[Birth Mother,] First Mother Forum

High number of adoptions in the US is a national disgrace

2012-01-28T18:58:00.001-05:00

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.

The E. B. Donaldson Adoption Institute used the 14,000 figure in its 2006 report, “Safeguarding the Rights and Well-Being of Birthparents in the Adoption Process.” In his talk at the Adoption Symposium held by Coordinators 2 in Richmond last September, Donaldson director Adam Pertman upped the number to 15,000.

OH DEAR, WHAT IF THERE ARE NO BABIES TO ADOPT?

The National Council for Adoption put the number even higher, reporting that infant adoptions declined from 22,291 in 1992 to 18,078 in 2007. The NCFA urged action to reverse this trend: “there is still much work to be done in order to ensure that women facing unintended pregnancies are fully informed, educated, and able to consider the option of adoption on an equal basis with all other pregnancy options.”

The Adoption Guide, a publication of Adoptive Families magazine, however, cheerily reported that “25,000 American families successfully adopt newborn babies in the United States every year.” The Guide tells prospective adoptive parents encouragingly, that cost of adoption varies from $4,000 and to more than $30,000 but that “the median cost of a domestic adoption is under $20,000,” and that open adoption, far from being co-parenting “typically involves periodic updates to the birth family, often via an intermediary.” Unfortunately we know that "open" adoptions often effectively close because the adoptive parents have no legal incentive to keep communication open.

Whether 14,000 or 25,000, the domestic infant adoption rate greatly exceeds that of other western countries. England and Wales had 5,065 adoptions in 2008, of which 120 or 2 percent were children under the age of one. The population of England and Wales in 2008 was 55 million, about 18 percent of the US population of 304,000. If Americans adopted at the same rate as the Brits, we would have had about 660 infant adoptions.

Oliver Twist

Why this difference? For starters, our friends across the pond provide more support for families through the National Health Service and benefits to low income families, including Sure Start Maternity Grants of L500 (about $780). In perusing British adoption websites, I did not see advertisements soliciting women to give up their infants. Adoption appears to be a charitable endeavor focused on finding families for children who need them rather than locating newborns for families who want them. England and Wales have fewer members of evangelical and Mormon churches, religions which promote adoption as THE solution for unmarried mothers.

I've seen no reports that the small number of mothers giving up their babies has resulted in more child abuse or disturbed children. I’ve seen nothing about large numbers of children twisted into Dickensian orphanages or infant bodies floating down the Thames. In fact, it is likely that overall, children have benefited from the low adoption rate. As we have said many times at FMF, child welfare experts--including the Child Welfare League of America--report that generally children do best raised in their natural families.

Jane and Evelyn Robinson

England and Wales are not alone. Australia has only a handful of domestic adoptions each year, according to author and social worker Evelyn Robinson, who is also a first mother. The government encourages and supports women to raise their children. It handles all adoptions so there is no profit to be gained by any private adoption agency. Based on what I’ve heard at American Adoption Congress conferences, the same is true for Western Europe generally.

MAKING MONEY MOVING BABIES AROUND
While our figures are shockingly higher than other developed nations, they are a far cry from the past, as pre-1973, about 19.3 percent of single white women surrendered their infants, but approximately only 1.5 percent of black women, as their culture did not encourage young women to surrender their babies. Adoption in the U.S. then, as today, is BIG BUSINESS.

The demand for healthy newborns is insatiable, fueled by gay couples, Hollywood celebrities, misguided do-gooders, and the large number of couples who wait until it is too late to have children. The odds are that 50 percent of women over 35 will fail to get pregnant over the course of eight months, and after that the odds keep dropping. After a year of trying naturally, it's off to the fertility clinic, and when that fails--and the longer one waits, the higher the failure rate--adoption is seen as the socially accepted way to "build a family." Adoption attorneys, adoption agency directors, and adoption facilitators are in the wings waiting to find you a baby, and many make make six figure salaries doing so. As for the mothers, (the producers of these valuable commodities), for trusting the "adoption option," they receive few dollars towards expenses and sorrow by the bucketful.

(Of interest: Domestic infant adoptions are a small percentage of total adoptions. Total adoptions in 2008 were 136,000 according to data gleaned by HHS from court and vital statistics records. About 40 percent came from public agencies (foster care) and 13 percent from foreign countries. The balance of adoptions, 63,094, 47 percent, came from step parent or other relative adoptions, tribal adoptions, and voluntary infant adoptions.)

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*Child Information Gateway, “How Many Children Were Adopted in 2007 and 2008?"

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Sources "Voluntary Relinquishment for Adoption"
"How Many Children Were Adopted in 2007 and 2008?"
“Safeguarding the Rights and Well-Being of Birthparents in the Adoption Process"

National Council for Adoption "Factbook"

"the Adoption Guide"

"Adoptions in England and Wales"

UK "Financial Help for Families"

Evelyn Robinson

For a comprehensive analysis of adoption as a business, see Mirah Riben's book, The Stork Market, America's multi-billion dollar unregulated adoption industry.

Open or closed: Losing a child to adoption is painful

2012-01-23T23:01:00.000-05:00

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.

Reality set in. I knew having any kind of contact with my daughter was a pipe dream. I didn't mention it to the social worker both because I thought it would be a waste of time, or worse, the social worker would do something to make sure I never saw my daughter again, like send her to China.

Openness in domestic adoptions has become a necessity now that women with unplanned pregnancies have more choices. For some adoptive parents, it is the price of obtaining an American child; for more enlightened ones, it is the preferred option, allowing their children to know their roots and, the adoptive parents believe, dissipating their birth mothers' grief.

MOTHERS IN OPEN ADOPTION
Now that I have met mothers in open adoptions, I'm not convinced that they have it so much better than we did. Take a look what mothers in open adoptions write on their blogs, BirthMom Buds and Birthmothers4Adoption, watch Teen Mom birth parents Catelynn and Tyler who are now professional promoters of adoption, and what you see is pain, pain, pain, ripping through their stories as they insist they did the best thing. Most of the mothers in open adoptions that I've met express the same regrets as those of us in closed adoptions.

When I surrendered I knew I could not have contact with my daughter and should not even start looking for her until she was 18. I could force myself to cast aside thoughts about her until she reached that magic age. Mothers in open adoption have to navigate a relationship from day one. They worry about whether they will have contact and how their children will respond. If their children tell them they are happy they were adopted, mothers feel bad. If their children are angry they were given up, mothers feel bad. If their children ignore them, preferring to play with Legos, they are devastated; if their children sob when they leave, they are consumed with guilt.

Even where adoptive parents work hard to be congenial, mothers may not feel comfortable talking about aspects of child-rearing with which they disagree. Adoption agencies counsel them to put on a happy face. If they show their emotions, the adoptive parents may cut them off. All of this when open adoptions are at their best. And as we have written about before, all too often, open adoptions close.

OPEN BETTER THAN CLOSED
Despite this, I do believe that fully open adoptions are better than closed or partially "open" adoptions. Mothers in open adoption say they are glad they can know their children and how they are. They don't have to wonder if their children are alive, or well or sick, or if they are well taken care of. They don't have to live a lie--as I did for many years--always stumbling over the question "How many children do you have?"
_________________________________________
Inconsolable Grief
Catelynn's and Tyler's open adoption will stay open; for other first mothers not so much
Are Open Adoptions a Boon for Birth Mothers or a Scam?
How to make an Open Adoption work
An Un-Open Adoption: Adoptive Parents Lie and Break a Mother's Heart
BirthMom Buds
Birthmothers4Adoption
Tyler and Catelynn
Pocketful of Miracles

To understand ourselves, we must know where we came from

2012-01-20T13:57:00.001-05:00

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.

BEING PROUD OF GRANDMA
Only many years later--and I mean, decades--did I learn that this man had molested my mother's older sister, and bothered my mother once but didn't do more than scare the hell out of her. The youngest sister apparently didn't even know about this. My mother said that when her mother--whom she idolized--found out what he was up to (I do not know the details), she began sleeping on the couch, and soon after moved out, taking her children with her.

My mother

That put a whole new light on this woman. Instead of seeing her simply as someone who was sickly, I gained a new respect for her. She got up and left when the going got ugly. Now I could frame her divorce and remarriage in a renegade Catholic schism in a completely different way. Now I could be proud of her courage. This is a woman who stood up to her husband, and took the censure that came with the divorce. No one outside the immediate family knew why, and she did not tell--hence the youngest sister not even aware of what had occurred.

As for the other grandmother who died two years before I was born? According to family lore, I am a great deal like her. My middle name, Blanche, is for her own Bronislawa, the Polish equivalent. I know that she left a relatively well-off family in Poland by herself to come to America, and met and married my grandfather here.

Rule breaker Bronslawa Drozdusky

When I learned that she wrote numerous letters to the newspaper in the hardscrabble town in southwestern Pennsylvania where they lived, I remember feeling a internal shift of joyful recognition. Ah ha, that's where I got that from. I also knew that she supplemented her husband's meager salary as a coal miner by making bathtub gin at home during Prohibition. My dad said she sold a Mason jar of her "white lightening" for fifty cents, and the miners came by on the day they got paid. The police came by once too. Grandfather took the blame and spent a night in jail. It's unlikely I will ever be a bootlegger, but I sure do urge us all involved in adoption to break unjust laws if necessary to find one another. I've often said that blood on the steps of the Department of Health where sealed records are kept would wake up some knucklehead legislators to the desperation of the situation. Knowing what I know about my grandmothers, I think they would think the same. Both strong and determined women, they both broke the rules. And when I came out of the birth mother closet, my mother did not hesitate to support me wholeheartedly, despite the negative gossip this generated in her home town. Thanks, Mom. ♥

Everyone in the family said I was most like my father's older sister, Jean, who left Pennsylvania when she was sixteen and went to New York City on her own, and made her way. When I knew her, she was a waitress in a restaurant near City Hall, and worked there until she married one of the customers. It was from her suitcase when I was twelve I found and read Bonjour Tristesse, barely understanding what was going on. I adored my Aunt Jean. Even when my mother was with Aunt Jean and me, people on the street used to think that Jean was my mother. I sounded like her too. Today I am noticing how similar our hair styles are in the pictures here--all waves, with bangs--even though the styles suit our times. And I notice my mother has one of those Marcel waves too.

My aunt Genevieve

The stories of these women are my history. They are who I come from. They inform and influence who I am. And it is comforting to know these things, to know about them, to feel them living though me.

IT'S NOT JUST THE COLOR OF YOUR EYES
This rumination came about today after reading David Brooks this morning in the New York Times. He was writing about Mitt Romney. What Brooks had to say has a direct connection to what it is like being a product of a certain family, and having that history written into your DNA. Brooks wrote:

"Romney’s salient quality is not wealth. It is, for better and worse, his tenacious drive — the sort of relentlessness that we associate with striving immigrants, not rich scions.

"Where did this persistence come from? It’s plausible to think that it came from his family history. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once observed that it takes several generations to make a career. Interests, habits and lore accrue in families and shape those born into them." [Emphasis added.]

Brooks then related a brief history of Romney's family, taken from the book The Real Romney. Romney's not going to be my candidate of choice, but you can read into his history the tenacity that is a hallmark of the man today. In understanding the man, what matters more are not the particulars of Romney's Mormonism--which we certainly quibble with--but the exodus in his history, and the dogged determination to overcome odds.

High school senior Lorraine

You can see where all this led me, right? To have a whole history swiped from you is an unspeakable crime, yet it is done by the hundred fold in adoption. Knowing what we know today about the need for a history--emotional, cultural, medical--no one can participate in any adoption that is not fully and freely open and feel they are doing the right thing any longer. As for me, not adopted but having participated in one when I surrendered my daughter, I was left with an overreaching sadness. Everyone needs to know where they came from to best deal with where he is going. Any other way is to be handicapped for life.--lorraine
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Source: The Wealth Issue

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

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

2012-01-18T12:10:00.002-05:00

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.

Lorraine

At the time I said that what if all these people never agreed, did the individual ever have the right to know the truth? Yes, I said, unequivocally--especially since the man asking was the real biological father, not some meddling neighbor.

Now Ariel Kaminer, The Ethicist, had another truth-telling column in the January 8 issue of the NYTimes Magazine: Name Withheld from El Paso writes and says he has a "self-contained" yard where he keeps a dog, and into that yard from which the dog cannot escape a neighbor's cat has strayed. Cat ends up "sleeping with the fishes." Owner of said cat is recovering from "extensive cancer treatment." Should Name Withheld tell the cancer patient neighbor that his dog killed the cat, or can he let her think the cat is out there "playing in the park?"

The Ethicist says: "False hope is not a gift. Please tell her the whole truth." Hi, Neighbor, my dog killed your cat....now don't you feel better knowing the truth? Can we still be friends, now that I've got that off my chest?

What? According to The Ethicist, it's right to inform the neighbor that his or her cat, left to his own devices, decided to come into an area where there is a loose dog of unknown friendliness roaming, and that he suffered the consequences, but it's okay to keep silent about something as true knowledge of one's father?

SKEWED PRIORITIES
I think The Ethicist needs to rethink his or her priorities. And I think she's wrong on both counts. If you have a cat and let it roam freely outside, where it kills birds, especially fledglings in the spring and summer, and other small rodents such as chipmunks, the cat's owner also has to accept that the cat himself may come to a swift and brutal demise also. Some dogs, like cats, will chase and kill other animals; it is also in their nature. I once had to scream bloody murder at my late dog Jack to drop the squirrel he had in his mouth. He and the two dog buddies he was with turned to me and looked shocked that I could yell that loud, but Jack dropped the squirrel and it ran away. Death averted that day, and maybe Jack learned that squirrels were off limits.

But to return to the main here--Do individuals have the right to know the truth of their origins? If they do not, then the whole argument about the right to an original birth certificate for all, adopted individuals included, is an iffy proposition. If it's all right not to tell someone who their real father is, then it is also permissible to keep adoptees' birth certificates under lock and key from the person they were issued for and about: the individual whose birth certificate it is.As I've said here before: Embarrassment alone is not reason enough to deny the truth of one's origins.

