie. I came home, then read the email from the adoptee, and knew I had to do something.

Dealing with an adoptee's 'no contact' request

Lorraine

How should we first/birth mothers respond to a relinquished son or daughter who is unwilling to have contact? is a discussion that began in the last blog post. It is a question I've heard many times and also had to deal with myself--and now with my (adopted out*) granddaughter.

What's difficult for us birth mothers is to know when we might send them a note or an email or a card because we find it hard to believe they don't want to know, somehow, that we are still thinking of them. I've heard adoptees say that they did appreciate getting that one card on their birthday--it answered the questions: Does my birth mother think ever think of me? Is she thinking of me on my birthday? Does she even remember my birthday?