THE TELLING TEN PERCENT
I read somewhere that approximately ten percent of the families who come in for blood work to see if a parent is a donor match for his child discovers that the biological father is someone other than the man so named on the birth certificate. It happened in my own family, and I admit I never learned if my own first cousin knew that his "father," a man he told me he despised, was not his biological father. I hesitated to tell my cousin, wrestled with how I might find out if he knew the truth, but before I did anything, my cousin died. Another relative discovered that her daughter was not her husband's offspring, but that of a man she had a brief affair with twenty years earlier. My relative's marriage was on the rocks, as the daughter herself found her dad having a cozy dinner with someone he was having an affair with. Now my cousin, the young woman's mother, is married to the father of her daughter. Yes, I know not all such complications have such sweet endings, perfect for a romance novel, but this one did. Last I heard, all was well. And my cousin is very happy.

And to hear a song about learning the truth...which apparently Eddie Vedder talked about in a PBS special.--lorraine

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Source: A Dog’s Right to Life?
See also:
Biological Fathers everywhere hiding in plain sight

People say the strangest things to first mothers

2012-01-15T19:34:00.003-05:00

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.

WHEN 'THANK YOU' DOESN'T APPLY
"Thank you for letting me be adopted." Now they may be saying, I'm glad you did not have an abortion, which of course would be natural to think--even surrogate kids without a chance of finding out whose genes they have would agree because after all, they exist and wouldn't otherwise--but how do we feel when we hear: Thank you for letting me adopted? See above.

We hear that our "found" reunited children are urging anyone--except in some dire situation--to give up their babies. See above.

Given the adoption consciousness of the world today we expect and are not surprised when people from the world at large cast an uncritical and unknowing eye on all adoptions everywhere as A Good Thing. When we hear or read it coming from close relatives, who have some idea of the personal pain our relinquishment has cost, it feels like a personal attack. We feel like we don't count in their eyes, that anything we have said has not made any impression on them. One first mother's sister posted on Facebook that among the things she wanted for Christmas is that all the "unwanted children of the world be adopted." Well, we would hope that all children have families et cetera, but stating that as a comment gives more credence to the idea that there are--you know--millions and millions of babies in, say, Ethiopia, waiting for Madonna (or anyone) to take them. In fact, there is a push on right now to Stop the Trafficking of Ethiopian Children. Despite how pro-adoption people do not like the word "trafficking" in connection with adoption, this is what it is called by the people in Ethiopia trying to stop it: Stop trafficking Ethiopian children.

A close relative saying that she thinks that adoptees and birth/first mothers ought not to search and that "well enough ought to be left alone." This means: no reunions, no opening of sealed records, no answers to lifelong identity questions, of both mother and child.

JUST HOW SELFISH ARE YOU?
"What part was not selfish when you looked for your daughter?" That questioner assumes that the main impulse reason to look for one's own child who was surrendered and adopted is selfishness, and that the son or daughter who was adopted is so much better of without out. This is an out-and-out total attack on the birth parent who choose to search. I wrote about this happening to me a couple of years ago.

"I wouldn't mind seeing my (real/natural/birth) mother again." This may have been written without a great deal of thought in an awkward attempt at welcoming a visit to or from one's natural mother, but it sends a message of hesitation, uncertainty--Does the (adopted out) son or daughter really want to see his/her mother? Maybe, but maybe he/she would mind, and rather not. I know as well as anyone that the relationships after reunion can be fragile, but I would think it would hurt if a birth mother, contemplating seeing her son or daughter again said..."Well, I wouldn't mind seeing you..."

"You are nothing more than a reproductive agent." Comment superfluous, but thanks for reminding me what you think of me. See blog link below. Birth Mothers Attacked as Usual...or, Maybe I Need New Friends

Heard from an adoptive grandfather: "You (reunited birth mother) are our greatest fear." Well, actually this one was more in line with what a lot of us expect, so it didn't hurt at all when it was said to me at a dinner party while the hostess was in the kitchen getting dessert. I replied before she returned that my daughter had lived her with my husband and me for several summers and, in fact, worked here during the summers, and that to his surprise, I had a good relationship with her adoptive parents. I said it with a smile. I hope he choked on the chocolate mousse. At the very least, I made him uncomfortable.

That's my short quick list tonight before I watch the Golden Globes, hoping that some tipsy winner says something wacky (unlike the Oscars, the actors are having dinner and drinking) and that Ricky Gervais is as outrageous as usual. And what triggers you?

--lorraine

Jane here: Let me add the comment from my niece Janice who was trying to enlist my help in convincing her daughter Beth into giving up Beth's child for adoption. I told Janice how painful it was to lose a child. Her response: "That's just you. Other women have no problem with it."

Lorraine here again on 1/17/12: The other evening after I posted this an adoptive grandfather who is an old friend and on Facebook said: I see you still are on that adoption business. You know I am against birth parents searching! and the intent of his comment was to tell me how the blog annoys him. Well, this is a man who became somewhat of an uncle to my daughter Jane, let her stay at his place in Manhattan etc. but the blog just bugs him! Long after he met Jane his (single) daughter adopted from China. Well, get over it! Don't read the blog! (He doesn't, as far as I sense.) But if you are going to keep telling me this, our friendship is in big trouble! This is who I am. Get over it or get out.
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see also: A Neighbor Condemns Searching for our Children Lost to Adoption, a friendship ends
Birth Mothers Attacked as Usual...or, Maybe I Need New Friends
Open Adoption is "one free baby-sitting scam"....

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

2012-01-12T21:54:00.000-05:00

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.

In 1983, Hayes was 23, a nurses' aid struggling with her finances, and Romney was not only her church leader as her bishop, but she also thought of him as a friend. He helped find her odd jobs with other members of the church. Then Hayes became pregnant, and though marriage was not part of the equation, she looked forward to having another child. “I kind of felt like I could do it,” she is quoted as saying in the book. “And I wanted to.”

GIVE UP THAT BABY, YOU SINNER!
But Romney, hoeing to Mormon policy of discouraging out-of-wedlock mothers, sat down with her and "said something about the church's adoption agency." From the excerpt in Vanity Fair:

Hayes initially thought she must have misunderstood. But Romney’s intent became apparent: he was urging her to give up her soon-to-be-born son for adoption, saying that was what the church wanted. Indeed, the church encourages adoption in cases where a successful marriage is unlikely.

Hayes was deeply insulted. She told him she would never surrender her child. Sure, her life wasn’t exactly the picture of Rockwellian harmony, but she felt she was on a path to stability. In that moment, she also felt intimidated. Here was Romney, who held great power as her church leader and was the head of a wealthy, prominent Belmont family, sitting in her gritty apartment making grave demands. “And then he says, ‘Well, this is what the church wants you to do, and if you don’t, then you could be excommunicated for failing to follow the leadership of the church,’ ” Hayes recalled. It was a serious threat. At that point Hayes still valued her place within the Mormon Church. “This is not playing around,” she said. “This is not like ‘You don’t get to take Communion.’ This is like ‘You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.’ ” Romney would later deny that he had threatened Hayes with excommunication, but Hayes said his message was crystal clear: “Give up your son or give up your God.”

ROMNEY LETS HAYES DOWN
Hayes gave birth to a son she named Dane. Before he was a year old, he needed risky surgery because the bones in his head were fused together, restricting the growth of his brain. They would have to be separated. Hayes looked to her church for emotional and spiritual support, and, setting aside their uncomfortable conversation before the baby's birth, called Romney and asked him to come to the hospital to give her baby a blessing. Hayes was expecting him, but two people she didn’t know showed up instead. From VF:

She was crushed. “I needed him,” she said. “It was very significant that he didn’t come.” Sitting there in the hospital, Hayes decided she was finished with the Mormon Church. The decision was easy, yet she made it with a heavy heart. To this day, she remains grateful to Romney and others in the church for all they did for her family. But she shudders at what they were asking her to do in return, especially when she pulls out pictures of Dane, now a 27-year-old electrician in Salt Lake City. “There’s my baby,” she said.

Though this happened in 1983, but from what we read and have learned about the pro-adoption stance in Mormonism and the state of Utah, where LDS is headquartered and is extremely influential politically, we do not believe that much has changed since within official policy. A recent expose in the Salt Lake Tribune about adoption policies at Utah agencies, whether LDS agencies are not, shows that they are reflective of the kind of anti-single-mother/pro-adoption policy that Hayes says Romney trumpeted three decades ago.

BRAINWASHING BIRTH MOTHERS
It is one thing to have a leader of our country that is against a woman's right to choose to have an abortion or not; it is quite another to have a leader who is a member of an organization that so strongly urges single women to relinquish their children if they are unmarried. We have seen the "proud to be a birth mother" blogs run by Mormon women and frankly, we are appalled. Why would anyone be proud to give up a child to adoption? Yet this is the kind of brain-washing that LDS continues to perpetuate.

Church dogma is not that children must be adopted. However, church dogma unequivocally states that children are entitled to a two-parent family: "Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity," is included in THE FAMILY: A Proclamation to the World, which is dogma. Elsewhere, in numerous articles in the Mormon magazine, Ensign, and at Church meetings, the Church promotes adoption as the best choice for single pregnant women. The overall take-away is that keeping a child if you are a single mother is selfish, dooming a child, not only in this life but for all eternity.

We know from communication here that not all agency workers at LDS agencies are this earnest in their efforts to have all children born to single mothers adopted by others.

Yet.

One has to be a strong and brave woman to stand up against the pressures of the LDS strictures. LDS is not like Catholicism, where in America there are "cafeteria Catholics" who go to Mass on Sunday but use birth control on Saturday. To be a Mormon in good standing, the rules are strict, no exceptions. How many more mothers and children must be sacrificed in order to hoe to church dogma until the elders have a divine revelation and LDS policy changes?

In this day and age, after all that we have learned about the psychological harm to both mother and child in unnecessary adoptions, urging any mother who wants to keep her baby to give him up to strangers is cruel and unusual punishment.--lorraine
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For those interested in the story about Romney driving to Canada with the family Irish setter in a box on top of the car, details emerge. Yes, the dog pooped on the way, and the runny effluence could be seen inside the car. The family stopped, cleaned up the mess, and continued. The poor pooch stayed in his cage on top of the car. From VF: It was a preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management. But the story would trail him years later on the national political stage, where the name Seamus would become shorthand for Romney’s coldly clinical approach to problem solving. Poor dog, we say.

See also:
An LDS birth mother talks about her church, search and reunion, and the LDS position on such matters
Mormon Myths and Adoption Records
Unwed Fathers Can't Win Against the Mormons in Utah
Utah's laws designed to thwart birth fathers
Adoption and the Mormon Church
Adoption Reform and the LDS Church

From the LDS website: THE FAMILY: A Proclamation to the World

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

2012-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00

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.

There’s an equally popular variation of the best interests story which was told in the 1995 film Losing Isaiah: judge rules for mother but she returns the child, recognizing that his adoptive family is his family, selflessly putting the child’s interests before her own.

VIOLATING PARENTS' RIGHTS IN FAVOR OF ADOPTERS

These stories and countless others like them reinforce the very wrong idea that a child should stay “in the only home he has ever known” no matter that he got to the home through gross violation of his parents’ rights.

The truth is that children transferred from an adoptive home to their natural parents’ home can do just fine in spite of the opinions of mental health experts only too willing to weigh in for the adopters. Courts returned both Baby Richard and Baby Jessica to their rightful and natural parents at age four and two-and-a-half respectively. Although they became poster children for the failings of adoption laws to protect adopters, follow up stories showed that these children did fine. Baby Jessica, who was Anna Schmidt, says she has no memory of the Deboers, who fought the Carla and Dan Schmidts in the courts as long as they could before they turned over a screaming child in front of the TV cameras they made sure were there. A followup story by Diane Sawyer several years later showed a healthy, happy and well adjusted teenager.

Despite dire predictions that Danny Kirchner (Baby Richard), taken at age 4 from the "only parents he had ever known," would suffer irreparable emotional damage, he was "a well-rounded 7th grader," shown in pictures in a book published by the psychologist, Dr. Karen Moriarty, who counseled the biological parents, Daniela and Otto Kirchner. In both cases, the baby had been adopted with out the permission of the father. Moriarty, who published a book on the case and its aftermath in 2007, was considered to be "on the wrong side" by the public and the media, particularly Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, who wrote literally a hundred skewed Baby Richard columns.

Partly because of Greene's unrelenting campaign against the child being returned to his natural parents, Moriarty received hate mail and threats, required police surveillance at her home and office, fielded fallout from celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters and then First Lady Hilary Clinton, and eventually retired early and moved from Chicago, with her husband, to Florida, where she wrote Baby Richard--A Four-Year-Old Comes Home.

A more recent case was that of Benjamin Wyrembek, a father who fought for his child while the hysterical adopters, Christy and Jason Vaughn, mounted a Facebook and religious campaign to stir up public opinion against Wyrembek. As Lorraine wrote in 2010: Most of the of the media stories have been skewed towards the "only family he has ever known," the Vaughns. A columnist for the Huffington Post got into the fray with this kind of language:

"That child, now Grayson Thomas Vaughn to me and Grayson Bocvarov [Note: mother's last name] to others, is three years old and may be ripped from the only family he has ever known: Christy and Jason Vaughn -- his mom and dad. [Emphasis added.]

There has been no word yet how the boy is doing. We assume he is doing fine with his natural family, as did the two other children mentioned above. For us involved in adoption as first/birth mothers, this comes as no surprise because the similarity in personality, talents, and interests, more than made up for the lack of common experiences, especially when the child is returned to his natural family at a young age. The children received an added bonus, avoiding the fear of abandonment, identity confusion, and other issues reported by adoptees.

“Best interests of the child” stories like the Harry’s Law segment and Losing Isaiah help promote adoption, always popular in the land of make-believe, by presenting faddish views of what constitutes the "best interests" of children as superior to the time-honored fundamental bond between parents and children. These shows set the stage for laws like Utah’s and other “adoption-friendly” policies, which in effect grant a sort of squatter’s right to adopters.

WHY NOT JUST TAKE A CHILD WHEN THE PARENT LOOKS AWAY?
As Justice James Heiple of the Illinois Supreme Court wrote in the Baby Richard case:

"If ... the best interests of the child is to be the determining factor in child custody cases ... persons seeking babies to adopt might profitably frequent grocery stores and snatch babies from carts when the parent is looking the other way. Then, if custody proceedings can be delayed long enough, they can assert that they have a nicer home, a superior education, a better job or whatever, and that the best interests of the child are with the baby snatchers. Children of parents living in public housing or other conditions deemed less affluent and children of single parents might be considered particularly fair game."

This has already occurred in international adoption according to recent news reports about children taken illegally and sold on the American adoption market. Shows like the Harry’s Law segment allow adopters who realize that their child may have been stolen to feel comfortable in looking the other way and keeping the child.

___________________________________________

More on Baby Richard and Baby Jessica cases

Kidnapping and Corruption in Chinese Adoptions

Adoptive parents prefer head-in-sand to real questions and reality

Hollywood beget babies any way they can
Adoption by Gentle Care being sued by Wyrembek
Why the story of The Boy Now Called Grayson makes me crazy mad

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

2012-01-08T11:32:00.001-05:00

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.
In 1928 two teenage girls, one of them Minka Disbrow, were walking in the woods when three men jumped out and raped them. Disbrow was sixteen at the time, and didn't even know where babies came from yet
.
NOT BLAMING THE CHILD
Though the daughter she gave birth to was adopted, Minka Disbrow did not blame the child, or forget about her, or think of herself as anything but the girl's mother. For years she wrote letters to the agency though which her daughter had been adopted, and until the agency changed hands, received updates on her daughter's welfare. The girl's childhood was apparently a good one, and it wasn't until she was in her seventies when she developed heart problems that she began looking into her past, and wanted to find her true family. She petitioned the court in South Dakota, and eventually got a huge stack of papers that led to 94-year-old Minka Disbrow, mother of two other children. Dianna Huhn, 65, Disbrow's raised daughter who lives in Portland, Oregon told the Oregonian "'I have never seen my mother as happy.'"

Rape is an issue in adoption, and is often used as one of the bugaboo reasons that legislators insist there must be a "contact veto" in any legislation unsealing birth certificates, allowing women whose children were the product of a rape to continue to push this terrible secret down. But don't they see how that continues to punish the children for the sins of their elders? For the brutality of their fathers? Sitting before a legislator who has his mind made up against opening records, or who is on the fence about what to do, it is often hard to counteract their statements. What about the woman who was raped? I've been asked more than once when lobbying.

Brave women like Minka Disbrow are the example we need to tell them about. Not only did she not turn away from her child, she continued to keep her memory alive through the years. When Ruth Lee's family got the documents pertaining to her birth and adoption, the file contained 270 pages, including all the letters Minka Disbrow had written to the adoption agency. That's clearly proof of a mother who is more than a "birth mother."

WILL OTHER WOMEN LIKE MINKA STAND UP
Minka Disbrow is not the only one. Roberta MacDonald in Maine who led the fight there to unseal birth records gave up the child who was born after a rape. Artist and filmmaker Shelia Ganz is another. I know there are many more. We can only hope that the widespread dissemination of Minka Disbrows's story, and her life-affirming reunion with her daughter after more than three-quarters of a century, will encourage others who had a similar experience to emerge and not be ashamed. Silence hurts us all. Silence keeps original birth records sealed. Silence is our enemy. --lorraine
------------------------
Source: Minka Disbrow, at 94, Reunited With Biological Child 77 Years Later

Hollywood celebs beget babies any way they can

2012-01-05T00:10:00.000-05:00

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.

Kidman is also the mother of two children through adoption with former husband Tom Cruise. The list of Hollywood entertainers who adopted children stretches as far back as Hollywood and includes Bob Hope, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine, James Cagney, June Allyson, Perry Como, and of course, Ronald Regan and Jane Wyman. In recent times it includes Sandra Bullock, Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest, Sheryl Crow, Edie Falco, Mia Farrow, Calista Flockhart, Mariska Hargitay, Katherine Heigl, Hugh Jackman, Diane Keaton, Madonna, Rosie O'Donnell, Paula Poundstone, Marie Osmond, Michelle Pfeiffer, Denise Richards, Sharon Stone, and of course adoptive mother extraordinaire Angelia Jolie--to name a few.

ADOPTING A BABY AS AN IMAGE PICKER-UPPER

Kim Kardashian, mere etre?

It's unlikely the trend will slow. Even Kim Kardashian (she of the 72-day marriage) fame is considering adopting a Haitian child. According to anonymous sources quoted in In Touch "Kim sees it as the perfect way to heal her damaged reputation--and transform her into an earth mother, a la Angelina Jolie. 'She's telling friends she wants to adopt because of the awful living conditions she saw in Haiti,' sighs a pal. 'But it's pretty obvious she's only doing it to revive her image.'" On the other hand, Hollywood Trends Examiner, an online tabloid, excoriated Tina Fey for having a baby au natural. It was her second that way, the nerve of her!

While I don't doubt that some of these celebrity parents are motivated by love for children, these high-tech births and adoptions smack of publicity-seeking, priviledge, and raw power. With enough money, anyone can be a parent. While it used to be the rich got richer and the poor had babies, now it seems that the rich get richer and have the babies of the poor.

Surely these people must realize that mothers don't give up babies simply to be spared the burden of raising them, but do so because of the lack of resources to care for them. And while surely some women donate eggs to their relatives, most do it for the money, just as women in places like India carry fetuses to term to have enough money to buy a house.

Do these adoptive parents or parents through surrogacy think about the women who lose in these transactions? The mothers who grieve over the loss of their children. The women who risk their health to produce eggs or carry babies. Do these wealthy unnatural parents consider helping mothers keep their babies? Are they aware of how the adoption industry--abetted by conservative religious authorities-- manipulate vulnerable mothers into surrendering? Have they read about fathers denied the right to raise their children by harsh and unfair laws? Do they realize college coeds are lulled into thinking that their eggs are nothing but tissue to be sold for profit?

Do they think about the lives these children acquired from the bodies of others will lead? Because of their parents' demanding schedules, most of these children will be raised by nannies and many sent to boarding schools. Because of sealed records, the children, particularly those born with donated eggs or sperm, may never know their biological origins. By the time they graduate from, high school, some may well be orphans. When Robert De Niro's new daughter is in the fifth grade, he was be 78. By the time she graduates from high school, he will be 85 or 86 and possibly in a walker, if he is still alive. Yes, this daughter of his will probably have enough money to live well, but there is so much more to a fulfilled life than money.

What are these people who create babies this way thinking? How selfish are they? While capitalists and conservatives scream for fewer regulations, we believe that this manufacture of children should be tightly regulated and that it should be illegal to do it for money, as is the case in some countries. Removing the exchanging of shekels for a baby would immediately curtail their production.

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF BABIES TO ORDER
By acquiring children through adoption and creating them through artificial means, these wealthy celebrity parents are normalizing the experience, and thus encouraging others to do likewise. It is not enough simply to want a child; the moral decision would be to care for motherless and fatherless children already here. If they truly wanted to do the right thing, they would take children out of foster care who do need permanent parents and homes. In the process of furthering this new and disturbing trend of manufacturing babies to order, they likewise further the exploitation of vulnerable women, and create children who are not grounded to their history and the history of the world. It is indeed a brave new world these individuals must one day face.
________________________________________
See also:
Action is the Sincerest form of thanks
What's wrong with fertile women adopting?
What We Think About Adoption
Egg Donors or Egg Sellers?

Why First Mother Forum is moderating comments. Again.

2012-01-04T10:27:00.000-05:00

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.

Fellow blogger Jane and I went over the comments together, and those comments that, even only in part, attempted to analyze my granddaughter, her motivations, or brought in her adoptive parents, were removed. In the process some good parts of comments are gone because of a small mention of something in them. However, blogger does not allow for editing at all, as on a newspaper. Some of the comments removed were by regular readers, or occasional commenters (adoptees) whose voices I respect and whose input I value. I am sorry. I know writing a comment takes time and thought. I do ask for your understanding and forbearance on this matter.

SILENCE HURTS US ALL
It is worth noting that it is precisely this kind of self-editing that prevents our story from getting out and thus changing more hearts and minds about adoption issues, including changing the laws that seal original birth records, and discouraging people from thinking that adoption is the answer for their fertility issues. Birth/first mothers don't want to hurt their families' feelings, and that includes their children, adopted out or kept; any siblings of the adoptee; parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, you name it.

Being gay and coming out of the closet certainly is fraught for a lot of people, but telling our story--whether first mother or adoptee--truthfully has the potential of not just shocking others, but offending them, and so silence becomes all the more pervasive. Writing a book and putting down true feelings is also a endeavor treading on dangerous water; so is writing a blog. One woman was asked to be the center of a TV movie but declined because it would probably offend her adoptive parents; another says she doesn't have a personal blog even though she is a very good writer because of hurting her family, if she tells the truth. Steve Jobs gave his biographer Walter Isaascon full control and apparently did not read the manuscript; one can speculate that Jobs did so in an effort to be completely truthful but then, not be responsible for what was said about both his natural and adoptive families, as well as the daughter he originally denied he had fathered.

Because of the criticisms leveled here, there has been more than one time when I considered shutting down First Mother Forum--wouldn't I be healthier if I did? But the criticism and potential for hurting others is precisely why and how birth mothers and adoptees have been muzzled for so long. Speak up and god knows, someone will slap you down. Publishing my memoir, Birthmark, way back in 1979 was no picnic. Someone needs to tell our stories, and Jane and I will continue to do our part--and it is a part because now there are others willing to stand up--until the records are open in all 50 states or we just plumb get too tired.

IT'S NOT ABOUT AGREEING OR DISAGREEING
An ANONYMOUS then wrote a nasty comment and accused of us of being "shallow" for taking down comments, stating that I took down the ones that disagreed with me. They had nothing to do with "agreeing" or "disagreeing. (A charge that we have heard before from someone named Kippa aka Anonymous who comes here it seems only to tell me how wicked I am). IN FACT, PEOPLE WERE NOT REALLY "DISAGREEING," THEY WERE SIMPLY ASSUMING TO ANALYZE HOW MY GRANDDAUGHTER FELT, AND WERE NOT ABOUT MY BEHAVIOR, or telling me what to do when I had made it plain what I was going to do: go away. Do nothing. Make no contact. Comments that incited bickering among the commenters were also removed, or that misunderstood but required clarification were also removed.

Of course I understood what happened with my granddaughter and our relationship. Full retreat seems to be as common as not. I repeat, after receiving her email requesting no contact I was not going to contact her, and no where in the blog post do I suggest otherwise. I said I was glad to have this actually clarified. I have lived through this kind of retreat many times over the course of the 26 years I had with her mother, my daughter, and read about it not only in numerous adoptee memoirs, starting with Betty Jean Lifton's Twice Born and Lost and Found, but also at many blogs, as well as talked to numerous adoptees over the many years I have been involved in adoption reform. We first/birth mothers might not like it, but if we have done any reading on the issue at all, we get it.

WHY WE USE BIRTH MOTHER
To the person who criticizes us for using birth mother: Unfortunately that is the term that the greatest number of people who looking for us will use when they search for related information on the web. Many natural mothers, adoptees and adoptive parents have never heard the term "first mother," and "natural mother" freaks out a lot of adoptive parents. Until there is a major language shift we will use birth mother, along with the other terms. We hope we are moving along this discussion and usage to a term less pejorative than birth mother. (See 'Positive' Adoption Language? one of our permanent pages.)

I hope that most of you will understand why we did this. We wish we did not have to use comment moderation. It is more demanding for us as we feel a responsibility to be timely, but it appears necessary any time Jane or I write from a personal perspective. We do get the occasional spam from someone who wishes to direct our readers to another site, such as a fertility center or even a porn site, but those can be taken down, and are. Moderation does inhibit quick discussion, and if we feel certain posts are not likely to be cause dissension or attack, we may let comments be published without moderation. It will be on a post by post basis. Jane and I are only two people and do have other lives.

On another note, would the person who lives in or near Edison, NJ email me at forumfirstmother@gmail.com. I would love to hear from you. Thank you. --lorraine
---------------------------------------------
Jane will be back with another post later today or tomorrow.

Dealing with an adoptee's 'no contact' request

2012-01-01T20:33:00.001-05:00

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?

But then I've also heard adoptees who say they dreaded when their birthdays were coming because they might get such a card in the mail, and it made them feel as if they were being stalked. One birth mother sent me her daughter's letter saying just that. Ouch. If there ever was a Catch 22, this is it.

For this, there are no hard and fast rules as to what is best. Each of us must do what lies in our hearts, and hope that our action-- an email, a birthday or holiday greeting--is received warmly. But no one can read the heart of the other. Since my 26-year-relationship with my daughter involved periods of silence that lasted more than a year at times, I sometimes broke the ice and made a phone call, but more often then not she was the one who called and we were back in the business of mother and daughter. I have a vivid memory of one birthday of my daughter Jane when I knew--I just knew--that she did not want me to call, and Linda, a birth mother friend, called me when I was in the depths of despair. It was the spring of Jane's last year on earth. It was so comforting to talk to Linda, and simply have be with me on the phone while I wept. My husband has been great about everything connected with Jane, and then my granddaughter whom Jane relinquished to adoption, but there are times another birth mother is better than anyone.

WHEN 'NO CONTACT' IS WANTED
Emotionally, it was exhausting when Jane retreated and I wondered what to do. Maryanne, who wrote about her own off/on relationship with her surrendered oldest son in the comments to the last blog, seems to have managed it as well as anyone could. My own relationship with my granddaughter, after what seemed like such a positive beginning two years ago, took a turn into "no contact wanted" in the fall. Many of you know about her as--with her permission--I had written extensively about our meeting and burgeoning relationship. We went from frequent emails and phone calls, before and after a week-long visit here after I sent her a plane ticket, to her slowly drifting off a year later. I had opened my heart and home, and so did my husband. I was planning what family heirlooms I would one day give her. When she didn't answer an email, when the last phone call had been somewhat strained, I emailed and asked again, in one sentence, what was up. No response. I asked again in a note that was barely more than a ? I felt like a jilted lover who had not been told the relationship was off. Only the week before I had sent her a scarf in colors I thought would look great on her. Now I felt like a fool.

An email finally came, telling me she was happy now, that the last two years had been emotionally roiling, and now she wanted "no contact" for an indefinite time being. In fact, she said she was annoyed that I had emailed her after she had not responded to other emails. Her email was actually a relief to receive, because I needed more clarity and closure than her just slip sliding away.

But of course I was sad. However, there were other things in her email (that I am not going into) that made me somewhat angry, and instead of "no contact" I wrote her back and calmly but firmly answered her charges, adding that I would always be open to a relationship and signed off Love because that is still how I feel.

NO LONGER PLAYING THE VICTIM
Responding like that felt better than just lying down and taking more punishment for having given up her mother. I had not given my granddaughter up, and tried unsuccessfully to talk my daughter into letting her father and his mother raise her. But like the women who flee to Utah, that adoption-friendly state, to relinquish their children when the birth fathers object, my daughter Jane could not be persuaded otherwise. And in 1986, in the state of Wisconsin, the system did not side with the father. However, that was a long time ago. Now I was dealing with the reality of a grown-up women. I don't know what caused the change in attitude; it began right after she met her father. I heard it in her voice, read it in her emails.

Jane's pregnancy occurred during one of our breaks and we had not been in contact during her pregnancy. It is likely that she told the father of her baby terrible things about me; I don't know. I called her on her birthday, however, and learned then that she had given birth two days earlier, and we resumed a fast relationship, on the phone a couple of times a day for a while. She and Lisa's father were no longer together, and she would have never told him I was in favor of his keeping Lisa. She said things about him that I could not verify, but doubted, knowing they would make me think he was unfit. Jane visited in a couple of months after the birth, and was still incredibly raw.

I have punished myself a great deal for having given up her mother for adoption, even though it happened when I felt I had no choice. But in the way it feels, that doesn't seem to salve much of the emotional anguish, no matter what we tell ourselves. But not answering my granddaughter's charges would have felt like standing there and let her continue the emotional whipping. Some part of me said, Been there, done that. Enough. If you want a relationship, I'm not playing the victim, always apologizing for some imaginary line I've crossed--even if the problem was as you say that I contacted you first. Yes, I did, and you came, you saw, you took. All that is within your right as a member of my family, my granddaughter. But now if you want a relationship, it has to be on another footing than me merely being apologetic and afraid.

PRETENDING I WASN'T SAD WASN'T HEALTHY
The holidays were harder this year than last because of this. I admit I talked myself into thinking I did not feel as bad as I really did--she wasn't my daughter, I didn't give her up, right? Instead of crying, I had a sinus infection much of the fall, and it came back the week before Christmas. We cancelled our usual Christmas Eve trip to New Jersey to spend a boisterous evening with my husband's many nieces and nephews, and their kids. Acupuncture released the sadness a few days before Christmas, and I spent a day-and-a-half weeping on and off, realizing this was a lot healthier than holding it in like a hard ball in my heart, my head, my gut. I thought I had everything under control when a relatively new friend (who knows my story) approached me in the supermarket, and the tears just flew out again. After the tears ended, I was able to have quite a good holiday with friends who live nearby, some of whom know my story, most of with whom I never talk about this issue. Christmas Eve--a very big deal for me with my Polish family background--was at the home of the friend I ran into at the supermarket, and it was a good evening--not a single word about adoption.

I have no idea if I will ever hear from my granddaughter again. At our age, one does think about dying; I also have no idea if I would want my husband to let her know if I were sick, or dying, or if he or my family would. That's "contact." That requires her to make a decision. Maybe, now, I don't want to know how she would react.

Reflecting on this I am amused that in the "positive adoption language" that is social-worker/adoptive parent speakese, it is "preferred" to change the tense of being adopted. Preferred lingo is "He was adopted," not "He is adopted," as if adoption was a one-time act that did not color the rest of one's life, whether you are mother or child.

A cosmic Ha! to that.--lorraine
------------------------------
* The language is weird, I know, but I write this for people who may not be familiar with life's continuing saga played out here at First Mother Forum, and adopted out does make its meaning clear; I picked it up from an adoptee blog.

More: Meeting my "Adopted" granddaughter
Conversations with my daughter, Part 4
Forty-five years later, I still regret giving up my daughter.
'Positive' Adoption Language

The Year 2011 in Adoption: some good news, some setbacks

2011-12-30T18:19:00.002-05:00

Jane and Lorraine, 1983

Some gains, some frustrations...that's the year in adoption news.

Adoption was in the news this year starting in January with Oprah's revelation that she had a sister who had been adopted. This being about Oprah, her sister's lengthy search was documented everywhere, providing a spotlight on the fact that individuals who are adopted are still denied free access to their original birth records in the vast majority of states, though many have half-way measures in place.

The best news of the year was the Rhode Island--the smallest state in the Union--passed a bill that will allow anyone 25 and over full access to their original birth records come July 2012. The age of 25 was a compromise after Senate Majority Whip Maryellen Goodwin, a Democrat from Providence, wanted to raise the age to 30 so adoptees wouldn't ask for their birth certificates out of spite. Goodwin's sister has two adopted children. “I think 18 is too young,” said Goodwin. “It’s a tender age. I want them to be able to find their records in an appropriate and meaningful kind of way, not because they want to get back at their adoptive parents.” [Emphasis added.] As if that is what wanting to know your true heritage is about that.

In Illinois, people adopted in that state who were 21 or older could begin getting their original birth certificates as of November 15. Birth parents had a grace period of one-year to file contact vetoes. Only their information would be redacted, but not that of the other parent if listed. As of mid-December, more than 4,000 people have requested their original unamended birth certificates. Only 431 parents have requested anonymity. A breakdown of the sex of the parent was no available, but it anyone has that data, please leave a comment.

Lorraine

We continue to be conflicted by this kind of legislation for it allows birth parents to hold their children hostage to their personal preference, when all individuals should be allowed to know the truth of their origins. It is as if Lincoln passed a law freeing the slaves--unless the slave owners objected. On the other hand, this does allow the great majority of people to obtain their original birth certificates.

But here on the East Coast, where so much hope was invested in the bill that finally passed the New Jersey legislature--an imperfect piece of legislation such as the one in Illinois--the Republican governor Chris Christie refused to sign it into law. After dangling the hope that he might sign as he kept saying that he was undecided, he smacked us all down with a lengthy response proposing a bill more restrictive as it included a permanent veto for birth parents! So decades of work seemed to go down the drain in one fell swoop--if only it had taken the extremely rotund Christie with it. (Instead, he is campaigning for Mitt Romney in Iowa--the two of them together would be so against equal rights for adoptees I can't think about it.) The New Jersey Coalition for Adoption Reform plans to go back to the legislature with a clean bill. No veto. Adoption reform was an issue in several other states, but none managed to get very far. In New York, for a time it looked like we might get a bill out of committee to the floor for a vote but just as that seemed possible, a veto was added to our bill, and Unsealed Initiative withdrew support. (If you can bring us up to date as to what happened in your state, please add a comment. )

Most Famous Adoptee Steve Jobs died October 5 at 56, and we covered the news of his reunion with his sister, Mona Simpson and his birth/first mother, Joanne Schieble Simpson, and his father, Abdul Fattah Jandali, racking up some of the highest traffic we had at First Mother Forum all year.

With stricter requirements for prospective parents and tighter laws to crack down on illegal practices, international adoptions to the U.S. have fallen over 20 percent in the past five years, with some countries (namely Russia) declining by nearly half.

Perhaps signalling a trend, Adoption Alliance, a non-profit agency in Denver which finds families for some of the most difficult-to-place children, is closing, a victim of the economy that has led to fewer families seeking to adopt, and donations down.

Jane

Here at First Mother Forum, we had a few squabbles that broke out in the comments, but after things calmed down we switched to a policy of not monitoring comments before publication for recent blogs, and so far, no fire fights. We will stay this way as long as possible, but always retain the right to take down any offensive comments, and return to monitoring if necessary.

On a personal level, my (adopted-out) granddaughter Lisa, after a great relationship of a year and a half that gave me joy and comfort, chose to retreat. So be it. Jane and her first daughter, after some bumpy times, opened up more communication between them than they had for several years. The good news.

Jane and I wish you a great New Year, and our hopes for good resolutions to issues unresolved and reunions not completed. We thank you for your many comments and look forward to another year of writing about adoption news, reforms, and our personal experiences. Thank you for making our experience so much richer. --lorraine

----------------------------

Source:
First Mother Forum in USA Today and The Adoption Option Revisited
International Adoptions in Decline
American Adoption Congress Legislation page
Meeting my "Adopted" granddaughter

Utah's laws designed to thwart birth fathers

2011-12-27T17:29:00.000-05:00

Lorraine

The Salt Lake Tribune is continuing their revealing series on how natural/ birth fathers are regularly screwed by the system in Utah. Today's installment by Brooke Adams tells the story of Jake Strickland and how he lost his son through outright violation of the law in Colorado, and despite that, the law in Utah to designed only to serve the adoptive process. The Tribune did not name the agency involved but thanks to one of our readers, First Mother Forum learned it was LDS Family Services, the adoption arm of the Mormon Church.

Strickland's story involves a lying women--the mother of his son--who strung him along, letting him and his family believe that she was going to allow him to raise their son, or that they would do so together. In many respects, he did everything right: support her, pay for her medical bills, and continue to check up on her as the pregnancy progressed. A few days before they baby was born, the couple strolled through Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

BIRTH MOTHER LIES, BIRTH FATHER LOSES SON
What Strickland did not know was that his former girl friend, Whitney Petersson, was not divorced as she told him she was, and so--unless he filed a paternity suit before the birth--he would have no say as to what happened to the child. Legally, the child would be the issue of her husband. Petersson lied to Strickland not only about not being divorced, but she also kept up a charade that she was going along with his plan to raise the child. While Strickland was expecting the child to be born by Cesarean on Jan. 5, she had already given birth on Dec. 29 and placed the baby with an adoptive couple a day later. Her legal husband signed away his claim to the child, but later felt guilty about it and sent all the documents to Strickland. Under Utah law, the birth father in cases like this has no recourse. However, 3rd District Court Judge Terry Christiansen did at least find the deception "troubling." According to the Tribune:

"Assuming the text messages are accurate, there is a deliberate attempt by Ms. Pettersson to deceive Mr. Strickland as it relates to the birth of this child," the judge said. "There were obvious fraud and misrepresentations occurring."

But, after noting Utah’s strict requirements, the judge said, "No matter what I do, I’m either sanctioning a fraud toward Mr. Strickland or I’m depriving adoptive parents of a child I’m sure they’ve grown to love and appreciate." [Emphasis added]

Despite Strickland's best efforts to gain custody of his son, he and his mother were informed on this Thanksgiving Day that the adoption had been completed. He is devastated.

FRAUD IS NO PROTECTION FROM PRO-ADOPTION POLICY
Yesterday we quoted attorney David M. McConkie who defended Utah's unforgiving policy towards single fathers. He went further in today's Tribune installment, explaining that Utah’s law puts the onus squarely on fathers to figure out how to protect their own rights. It is hard to determine what else Strickland could have done except hold Petersson hostage until she was ready to give birth, for under Utah law fraud on the mother’s part--as clearly in this case--does not excuse a father’s failure to protect himself, said McConkie. He helped draft the law that is so flagrantly biased against birth fathers. From the Tribune:

"Don’t expect the mother to be the one that’s looking after your interests, to protect your interests, because you’ve got to know that mother may not have the same interests that you do," said McConkie, who formerly worked with Petersson's attorney David J. Hardy, but now is a manager at LDS Family Services. "You don’t have a legal relationship here. You proceed at your risk."

To judge from quotes at the Salt Lake site, the risk of not being able to raise your own child is assumed when you have sex outside of marriage. There is so much here that is wrong. We discussed the corrupt legal system yesterday, but today I want to talk about the mental state of the adopters in these cases. What in the hell do they think they are doing? They are no better than common criminals who kidnap children on the street or from hospital nurseries, only they have the patina of justice on their side.

But in the canon of true justice, they are baby thieves without hearts and no matter how they raise these children, their parentage is morally reprehensible and worthy of jail time.--lorraine

-----------------------

Source: Would-be Utah dad says misplaced trust cost him his son

Yesterday's blog: Unwed Fathers Can't Win Against the Mormons in Utah

John Wyatt [see above blog] has filed with the U. S. Supreme Court. It is not a given that the conservative justices will rule in favor of Utah. Often conservatives understand the right of an individual to be raised by the person whose DNA he or she carries.

For more about Jake Strickland's fight for his son, see Get Baby Jack Back.

Unwed Fathers Can't Win Against the Mormons in Utah

2011-12-26T20:37:00.000-05:00

Lorraine

What is Utah doing in the United States? The Constitution protects us from religious states, no? Not in Utah, apparently.

Its laws in one area seem to be outside those of human decency, and certainly unconstitutional. And it has to do with the Mormon Church, which really controls the electorate, which controls the legislature, the courts, the everything. This is Utah today. Separation of church and state is pro forma, but does not really exist. It is a state like no other where separation of church and state exists on paper only, because the Church of the Latter-Day Saints of Jesus Christ really runs just about everything, and should not be tax exempt.

In yet another case, a single father from another state (Florida) is fighting to gain custody of his nearly year-old daughter whose former girl friend left her newborn with strangers in that unholy state, reports the Salt Lake Tribune, in the first of a four-part series by Brooke Adams. Of course, in Utah, that was perfectly legal, even though the father of the child was doing everything possible to protect his paternal rights. In Utah, that matters not.

IN UTAH, IT'S GRAB (the child) and GO (to the adopters)
According to the Tribune story, the daughter of Ramsey Shaud, 22, and Shasta Tew has been with her adoptive caretakers since she was a few days old. Even even though Shuad did everything by the book, the state is still conspiring to steal this child from her father. Shaud's case was heard by the Utah Supreme Court in September and it is likely to be several more months before a decision comes down. Then the argument is likely to be that it is in the "best interests" of the child to not remove her from "the only family she has ever known."

If the past is any guide, it is unlikely that Shaud will ever gain custody of his daughter. Because this is Utah.

When 22 -year-old Shaud learned that a girl friend was pregnant, he let Shasta Tew, 19, know that he wanted to raise the child with the help of his family. But since she balked at the idea, and said she wanted to have the child adopted by strangers, he soon filed with the Father's Registry in Florida, their home state, and sent in the $20 filing fee. Five months letter, he got a terse note from Tew's mother that she was taking a three-day holiday trip to Arizona and Utah.

He immediately went on line and found the form for the father's registry in Arizona, printed it out, filled it in and sent it in. But Utah was more troubling. Despite spending hours on line trying to find the form, it was nowhere to be found. The clear intent is to make it nearly impossible for fathers to comply with the convoluted law within the time frame, as lawyers who helped draft the legislation have stated. After Shaud failed to turn up helpful information on the Utah website, Shaud searched the Internet for "how to prevent adoption in Utah" and discovered a website created by Cody O’Dea of Wyoming, detailing his own and numerous other fathers’ unsuccessful fights to stop or undo adoptions in Utah. Shaud then hired an attorney, hoping to undue the adoption of his daughter who was born on January 15, 2010.

Mothers from any state may sign their children away irrevocably 24 hours after birth. A single father who hopes to raise his child--before the mother signs the surrender paper in Utah--must:

File a paternity action in a Utah court stating he is “willing and able” to have full custody and will pay child support, pregnancy-related and childbirth expenses. It also must detail a plan for the child’s care, including specifically how he will Nomake his money to pay for the child's expenses, and who will care for the the child while he is at work. One father was denied his petition to gain custody of his own child because he left this detail off the filing.

File a “notice of commencement of paternity proceeding” with the Office of Vital Statistics.

Prove he paid for a reasonable share of the mother’s pregnancy-related and childbirth expenses, unless he is able to show he did not know about the pregnancy or was not allowed to pay expenses.

Not only must he does, he'd better to damn quick: An unmarried father residing in Utah who wants to protect his parental rights must comply with all this before the mother relinquishes (which is likely to happen at the hospital) or if the birth occurs on a weekend or holiday, within one business day. In other words, if the mother sneaks in from another state, the father is at a great legal disadvantage.

Wyatt and Baby Emma--ABC News

We have written about other cases here before. John Wyatt, whose daughter Emma will be three in February is still hoping to get custody of his his daughter. "The birth of the child and the whole plan for adoption was hidden from John — in fact, he was misdirected as to what was going on," said Stan Phillips, an adoption attorney in Tyson’s Corner, Va., and co-counsel on the writ filed by the Washington, D.C.-based firm Crowell and Moring. "In Utah, birth fathers must come up with every possible argument before you even know what is going on in the case, and that is just unconstitutional."

Wyatt also has filed a federal lawsuit against Act of Love, the adoption agency; Larry Jenkins, the agency’s attorney; and the adoptive parents, alleging a vast conspiracy exists in Utah to take children from unwed biological fathers.

JUSTICE FOR FATHERS IN UTAH IS A JOKE. very funny.
Justice for unmarried fathers in Utah today is reminiscent of segregation laws in the South before the Civil Rights Act of the Sixties. In Utah, single fathers from any state can and do lose the right to raise their own children because the Draconian attitude of the Mormon church, all legally implemented by the state laws, makes it nearly impossible for them to gain custody. What shouldn't even be an issue once paternity is proven is Utah's very dirty little secret. Fathers are routinely stripped of their rights as fathers and the children given to good Mormon couples to raise without any concern for the father, or the child. Fathers typically lose because they don’t meet Utah's absurd deadlines, as happened in Shaud’s case. A lower court judge ruled his consent to his daughter’s adoption was not required because he didn’t meet a filing deadline — a delay Shaud argues was caused by Utah’s four-day workweek and a federal holiday.

In 1986, the Utah Supreme Court did find for a father, Rudy Aguilar of California, and ordered the child returned. Judge Daniel Stewart, in a sharply worded dissent, wrote that if "fairness were a guideline, it would destroy the system and hold children and adoptive parents hostage of their fathers." That pretty much sums of the LDS opinion toward fairness. Raising a child in a two-parent Mormon household trumps fairness anytime. In March 1986, the Utah Supreme Court reversed their decision (after obviously being told by LDS elders what the"right" decision was, finding the mother had deliberately withheld information from Aguilar, violating his due process rights.

But Aguilar was financially unable to continue the legal fight when it was sent back to a lower court. He gave up and has since died. That child is now 25; it would be interesting to know how how he felt when he found out how the state and the LDS agency, acting in obvious consort, thwarted his being raised by his own people. Me, I'd be hopping mad.

KEEPING THE CHILD FROM THE LOVE OF A FATHER
In 2008, Nikolas Thurnwald lost his case because he didn’t get an amended court document notarized or explain who would tend the child while he was at work. That same year, a father identified in court documents only as "C.C.D" declared he would assume full financial responsibility for the child but lost because he did not get a court order of child support or detail what would happen to the child if he were deported.

These are only a sampling of the injustice done to fathers because the Church of Jesus-Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, is so rapidly against any child being raised in a single-parent home, unless death has intervened. This is not in keeping with the laws of the rest of the country. In terms of fathers rights, the Mormon and the state of Utah are so far afield they defy laws the rest of the country--and the world--abide by.

Yet talk to David McConkie, the manager of children’s services at LDS Family Services, and he will tell you that Utah’s law is aimed at balancing the interests of all parties — the state, the mother, the biological father, the infant, the adoptive parents. LDS arranges adoptions through its 62 offices in the U.S. and abroad and is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "There’s going to be cases where it doesn’t work very well, but you can’t craft a law around a specific case," said McConkie [in an interview with the Tribune]. "You’ve got to craft a law that meets society’s interests and the parties’ interests more generally."

As long as the child ends up in an LDS household. Last summer when we wrote about LDS and adoption, we received an anonymous comment that stated:

"In 2009 the LDS Family Services office in Dallas, TX were informed of approx. 280 pregnant unwed mothers in the neighboring Mormon congregations. Only 11 placed their babies for adoption."

You know what's funny about that? Even assuming that all these women remained single when their babies were born, those numbers which the LDS office was trumpeting is approximately four times the national average of women in the U.S. who relinquish their children to adoption, which is fewer than one percent.

Most of you must know that one of the presidential candidates with rich friends is Mormon Mitt Romney, who did his two-year missionary work in France during the Vietnam war and once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the top of the car.--lorraine
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Sources: Stopping an adoption: In Utah, unwed fathers rarely win
Utah adoption law: model for nation or unjust burden?

See also
Utah rules against natural father. Again. And again.
Adoption Reform and the LDS ...
Utah to Birth Fathers: Go Back to the Grave!

Does my (birth) mother think of me on Christmas?

2011-12-22T14:59:00.001-05:00

My tabletop tree

Christmas, not April, is the cruelest time for many of us. All the gaiety, the awareness that families gather round together sharpen the reminder of who is missing: if you are a birth/first mother who has not been reunited, you are ever so aware of the presents you are not buying, the card not being sent, the phone call not made to the missing child. You wonder if he/she ever thinks of you at this time of the year. Question not. He is. My daughter said that she used to look at the moon on cold and clear winter nights, and think that somewhere I was under that same moon, wondering if I was thinking about her. I'll never know if our thoughts collided in space, but I like to think that they did.

GIVE YOURSELF THE GIFT OF GIVING UP THE SECRET
Christmas music seems designed to pierce through whatever shell we first mothers have surrounded ourselves with and reach down to our core to remind us: She is gone, she is six or sixteen or thirty-six, who is she today?--oh my god, that girl/teenager/young mother looks like me, could she be her? So many reminders accost us daily: shopping at the mall and seeing people who are the age of your child, or catching a glimpse of a mother and daughter--you note how much they look and act alike, you can not help it--out together for the day, seeing something you wish you could give your daughter, if only you knew where she was. I used to barely be able to get through Christmas Mass without weeping, even when I had that huge lump in my throat. The high notes of The First Noel and Silent Night cut right to the heart of my heart.

Until I told my family about my daughter I know my mother always wondered what was up. Life was so much easier when I didn't have this awful secret to hide. I hope some of you who have kept this secret will unburden yourself in the coming year, and find a way to greater acceptance of yourself. Shame breeds this secret. It is long past the time to let this shame rule our lives.

Lorraine

For those who have been reunited with their lost children, but have gone aground in the reefs past reunion, there is really nothing you can do but try to accept what is with equanimity. If you have done your part, and are rejected, find comfort in knowing that you did what you could, but the other party is not able to accept you. As I said earlier, if you feel like reaching out, do so. Make the call, send the letter, write an email, send a jar of jam. Don't promise more than you are sure you can deliver. Not only will reaching out make the other person relieved that you remembered her, you too will feel good for having done it. Shakespeare said it well:

"The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

Our path--whether first mother or adoptee--is not easy. Adoption is not a one-time act, but a lifetime reality. For all of us, it is a much more harmful deed that we could ever imagine, both in what it does to us birth mothers, and what it does the children we had hoped we were doing "the right thing" for.

ASK NOT WHY, BUT WHY NOT?
I am not a religious person, but it is so easy to ask, Why Me? Or Why Me, Lord? Why not you? is fate's chortling reply. But I do know we were not meant to have our hell on earth to provide someone else's joy, to complete someone else's family, yet it does seem that that is the good--someone else's gain--that often springs from the sorrow and grief of losing our children. Instead of simply feeling resentful, I now try to accept this. But I still will try to point out my feelings about this whenever possible. Not speaking up when we can keeps records sealed, makes other see adoption only as a feel-good solution for others, and keeps more of us first mothers deep in the closet.

My daughter and me, 1983

I will go to Mass on Christmas morning and ruminate about my daughter, who died four years ago. In my own way, I pray simply by thinking about her and focusing on the good things about her, the joys we were able to share, the good times we had. I loved shopping with her and buying her clothes; we laughed at the same jokes; we both loved the sea. I am proud of the work she did for the epilepsy foundation, and how she was beginning to find her voice as a writer herself, after overcoming tremendous odds.

I will be glad for my husband, my friends both far and near, my dear and serendipitous relationship with the daughter of my first love. I will, I am sure, be once again overcome with emotion when the chorus sings Silent Night. And then, I will share Christmas with family and friends and good food and fellowship. And I will know that no matter how much I miss her at this time of year, Christmas is only a season, Christmas is only a day.

In a few days Christmas will be over, and life will go on. It can't help itself.--lorraine
---------------------
An earlier version of this was published in 2009
See also:
Calling loved ones (and those you are not so sure of) for the holidays
A First Mother remembers: My Adopted Daughter's first Christmas gifts
Letters Lead to an Alternative Universe Daughter

Forty-five years later, I still regret giving up my daughter.

2011-12-19T17:45:00.001-05:00

Jane

Forty-five years ago today, December 19, 1966, I signed the papers giving up my month old daughter Rebecca. It was dark that Monday afternoon when I left the social worker’s office, the lights of nearby businesses and the street lights obscured by the ubiquitous San Francisco mist. Although the streets were crowded with holiday shoppers, I felt an overwhelming sense of emptiness. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. I knew, though, that my life would go on in some fashion. I wanted to know what that was, to leap forward in time, to the place where my life would resume and the pain would stop. I wanted to know how I would look back on this day.

Rebecca was born November 17, 1966, a week before Thanksgiving. While in the hospital, I gave permission for her to go into foster care but could not sign the papers which would separate us forever. The following Monday, November 21, the social worker told me I needed to make a decision soon about keeping Rebecca. The longer I waited, the lesser her chances at being placed in a good home. The social worker told me of a couple who would be perfect for her, but the couple wanted a child under a month old.

'IF YOU LOVED YOUR CHILD, YOU'D GIVE HER UP'
I spent Thanksgiving week in my rented room in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The Monday after Thanksgiving I registered with a temporary job agency and spent the next few weeks working at menial clerical jobs, trying to take my mind off the baby. In the evenings, I argued with myself, one voice parroting social worker maxims that I had heard on countless soap operas and read in true romance magazines: “Your baby needs a mother (pause) and a father. If you loved your child, you’d give her up. You’ll forget and get on with your life.” Another voice shouted back, “Do not go gently. Rage, rage at this unnatural act.” Then the questions. “How can I care for her? How can I face my family?” If I can't manage my own life (the baby was proof of that), then I couldn't raise a child. I had cheated by having a baby while unmarried and didn't deserve such a beautiful child. I even questioned why I was struggling. Mothers give up their babies all time,” I thought. What was wrong with me that this is so hard?” I stared at the wall, my questions unanswered. I wrote to the baby's father, begging for help but got no answer.

On Friday, December 16, my 30 day reprieve (as I thought of it) was up. I left work early and called the social worker from a neighbor’s phone. I’ll sign the papers,” I told her. “I’m worried that the baby [I couldn’t bring myself to say ‘my daughter’] won’t get any Christmas presents.” I agreed to come to her office on Monday, December 19. After I arrived, an assistant who was a notary brought in the documents and stood next to the social worker as I signed them without reading them. The assistant notarized them, picked them up, and walked out of the office. My muscles tensed; I wanted to spring up and stop her. I followed her with my eyes and said nothing.

As I got up to leave, the social worker asked. "How do you feel?" "Terrible," I answered. "You're making plans for your baby," she said soothingly. "No, I'm not; you are," I retorted, an small act of defiance giving full expression to my sense of powerlessness as I walked out the door into the mist.

As 1966 merged into 1967, I thought of Rebecca constantly. I tried to comfort myself thinking of the joy my daughter brought to the perfect couple who I imagined was childless. A child, a blessing, just in time for Christmas. I pictured them taking photos of her propped up under the Christmas tree, wrapped in a soft pink blanket or perhaps a big stocking .

Thirty-one years later, when Rebecca and I reunited, I learned that she had not been placed in her adoptive home until the middle of January and that the adoptive family had three children, two by adoption and one au natural. Rebecca has no photographs of herself for the first two months of her life.

I left San Francisco for my sister’s home in Southern California in January, 1967, about the time Rebecca went to her adoptive home. As the days passed, I was able to think of the future in a concrete way, and a year later, enrolled in law school. The future brought a career, a great husband, and three other fine daughters.

STUCK IN THE PAST

Over the next three decades, I lived in the present for the most part but a part of me stayed on December 19, 1966. I re-played that day over and over. Sometimes I imagined that if I concentrated hard enough, I could change the events. I told the assistant to stop and give me back the papers.

Since my reunion with Rebecca, I am less focused on changing the past although I will always regret giving her up. The reunion allowed me to pick up the fragments of my life left in the social workers office and live more fully in the present.

Today life is generally good. I’m going Christmas shopping for the three daughters I raised, my two grandchildren who live nearby, and my husband. I sent Rebecca a Christmas card, but no presents for her or her children at her request. This past weekend, I enjoyed a visit from one of her daughters. Rebecca called to thank me for hosting her daughter and we had a nice chat.

I know that some of our readers are not so fortunate--that their child or their parent has refused contact or ended a relationship. My heart goes out to them.

__________________________________________
A First Mother remembers: My Adopted Daughter's first Christmas gifts.

Calling loved ones (and those you are not so sure of) for the holidays

2011-12-18T18:36:00.000-05:00

From my alternate universe daughter

Christmas is right around the corner, and no one can ignore it. And for a lot of us--first/birth mothers and adoptees--it is a killer of a day. An adoptee wrote to me recently about her birth father--who wants a relationship NOW (many years after he was first contacted), and admittedly he's not the healthiest person around, or in the best situation. Last time she reached out a hand, he acted less than reasonable, and so now the adoptee is wary. Of making a phone call. What if he wants more than she is prepared to give? And anyway, it's confusing and she feels weird about him and where was he when she first got in touch and....

Fair enough.

And at FMF we have heard the other side too: that mothers cut and run. Both adoptees and first mothers have written anguished comments about the need to finally walk away. The last post about Denise Roeselle's memoir (Second-Chance Mother) recounting her difficult relationship with her very troubled son has led to a discussion about how much we birth mothers are supposed to take from our children, when they act in ways we find difficult or abusive. Sometimes it seems our children keep testing us and testing us until...we find that the turmoil is more than we can handle, and cut off the relationship.

TESTING, ONE, TWO, THREE....

Lorraine

I certainly felt that my daughter was testing me at times; at other times when we ran aground she was really confused and found it difficult to be a "good" daughter to her adoptive mother--and still have a relationship--of any sort--with me. At that point I heard that her adoptive mother came to not being able to hear my name without making a snide comment or walking out of the room. Consequently, for close to two years one time, my daughter Jane cut off any contact with me. Wow, that hurt--and it would have helped if I had had some explanation, but nada. Just Poof! and she was gone. That was one Christmas. Of course it is not lost on me that Poof! and she was gone...is now adoptees feel about their birth mothers, once they are able to understand what adoption means: that someone else left them. Without an explanation.

Anyway, that Christmas when Jane vanished, there were no presents sent, no cards, no Merry Christmas calls. Tomorrow is another day, I told myself. Christmas will be over tomorrow. My husband's large family of nieces and nephews and spouses and children--not an adoption in it close enough to count--was around and made the holiday jolly in spite of my daughter's utter rejection.

Should I have tried calling her that Christmas? I couldn't. She had made it plain she didn't want to hear from me. It took nearly another year before she called up one day and began the conversation with: How are you?

MAKING THE CALL IS A GIFT TO YOURSELF

What did I tell the adoptee who realizes her father is trying to be in some kind of contact with her? Make a call. Make it a day or two before Christmas to a) end the confusion of should I or shouldn't I? b) really make her father's Christmas so he won't spend the day wondering if he might get such a call. It will be a great gift in the true spirit of the holiday. I added that she might make the call when she truly couldn't stay on the line for a long time--just before she had to be somewhere, or her husband or children might demand her attention, or she had to take the Christmas cookies out of the oven. In other words, reduce the stress level by limiting the amount of time she could stay on the phone. She should give herself an out. If they wanted to have a longer conversation, they could schedule it for another time. No matter what happens, she will know that she gave this gift--a friendly Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah--and that in turn is a gift to her.

As for everyone else, if you are the one who walked away from a relationship--whether you are the mother or the adoptee--and feel like opening the door back, even just a little--what better time of the year to do it other than now? And if you can't, okay. Don't beat yourself up over it. If you are the one hoping for that call, and do not get it sometime this week, remember that the holidays will be over next week. --lorraine
--------------------------------

Reunion gives birth mothers a 'second chance'

2011-12-15T17:06:00.000-05:00

Jane

Denise Roessle is euphoric when she learns that her son, whom she had lost to adoption twenty-six years earlier, has been matched to her through the International Soundex Reunion Registry. As the adult man replaces the fantasy child, though, anxiety replaces euphoria.

Denise was nineteen and living in Hawaii in 1969 when she became pregnant by a handsome Marine. After he reneged on his promise to marry her, her parents sent to a home in Los Angeles and arranged with a lawyer who specialized in placing children with Jewish families in New York to handle the adoption of Denise’s son. Erick Alan Janson became Joshua Goldberg, the son of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn.

Once they are matched, Denise is eager for a relationship, “The prospect of having a chance to right my wrongs and make a difference in my son’s life made me forget the hole in my [heart]." Denise, who never had other children, now has a second chance at motherhood, thus the title of her recently-published memoir, Second-Chance Mother. Josh’s desire to be Denise’s son, to rejoin the family he had lost, is at least as strong as her desire to mother him.

The book is well written, moving along smoothly as Denise tells not only the story of her reunion but of discovering her mother's family. Denise's mother, who had been so insistent on the adoption that Denise feared telling her parents of the reunion, claimed to be an only child. Denise learns that her mother was actually one of nine children, farmed out along with her siblings when her father died. Denise’s mother is strict, straight-laced, and Denise becomes painfully aware of the similarities between her mother and herself. Eventually Denise's parents learn of Denise's reunion with Josh. Once these family secrets are out, Denise and her parents develop a positive relationship.

Within a few months into their reunion, Denise has second thoughts about keeping Josh in her life. He angers easily, cannot maintain relationships, is untruthful, and wastes money on baubles, leaving him chronically short of funds for necessities. He refuses to accept responsibility for his actions. As a teenager, he had gone through a succession of treatment programs, dropped out of school, used drugs, and lived on the streets. He married young and had two sons whom he and his wife put up for adoption. He divorced his first wife and married a seventeen year old girl who is now pregnant. Over the next decade, Josh divorces and remarries several more times.

Denise and Josh have an up and down relationship. He misbehaves; she cuts him off; he begs or demands to be in her life, he tries to guilt trip her for abandoning him; she lets him back in; he misbehaves. Denise questions herself: Is she too strict? Too much like her mother? Should she be more giving and forgiving? The book ends with little hope that Denise and Josh will ever have a healthy relationship or that he will get control of his life

Josh’s problems, although they may have been related to his adoption, are not unique to adopted children. Parents throughout history have struggled with how to help their troubled child, treading the line between enabling and abandoning.

Where do birth mothers fit into the mix? Before my surrendered daughter Rebecca and I reunited, I worried about finding her in a drug house, a waif, a street child. I envisioned myself as a heroine, saving her from a life of degradation. As the curtain falls, she embraces me as her true mother.

At other times, I envisioned her as a famous movie actress and I worried she would reject me. As the scene fades, however, she embraces me as her true mother. My daughter is not a drug addict; neither is she a movie star. She is, however, an altogether woman, with a successful career, a long marriage, and four wonderful children.

I don’t know what I would have done if she had been chronically irresponsible like Josh or schizophrenic like the son Patti Hawn wrote about in Good Girls Don’t.

When we birth mothers signed the papers, we not only lost all legal rights to our children but we were freed from all legal obligations to them. As a practical matter, however, many mothers cannot walk away from their children just as mothers could not forget them no matter how much they believed the social worker’s maxim, “you’ll forget and get on with your life.”

We have an obligation to our adult lost children, not borne from guilt at giving them up, but born from nature.

__________________________
Second-Chance Mother

International Soundex Reunion Registry

Good Girls Don't
Does Adoption Run in Families?

As a first mother it's better to speak up than suffer in silence

2011-12-12T17:16:00.000-05:00

Jane and Lorraine. 1983

All right, I've been trying to avoid this all day...but what the hell? FMF is a personal letter in many respects to the world, and the friends and acquaintances I've made in the adoption community. Today is the fourth anniversary of my daughter's death and I have been trying to distract myself but it's not working too well.

What I do know is that she seemed determined to die by her own hand as she had tried to kill herself several times before, and that I could not have prevented her death. She was stopped before, years earlier in fact, but something that deep and resolved eventually wins out. Her life was troubled from the very beginning with adoption and epilepsy the double-whammy handed her. So I'm allowing myself to feel blue today--and I'm eating some dark chocolate too. Today, I feel bad. Tomorrow will be another day.

Over on Facebook a woman wrote that she is upset that her youngest brother is having his first child--out of wedlock--and no one in her family is upset. It is 19 years after she gave her son up. Now she is trying to be happy for her youngest brother, yet she finds
herself crying all the time: She wrote: "I just want to tell them all how I feel inside but I can't get the words out--not that it would matter, according to them my daughter never existed it. It is something that never happened."

Oh, don't a lot of us know that feeling? Of psychic loneliness and despair?

THE LIBERATION OF LEAVING THE BIRTH MOTHER CLOSET
Until I got out of the closet myself, I felt the same way about other births in my extended family and among friends. Everybody was married, and so there was not that comparison, but while I was happy for them, their joy brought into relief my own dark emotions about the daughter I had, but didn't have. And I couldn't say a word. I avoided baby showers, was undemonstrative when I heard baby news, turned away from labor scenes in movies...babies were not a subject that I could be involved in. After I came out and told my family about my daughter, it was a whole lot easier, largely because my mother was so accepting and sympathetic and understanding, not only of what happened, but the role I said I was going to play in adoption reform.

Coming out of the closet--while hard at the moment of truth--was so much easier than being in. It's not unlike being gay and coming out; in some circles, however, it's a lot more shocking. So be it. The more of us who come out, the less shocking it will be, the quicker those noxious laws of the past overturned, the fewer adoptions there will be in the future.

Over at Facebook, I left a comment for the woman encouraging her to speak up--tell someone in her family, tell them all--how she feels. Because maybe the day will come that her child will come looking for her, and instead of finding her (because her name has changed with marriage), that person first will reach someone else in the family. And because she, the mother, has never spoken up about her secret grief, that brother or uncle or father will think that she does not want to be reminded, and tell the caller to go away. We hear about this happening enough to know that it does happen. Brothers and uncles say. Well, Mary (or Linda or Jeanne or Janice) has never spoken about it, so she must not want to be disturbed. In New York Mayor Bloomberg has actively lobbied against open records--sending a paid lobbyist to Albany to work against our bill--and since opening the sealed records will not affect the city budget, I can't figure out why he would do this--unless it were personal. Maybe he has a close relative who relinquished a a child, but she and the family have never spoken of him.

IF ADOPTION WERE SO DAMN WONDERFUL...WE WOULDN'T BE IN THE CLOSET
We do need to let our families and close friends know the truth of our grief. We need to not keep this hidden. As long as we do, outsiders will think we are fine with having given up our children. When I told the wife of one of my husband's college roommates, she was shocked because she had never heard anyone talk about this before, and was rather amazed that it was the source of lifelong sorrow. Did other women feel like me, she wanted to know. This was a woman in her 60s. Of course she knew lots of people who had adopted, and some who were adopted, but she said, she'd never met another birth mother. That you know of, I quickly added. All she knew was that the sister of a college friend of hers had gotten into the same kind of "trouble," but she never heard another thing about it, or knew how the woman felt.

If you are at any large Christmas parties this year, stop for a moment and look around the room. It's almost a given that there will be adoptive parents, or siblings of adoptive parents, or adoptees in the room with you, and most everyone knows about the adoption. But where do the adoptees come from? Sure, some from overseas, but not so many if the adoptee is over thirty. First mothers will almost certainly be there too, each in her own private closet. If adoption were so damn wonderful, this wouldn't be the case.--lorraine
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See also: Telling a Stranger What It's Like to be a Birth Mother
My Daughter's Suicide
Adoption: Then, and Now
Remembering My Daughter on the Anniversary of her Death

Playing Politics with the Morning After Pill

2011-12-09T11:43:00.001-05:00

Lorraine

We try to stay away from politics here but yesterday brought news that infuriated me: An over-the-counter and safe method of birth control called Plan B--that is, The Morning After Pill--will continue to be denied to teenage girls under 17. Under 17 you need a prescription--that is, tell a doctor who may tell your mother, and anyway, by the time you get that script, it is likely to be too late for Plan B.

But you know what? A whole lot of teens have unprotected sex the first time because they are not planning on having sex. The Obama administration's head is in the sand on this issue, only slightly less buried than the previous Bush administration's, which allowed Plan B to be sold without a script only to those 18 and over. In 2009 after a federal court judge excoriated the FDA for placing politics and ideology ahead of public health, the Obama administration lowered the age to 17.

ARE THEY NOT READING THE SAME STATISTICS WE ARE?
Yet almost half of all teenage girls have had sex before their 17th birthday. Not everyone wants to tell their parents or the family doctor she is planning on having sex, not every teenage boy carries a condom in his wallet because...maybe tonight, so let us assume that a lot of teenagers under 17 will have intercourse without some kind of birth control. In fact, because many teens have no access to easily obtainable birth control, the United States has the highest rate of unintended pregnancies of young people in the developed world. That disturbing trend translates into one of the highest rates of teenage abortion and adoption anywhere. This is appalling. Not only is this inane restriction pushing the abortion rate, it is also serves to increase the number of teenagers who will give their babies up for adoption, and both will spend their lives with the sad and lingering consequences of that harrowing decision.

Yet Plan B is safe. After a careful and lengthy study the Food and Drug Administration found that Plan B was not only safe and effective, but also that adolescent girls can understand how to use it and what it does (prevent pregnancy), and what it doesn't do (prevent sexually transmitted disease). Plan B contains 1.5 milligrams of the female hormone progesterone, a slightly higher amount than is found in low-dose birth control pills, and considerably less than what is prescribed for other conditions.* It should be taken as soon as possible after unprotected sex because with time it loses effectiveness. Advocates for years have pushed to make it readily available to anyone who needs it. The American Medical Association, the American Congress of Gynecologists and Obstetricians, The American Academy of Pediatrics, and the expert advisory committee of the FDA all approved the sale of the drug to women and girls--yes, adolescent girls--of any age. If you are old enough to need it, you should be able to get it.

Women who have unprotected sex have approximately a 20 percent (one in five) chance of becoming pregnant. Taken within three days, Plan B cuts that risk to 2.5 percent (one in 40). "Very few medications are this simple, convenient and safe," Dr. Kathleen Hill-Besinque, of the University of Southern California School of Medicine, told The New York Times.

Had it been available, Plan B would have prevented my own pregnancy because I knew at the time I had sex I was likely to be ovulating (the old-fashioned rhythm method pushed by the Catholic Church taught me that), but the man involved was persuasive and I was in love. Would I have been at the drug store that very evening? You bet I would. But if I had had to wait for a doctor's appointment the following Monday to get a prescription in a city where I did not have a doctor--as was the case--it would have been too late, just as it will be too late for a teenager shy of 17.

POLITICS OVER PUBLIC HEALTH WHEN SEX IS INVOLVED
The FDA was about to approve the over-the-counter sale of Plan B, but for the first time ever, the Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, overruled the FDA. Her argument? Girls 11 or 12 would have difficulty understanding what Plan B was or how to use it. Apparently the fact that fewer than one percent of 11-year-old girls are sexually active, according to the Guttmacher Institute, was lost on her.

Margaret Sanger

But what was not lost is the evangelical criticism in an election cycle: While the drug’s principal effect taken as described here is to prevent ovulation, Plan B may also make the lining of the uterus less hospitable to a fertilized egg, making it anathema to anti-abortion activists. However, Plan B has no effect on established pregnancies. It is not an abortion pill nor is it related to RU-486, which is an abortion drug.

ABORTION AND ADOPTION RATES WILL STAY HIGH
Teenage girls today are often under considerable pressure to have sex, according to numerous surveys--way beyond what it was like in earlier decades. Many will give in. Whether the sex is half-halfhearted or not will not alter the odds whether pregnancy results; it's simply the luck of the draw. The morning after, when the high emotions and the pressure of the night before are long gone, is exactly when birth control needs to be available to teenage girls. Continuing to restrict the sale of The Morning After pill will assure that the abortion and adoption rates will continue to soar over other developed nations. In the U.S., we have a population nearly six times greater than that of England and Wales, but more than a hundred times the number of infant adoptions each year. This is not only unnecessary, but catastrophic. Let us be clear: giving up a child destroys whatever life you had before. It changes you forever. You do not have a baby, walk away and forget. Open adoption does not solve all ills.

The regressive thinking of the Obama administration is blatant politics that harks back to a time nearly a century ago when Margaret Sanger was arrested for distributing a pamphlet called Family Limitation. The details have changed, but we as a country have not yet comes to terms with sex. Sixteen- and fifteen-year-olds are having sex. Let them have easy access to birth control. This ruling will only continue to punish teenage girls. --lorraine
------------------------
* For other uses of progesterone, see my comment below.
For more on the lifelong effects of giving up a child, on both mother and child, see: Response to The Adoption Option

Breakfast on Pluto: A movie a birth mother can love

2011-12-08T13:52:00.001-05:00

Lorraine

Breakfast on Pluto is a little known Irish movie by well regarded director Neil Jordan that is about the hero's search for his natural/birth mother in London. The "hero" is no ordinary fellow--he's a transgender "nancy boy" as gays are derisively called in England, and the story, in a series of connected vignettes set in the Seventies, is as at least as much about his troubles and travails as he flounders through life as it is about his search for his mother.

As soon as he is old enough, Patrick "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy) leaves his unhappy foster home in Ireland and begins a series of picaresque misfortunes as he looks for love and place to call home with all the wrong people. All he knows is that his birth mother went to London after she deposited him at the door of the local priest, Father Bernard, played by Liam Neesom, and soon enough Kitten is going to "the city that never sleeps" to find her. All he has to go on is that she resembles Mitzi Gaynor.

Desperate people clutch do desperate things. Remember, I wrote to Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne asking if their daughter, Quintana Roo, was also mine. After I my daughter and I reunited, I once asked her what she would have done if I hadn't found her first. She said she would come to New York on a bus and look for me. Why not go to London to search for a Mitzi Gaynor look-alike? Desperate people do crazy things.

In Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten lurches from one unhappy episode to another in a movie that is one part snappy social satire and one part gloomy Irish dirge, playing out against the backdrop of the violence between the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland of that time. Breakfast on Pluto is not by any means a great movie, but the birth mother angle and enough satire kept me interested, along with an incredible performance by Murphy as Kitten. Would he ever be able to find his birth mother since he didn't even have a name?

How he gets it is nearly unbelievable--but the film is well enough done so that the scene comes off as heart-breaking rather than absurd, as it would if I were to tell you about it here (and I'm not going to). When he does learn the truth of his origins--the full truth--my internal remote hit "Cry." Please let him find his mother now, I was thinking. Thank god, for he does, though he doesn't reveal who he is to her in one of the most poignant scenes ever about such an interaction. Damn! I've got tears in my eyes just remembering it, Murphy's acting and the writing is that good. I remember doing something similar when I first learned who Jane was--I called her up and pretended to be doing a survey for Seventeen magazine to find out if she knew she was adopted.

From the perspective of this birth mother, Breakfast on Pluto (2006) is one of the best movies on this theme for both mothers and adoptees. The rest of the world will either love the film (as the non-birth mother friend who told me about it did ) or dismiss it as trivial. The director has two more famous movies in his ouevre, The Crying Game and The End of the Affair. Don't be surprised when Stephen Rea makes an appearance as a possible savior for Kitten. But you know he's not. Kitten has to find his mother first before his life can get better.--lorraine
---------------------------
For more on my contact with Didion:
Joan Didion's Blue Nights is really an adoption memoir

Foster kids do best when placed with extended family

2011-12-05T16:48:00.001-05:00

Jane

A couple who adopted nine boys through the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DFC) has been charged with sexually assaulting two of the boys, reports The Hartford Courant. George Harasz and Doug Wirth had been certified as foster parents, and a private adoption agency had recommended the adoptive placements to DCF. The two men also ran a puppy breeding business in the basement of their home and put the boys to work in it. In 2009, Harasz was cited for cruelty to animals when an animal control officer found 50 dogs in the basement. “Police said the room had inadequate ventilation and the smell of urine and feces was overwhelming.”*

This is just one of many stories of children being abused, even murdered, in foster or adoptive homes that appear daily in the media across the United States.

Back in the 1970’s as a young lawyer in Portland, Oregon I represented parents whose children had been taken from them by the state Children's Services Division (CSD). I soon recognized that, for the most part, these parents were not bad people; they had done things, often because of poverty, and, in some cases, ignorance, that the state and the courts considered neglectful. As a birth mother, I had a lot of sympathy for these parents.

Oregon followed what I came to call the “washing machine” philosophy of child welfare: place children in a “neutral” setting, far from their homes, where they would be “cleansed” from the taint of their biological family. CSD workers occasionally allowed parents to visit their children under supervision, but often cut off visits at the insistence of the foster parents. They complained that children cried when their parents left and were hard to settle down, demonstrating, according to the social workers, that the parents were a negative influence. They also routinely dismissed were parents’ complaints that their children were mistreated in foster care.

TWISTED GOALS OF CHILD WELFARE

Several years later I went to work for the State of Oregon as a budget analyst, and, as chance would have it, my first assignment was CSD. I learned that a driving force behind child welfare policy was the political power of those who provided “services” to children. Foster parent associations, group home operators, residential agencies--all had tremendous clout with legislators. When CSD proposed reducing out of home care due to budget constraints, providers showed up in full force, filling legislators’ heads with horror stories about children murdered by their parents. CSD administrators supported the providers, aware that currying favor with providers was necessary to stay in their job. Legislators responded by reducing funds for in-home services and increasing them for out-of-home services. (No child was going to die on their watch.) A sad note: years later I read that the directors of two prominent residential agencies sexually molesting children over a lengthy period of time.

I came to realize that for the most part CSD was not in the business protecting children in their homes but supplying providers with children to keep the providers in business. Child welfare operated much like our infant adoption system which has been twisted from its original purpose of finding families for children into finding children for would-be parents.

Although my career took me in a different direction, I kept an eye out for news stories about child welfare. In 1999, I was visiting my daughter who lived in Seattle at the time and happened upon an article about the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) and its efforts at reforming the system that so appalled me years earlier. NCCPR is a non-profit, tax exempt corporation whose directors read like a who’s who of child welfare experts. Here’s NCCPR’s “Quick Read” on child welfare. Things haven’t changed much since the 1970's:

“The failings of America’s child welfare system can be summed up by the very rationalization often used to justify the way it works, an approach that can be boiled down to ‘take the child and run.’ You’ve probably heard it many times: Sure adults may suffer when their children are needlessly taken away, but it is claimed, we have to ‘err on the side of the child.’ In fact, there probably is no phrase in the child welfare lexicon that has done more harm to children than ‘err on the side of the child.’

"When a child is needlessly thrown into foster care, he loses not only mom and dad but often brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, friends and classmates. For a young enough child, it can be an experience akin to kidnapping. Other children feel they must have done something terribly wrong and now they are being punished. One recent study of foster care ‘alumni’ found they had twice the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of Gulf War veterans and only 20 percent could be said to be ‘doing well.’

..."A second study, of 15,000 cases, is even more devastating. That study found that even maltreated children left in their own homes with little or no help fared better, on average, than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care.

..."All that harm can occur even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are but the rate of abuse in foster care is far higher than generally realized and far higher than in the general population. …That same alumni study found that one-third of foster children said they’d been abused by a foster parent or another adult in a foster home.

…"Furthermore, the more a foster care system is overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be there, the less safe it becomes, as agencies are tempted to overcrowd foster homes and lower standards for foster parents. …

"But that isn’t even the worst of it. Everyone knows how badly caseworkers are overwhelmed. They often make bad decisions in both directions—leaving some children in dangerous homes, even as more children are taken from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kind of services. The more that workers are overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be in foster care, the less time they have to find children in real danger so they make even more mistakes in both directions. That is almost always the real explanation for the horror-story cases that make headlines.

… "The only [child welfare] systems that succeed emphasize family preservation.”**

KIDS DO BEST WITH EXTENDED FAMILY
Besides overusing foster care, Oregon’s CSD preferred to place children with strangers rather than relatives---although relatives were willing and able to care for the children or adopt them if their parents had had their rights terminated. More of the washing-machine philosophy. The rational was that “the apple doesn’t fall from the tree” and relatives can’t be trusted not to return children to their bad parents the minute child welfare worker turns her back. When the state did place children with relatives, it paid them at lower rates than it paid stranger foster parents.

Eventually legislators had heard enough complaints about child welfare and passed a law in 2007 requiring CSD (now Department of Human Services, DHS) to make diligent efforts to find a child’s relatives and give preference to relatives for placement. The underlying rational is that "kinship care is as old as humankind, and family connections are truly deep in our DNA," wrote Lois Ann Day, director of Child Welfare program, in The Oregonian. Earlier in the year, we reported on this kind of placement in St. Louis that found that older kids (ten and up), kids with special needs, and hard-to-place family groups are likely to fare best when they are placed with extended family members. ***

The success rate for these kinds of in-family adoptions is huge. Relatives are likelier than strangers to be unfazed by a kid's special needs, such as being bipolar, because it's probable that the disorder runs in the family and the great aunt considering the adoption is already familiar with the condition because Cousin George has it too. Consequently, the family not only knows how to deal with it, but is willing to. Cultural connections and religion are likely to stay the same. You don't need to be a genius to understand that people do best, and are the most comfortable, when they grow up among their own kind and can recognize physical traits and talents in the people around them.

________________________________

*Connecticut couple charged with sex assaults of 9 kids

**The NCCPR Quick Read: Family Preservation is SAFER than Foster Care

Child welfare: Family connections more stable for displaced kids
***Homes for foster children: Find the real family first
Desperate moves of parents who lose custody

Desperate moves of parents who lose custody

2011-12-02T11:29:00.001-05:00

Lorraine

In early fall Nephra and Shanel Payne, parents who "kidnapped" their eight children from a foster care center in Forest Hills, New York, were all over the news. They and their kids--all safe, just after dinner in their car--were located a week later in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The couple was arrested and charged with eight counts each of kidnapping--one per child. The kidnapping charges were later dismissed after they agreed to plead guilty to second-degree custodial interference, a misdemeanor for which they were each sentenced to 90 days in jail and three years probation. They were released the day before Thanksgiving.

Stories about parents "kidnapping" their own children always catch my attention for I do not immediately assume that the state is automatically right in taking
custody away from parents, and think that the "kidnapping" charges are, well, like using a three-ton slab of stone to swat a mosquito. The Paynes emerged the other day and gave a lengthy interview to The New York Times. Their side of the story sounds like an over-eager system, ready to take children from parents because they are poor and not white. Child welfare authorities are not talking.

TO ACT, OR DO NOTHING?
In the interview, the Paynes said the trouble all started when one of their boys showed up at school with a bloodshot eye, a result, they said, of a squabble between the boys. We don't know if there were other suspicious acts, because child welfare authorities would not talk about the case. In any event, the kids were removed from the home and placed in foster care. Some of the children have been in foster care for three years. From the Times:

“It’s either do something or let your kids get swallowed by a system that does not have a heart,” Mr. Payne, 35, said. “To do nothing would have been more hurtful, more reckless.”

The couple have jobs--Mr. Payne is a construction worker, and Mrs. Payne is a beautician. During the time the children were in foster care, they said they showed up at every child visit with platters of food, home-baked cakes and even a juicer, they said, and they were devastated to hear that several of their boys had been medicated for things like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They were terrified, they said, when two of their children complained of not being fed enough and showed up to visits with split lips and bruises. Agency officials said those claims were not reported.

The Paynes, teenage sweethearts, said they learned in mid-September that Children’s Services had set a goal of adoption for the children--they range in age from 11 months to 11 years--and it was as if a switch had flipped. At one visit to the Forestdale agency, Mrs. Payne simply led the kids out to the car waiting out back, and off they went. During their life on the run--they went to South Carolina where they once had lived and then to Harrisburg where their family still had land.

“Acres of land, produce growing out of the ground,” Mr. Payne said, a smile reaching each side of his lean face. “It was going to be that freedom to see our kids just running around — to be happy, to be safe — with their mother and father.”

Describing their odyssey, Mrs. Payne recalled, her son Shalee, 6, awoke with a start. “He said: ‘I thought this was a dream. Thank you so much for taking us,’ I know that what I did was right because I heard it from my son.” They said they had stayed at motels, paying with cash so as not to be traced. They listened to music rather than the news even though the oldest boy had seen newspaper reports about the family. Their last evening together sounds like a party--which is how they described it--because after a chicken dinner in the van, they ended up at a park in Harrisburg where some of the boys got up on a stage and showed off break-dancing moves, the girls and Mrs. Payne watched cheerleaders.

Then came sirens, the order to "Freeze!", the barrel of a gun pointing at Mr. Payne. The baby began screaming. Mr. Payne collapsed and had to be taken to a hospital. "All I could hear was my baby screaming," he said.

OVER MEDICATED KIDS IN FOSTER CARE
Okay, this story hardly requires comment, but it aptly demonstrates what people will do to keep their children. At the same time we are reading this, here comes an alarming report from the Government Accounting Office:

Psychotropic drug use among American foster children is horrific and startling: in 2008, children in Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon and Texas who’d been removed from their parents and placed in the care of state child welfare agencies were being prescribed psychiatric drugs at rates 2.7 to 4.5 times as high as non-foster care children on Medicaid. Thousands of children were taking medications at doses that exceeded FDA-approved maximum levels. Hundreds of foster children were taking more than five medications at once and some were taking up to ten drugs simultaneously. Even some infants were being prescribed psychiatric medications.

Remember the Paynes said the boys reported being medicated? They had obviously fallen into the foster-care-medication trap, as it's one way to keep boisterous children quiet. At the moment, the Paynes are forbidden to see their children--any of their children--or even speak to them on the phone. They will return to Family Court on December 15 to seek visitation rights. Visitation? If there really are no other reports of abuse, if the parents do have a plan for keeping the family together, if this whole case is the result of a jittery-and-overworked child welfare officer, the children should all be returned to their parents, ASAP. We know that not all families are perfect; we know that some poor families have topsy-turvey lives, but that is no reason to split them up and parcel out the children. Not only are the older boys going to have a difficult time being "adopted," the lifelong emotional costs of that alone for any of the children is a good enough reason to find a way to keep them with their parents who are desperate to keep them close. At least the Paynes have a lawyer (Norman Steiner) working for them. Stay tuned.--lorraine

_______________________________

Source: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/02/bromides-are-no-better-than-zyprexa/#ixzz1fOpwlqnF

After Losing Freedom, Immigrants Lose Their Children

And if you have not seen the video of Loretta Young making a pitch for a foundling home (just added), check out the previous post: Loretta Young's 'adopted' daughter wasn't adopted at all

Loretta Young's 'adopted' daughter wasn't adopted at all

2011-12-01T12:31:00.001-05:00

Loretta Young and Judy Lewis

So imagine if you were "adopted" by your "birth" mother and raised as an "adopted child." Your mother later marries, and has two "of her own." You take her husband's name, but you are still the "adopted child" in the family. When you ask your mother "as adopted children do. They say, 'Where are my.... Who's my mother? Who's my father" And she would answer very easily by saying, 'I couldn't love you anymore than if you were my own child.' Which of course didn't answer the question, but it said, 'Don't ask the question.'" *

After you are all grown up, just as you are about to marry, you tell your fiance that you do not understand your confusing relationship with your mother [actress Loretta Young] and that you do not know who your real father is. "I can't marry you," the grown-up 'adopted child" says to her fiance. "I don't know anything about myself.

And he says: "It's common knowledge, Judy. Your father is Clark Gable."

Lorraine

Talk about a bombshell in your life. Judy Lewis, the "adoptee" in question later wrote that she had no inkling who her father was, or that your adoptive mother was her real mother.**

"Judy Lewis, Secret Daughter of Hollywood, Dies at 76" read the headline in today's New York Times. She was 32 before she discovered the web of lies that cast her, the real life daughter of Hollywood royalty, into what she described as a "Cinderella-like childhood" as the outsider, the adopted daughter of Loretta Young. The facts are this:

Young was 22 and unmarried in 1935 when she had a brief affair with Clark Gable, 34 and married, on the set of The Call of the Wild (apt title). Young was Catholic and abortions were not only forbidden, they were against the law everywhere. A pregnancy would have been a huge scandal and ruined her career. Young spent most of her pregnancy in Europe hiding from public scrutiny, but gave birth to her daughter in a rented house (still obviously hiding) in Venice, California. The infant was turned over to a series of caretakers, and Young returned to Hollywood. When her daughter was 19 months old, Young brought the baby home and announced through the gossip columnist Louella Parsons that she had adopted the child. Given the mores of the day, and the pressures to not be a woman like that, we can say that Young was clever to find a way to keep her baby and her career, given what happened to others who had babies when not married to the fathers.

But how about letting your child in on the big secret?

THE AWFUL POWER OF SECRETS
Even after Lewis confronted her mother with the truth, Young refused to fess up. Eight years later in 1966 Young finally made a tearful confession. I can hardly imagine the raw and powerful emotions of both Young--who had kept this secret so buried that she couldn't even tell the truth when you daughter came to her knowing it--and that of Lewis, who has to absorb and accept that her mother found a way to keep and raise her, but kept the truth from her until she was 31. Like, wow.

As someone who felt the stigma of the mid-Sixties--that free-love era that people imagine sure as hell did not exist in my world of 1966--and kept my pregnancy as hidden as possible, not even telling my parents, I can empathize with the pressure that Loretta Young felt. Decades later when the married Ingrid Bergman became pregnant by director Robert Rosellini in 1949, the public scandal in America killed her Hollywood career for several years. Talk about scandal: so great was the uproar from the public and pulpit, she was even denounced on the Senate floor, and Ed Sullivan refused to have her on his show. (She and Rossellini had a son; then twins, one of whom is actress Isabella Rossellini.) In 1966, I had to quit my job--it was unusual enough being a woman reporter not in the "women's department"--but single and pregnant? Forget about it. I went into deep hiding.

But good lord, why not come clean to her daughter at some age before it was forced out of her? This, I don't like about Loretta Young. As a child I watched The Loretta Young Show on television (1953-1961), on Sunday nights with my mother. Young introduced the dramatic series in a incredibly fashionable outfit, and she's swirl around as she shut the door behind her (supposedly her living room) as she walked into yours. Her public persona was that of a classy lady, above reproach and forever glamorous, which is probably one reason I liked the show--what was she wearing tonight? Loretta Young "get in trouble" like that? Unthinkable. The dramas themselves were about some problem that supposedly someone had written her about; I would imagine they stayed away from adoption-themed stuff. Young acted in half of the shows herself.

As I recall, when I got older I myself heard the rumor that the adopted daughter of Young was actually her daughter--it's possible that I even heard this from my mother when I was a teenager. But apparently this common knowledge had not reached Lewis. Everyone kept the big secret of her life from her, a story we all too often hear from adoptees.

Young did tell the truth to a biographer, with the stipulation that it not be published until she died; but

Judy Lewis around 1977

Lewis took matters in her own hands and published her own memoir in 1994, Uncommon Knowledge. In it she described a heated argument with Young on Mother's Day in 1986, in which Young threatened to sue Lewis if a book came out that revealed the truth about her parentage. Lewis said she asked Young if she would "ever acknowledge to the world that I am your child, and that Clark Gable is my father?'

"I refused to be dismissed that easily," Lewis wrote. "It all came pouring out — all the years of hurt and abandonment, all the feelings of not belonging, of being an outsider in my own family, years of repressed emotions that couldn't be contained any longer. The floodgates were opened and the words flowed unchecked."

"'No. I will never acknowledge what I consider a mortal sin — my mortal sin,'" Young replied, according to Lewis.

In an interview later Lewis said, "It was very difficult for me as a little girl not to be accepted or acknowledged by my mother who, to this day, will not publicly acknowledge that I am her biological child." After the book was published, Young did not speak to her daughter for three years. Young died in 2000.

AND DOESN'T SHE LOOK LIKE HER FATHER?
Lewis did have a career as an actress, appearing in a television soap for many years (The Secret Storm), and on Broadway; she also produced television shows. I don't know what kind, if any, of a relationship she ever had with her father. He died in 1960, two years after Lewis's fiance told her the rumor that was the truth. Later Lewis became a clinical psychologist and a licensed family and child counselor. She certainly had the personal family drama to call upon in her therapy.

It's the terrible force of public censure that makes these stories. It's the understanding of the powerful emotions unleashed by the story that makes them compelling. Today they are still the terrible reality of too many people's lives. Maybe it is impossible for many if not most adoptees to have what we could call a good relationship with their first/birth mothers, but at least the censure in most quarters (save Utah) is at least eroded to the point where being a single mother is not cause for a public and ruinous scandal.--lorraine

And for an ironic treat, watch the video below. Amazing.
________________________
*The above quote is from an interview on Larry King.
**("Positive adoption language purists, take note--how Un PC was that? Real father, real mother.)
The Times obit: Judy Lewis, Secret Daughter of Hollywood, Dies at 76

Natural and Adoptive Families: Let's Gather Together

2011-11-28T17:34:00.001-05:00

Jane

This holiday season families will gather together, give thanks for having each other, and wish each other well for the New Year. Except many families separated by adoption.

As a culture, we’ve made great progress in traversing divisions of race, class, religion, and geography. Surely, we can cross the adoption boundary, knock down that artificial barrier created by a judge’s signature on a piece of paper, celebrated with a baptism or cemented in a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple. Let’s bring our families together, natural and adopted, conceptually, if not physically.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. For many mothers, and I count myself among them, revealing that we had a child and placed her for adoption, is the most difficult thing we’ve had to do. Even in an age where we can’t check out at the super-market without reading tabloid accounts of infidelity and love children, the fear of exposure grips many mothers as tightly today as it did over 150 years ago when Lady Dedlock spoke these words to her daughter Esther in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

‘"This is the earthly punishment I have brought upon myself. I bear it, and I hide it. … I must keep this secret, if by any means it can be kept, not wholly for myself. I have a husband, wretched and dishonouring creature that I am! …

‘"My child, my child!"’ [Lady Dedlock] said. ‘"For the last time! These kisses for the last time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall meet no more. To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have been so long. Such is my reward and doom. If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered, think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask! Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable! And then forgive her if you can, and cry to heaven to forgive her, which it never can!"’

We at FMF are critical of these mothers, ignoring or oblivious to their children’s pain when they reject them for a second time. Secrets, though, are a two-way street. For ever birth mother cowing in the closet, there’s an adoptee refusing to let her own out.

Betty Jean Lifton, the revered author of three books about the adoption experience, wrote of the pernicious effects of secrecy in adoption. Although her relationship with her birth mother whom she found after a long search spanned many years, her birth mother always kept Lifton a secret, never allowing her to meet her half-brother. Lifton never told her adoptive mother of her reunion: “By destroying her myth [that she was Lifton's only mother], I would destroy what was most meaningful in her life,” she wrote in Twice Born, her memoir about her search for her birth family.

Singer and adoptee rights advocate Zara Phillips waited several years before telling her adoptive family about her reunion with her birth mother. She did not invite her birth mother to her wedding. Phillips explained in Chasing Away the Shadows: “Part of me wished that my birth family could have been there too, but it would have been too hard for my parents.”

Adoptee Katie Hern likened her relationship with her birth family to an illicit relationship. She wrote that she felt “like a traitor to my parents, to my adoptive mom in particular.

“I’ve made several trips [from San Francisco where she lived] to Chelmsford [Massachusetts where her adoptive parents and birthmother lived] without even telling my parents I was in the state. I am having a clandestine affair with my birthfamily.” (Reunion: A Year in Letters Between A Birthmother and the Daughter She Couldn’t Keep.)

Other adoptees, while acknowledging a relationship with their birth mothers, refuse to bring their two families together. Initially, I did not want to meet Rebecca’s adoptive parents, the French’s. I considered adoptive and birth families natural enemies. Rebecca's adoptive parents were rivals; I fancied myself in a holy struggle for Rebecca’s soul. I wanted her to return to where she belonged, to her real family, and forget those pretenders. Of course I soon dropped these illusions and accepted that I would have to share her, but I still resented these faux parents.

After I met birth parents and adoptees at conferences of the American Adoption Congress, I realized that it was possible for birth and adoptive families, not only to meet, but to have a positive relationship. Fellow blogger Lorraine stayed with her daughter Jane's adoptive family numerous times when visiting her daughter, or picking up her granddaughter for a summer visit. They also they visited Lorraine and her husband twice, once staying for the weekend when Jane was not with them. Their relationship might have had some strains, Lorraine said, but communication was always the best option for the two mothers. Another birth mother told me that she always stayed at her daughter’s adoptive mother’s house when visiting. Not only was it convenient but she enjoyed the woman’s company. Other first mothers have left comments here about staying with the adoptive parents. An adoptee told me that her adoptive mother and birth mother became good friends; they even ganged up on her when she considered leaving college, convincing her to finish.

And so I offered to meet Rebecca’s adoptive parents, thinking she would be relieved, that it would reduce the tension that must exist. Her response surprised me. “They do not want to meet you.” Over the years, I offered again to meet them and each time the answer was the same: She later wrote that the thought of us getting together was “weird.” Both the French's have passed away so I shall never meet them. I do believe, though, that if I had met them, we may have understood Rebecca a little better and perhaps appreciated each other, not only as contributors to her Rebecca's qualities, but as individuals.

I did eventually meet Rebecca's sister by adoption, Susan. It wasn’t weird at all. We spent about a day together along with a friend of Susan’s and Rebecca’s daughter, my granddaughter. Susan and I talked amicably about politics, a common interest, albeit she is a Utah Republican and I, an Oregon Democrat. We visited Portland’s Saturday market (that place is weird) and lunched at a Portland landmark, Dan & Louis Oyster Bar.

Lifton came to regret that her two families remained apart. In the dedication in her last book, Journey of the Adopted Self, she wrote:

To the memory of

my adoptive mother

Hilda

and my birth mother

Rae

who might have known

and even liked each other

in another life

and another adoption system.

As we celebrate love and reconciliation, whether it be at Christmas or the feast day of another faith, let families separated by adoption and families created by adoption come together. We have nothing to lose but our pains.

__________________________________________

"A first/birth mother remembers 'coming out' to her husband-to-be"

"Telling My family about my first child--and then going public"

"A Letter to (Birth) Mothers Who Reject Reunion"