A Home For Orphans

Milton Hershey School

There is a need to care for true orphans that do not have living family to care for them. Milton Hershey is mostly known for perfecting a recipe for milk chocolate. I love their Hershey Bars with Almonds but I really shouldn’t eat them because my biology is afflicted with a tendency to have high blood sugar. If I let myself eat one small miniature bar, I want more or something else that I shouldn’t be eating that is too sugary. Mostly I just don’t.

Milton Hershey was a leading philanthropist during his time. In the early 1900s, he was a visionary about providing better working conditions for his workers. He knew this support would also allow them to do a better job in his factory.

Eventually, he built a company town. It was beyond what most companies did at that time. Not only did he build homes for his workers but supported the growth of businesses in the surrounding area as well as a transportation infrastructure.

He and his wife Catherine never had any children of their own but they cared about child welfare. This motivated them to establish a boarding school for orphans. Even now, the school provides a home and free education through high school to more than 2,000 boys and girls.

Hershey is a good example of a visionary social entrepreneur. His efforts never diminished his financial well-being but kept on enhancing that further, so that he could do more.

Questionable Motives

The problem with adoption agencies is their motive to promote their business. It is always about the money though they will market their services in emotional, heart wrenching ways.

Adoption IS giving your baby away and it is about the agency SELLING your baby to someone who has the financial resources to pay for that baby.

Instead of posting on social media that you are praying to God for this desperate young mother to CALL you and give HER baby to you, it would be more altruistic to pray for support so that this mom could successfully parent her child. People who work for adoption agencies think it is okay to pray to God for a mom’s downfall so that she will ultimately chose to relinquish her baby to THEM.

Sadly, both the people working for an adoption agency and prospective adoptive parents all too often USE religion to coerce vulnerable people into doing what is to the benefit of these motivated people.

If you are a believer, then here is the truth – God did choose parents for that baby which is fully within the Christian viewpoint. Here’s a relevant example for you – wasn’t Mary only 13 years old and unmarried when she conceived Jesus ? And possibly homeless ? I don’t remember the part where God sent an adoption agency over to make things “right” for her.

And if anyone ever wonders why an adoptee would turn away from Christianity, here are your examples. Adoption agency workers and prospective adoptive parents literally praying for the trauma and separation in a genetic family to fulfill their own selfish desires.

Income Inequality and the Pandemic

There are hopeful adoptive parents who are so self-absorbed that they view the economic hardships brought on by the shutdown of the country to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus as a silver lining potential blessing.

They are hoping that financially distressed single pregnant women may be more likely to chose to surrender their babies to adoption under the current circumstances. This is a sad truth of our often selfish times that such people would be thinking this way but apparently this is the truth.

Instead of feeling compassion for women in those situations, they are hoping and praying it leads to something they want. This is always the case with domestic infant adoption which is generally 100% selfish.

It’s not about finding a baby a home. These babies have families. 9 out of every 10 placements occur because of financial pressures. Hopeful/adoptive parents often like to believe every birth mom just didn’t want her kid. That’s rarely the case. It’s almost always as simple as a lack of money.

The truth is that these babies are highly in demand and sought after. That’s why it costs so much to adopt domestically, supply vs demand. It’s exactly why it often takes years for someone to adopt. There’s a shortage of these babies vs waiting hopeful adoptive parents.

During a global pandemic, hopeful adoptive parents are still begging for money via GoFundMe, YouCaring, and hitting their friends up to buy ridiculously overpriced t-shirts.

Domestic infant adoption is almost always a baby going from a poor family to a middle/upper class one. The foundation of adoption centers around privilege, and the lack of it. The haves vs the have nots.

These are facts. Hopeful adoptive parents and their WANTS drive the billion dollar a year adoption industry. It drives the manipulative and coercive tactics used in adoption. All for $$$. It’s all about money.

Just A Fact

Adoption is taking a mother’s child from her. You cannot argue this fact. You may seek to be an exception but you are not. You are really just the same as every other person who has ever adopted a baby.

How do you go to the hospital and walk out with someone else’s baby ? Their BABY ! Someone’s baby she spent 9 months with.

Why is the suicide rate so high for adoptees and also for natural mothers and never discussed ?

It is true that sometimes caring for a child outside her primary family is necessary. It should be rare.

Some answers to the above from a “woke” adoptive mother –

You basically delude yourself into believing the lie that this is a “good” thing.

It starts with the narrative from adoption agencies. They parade “first moms” into the orientation meetings to tell you how choosing adoption for their babies was the best decision they ever made. They believe the lie, too.

You listen to your friends and family members who have adopted children. You see the beautiful families they built. They all seem so happy. You want that for yourself.

You are chosen by an expectant mom. She tells you how grateful she is to have found you. You tell her how brave she is. You really feel like you’re a team doing this together.

Here comes the hard part. The birth. I have never felt more uncomfortable as when I was in the labor room with my son’s mother. She was alone and asked me to be with her during her planned c section. If not for her being alone, I wouldn’t have gone in with her. I felt like a total intruder.

Our minds are powerful. We can convince ourselves of just about anything. Even justifying taking someone else’s baby. That’s my cross to bear. Now that I’ve acknowledged the cold hard truth of it, I can do my best to help our kids understand it.

A Question of Ethics

A question arises among adoptees about the morality of putting a price on their lives. It is a fair question. Is it right to pay tens of thousands of dollars to buy a child ? The going price is often in the $30,000-$40,000 price range.

One adoptive parent answered that question rather honestly – “We were so clouded by desire that we really didn’t think about the cost.”

What would you think, if you knew, that an agency had tiered pricing on the babies they are selling ? White$$$, whomever $$, Black$. Is value related to the ethnicity of a person ?

An adoptive parent in an honest evaluation of how they are feeling might say, “The moment we drove away from the hospital it felt like we stole him. It was such a conflicting feeling.” Some won’t even give it a moment’s pause.

What would you think if you knew the legal system was being gamed ? “Our lawyer was a whole other bag of nuts as she moved our court date around because the judge that was assigned to our case hates adoption.” I wonder why ? Could it be that judge knows something about the realities ?

A very honest adoptive parent might admit to an adoptee that – “Yes we bought a kid, yes at the time we thought we were doing the right thing ‘if we didn’t take him…’ yes, I wish it was different for him that he wasn’t a secret. But I love him. I am totally geeked when he discovers something new. I make little videos and pictures to send to the one app that I know the natural mother checks, so she can see her son. I hope that she comes and builds a relationship with this amazing human. I also daily feel conflicted with the whole process. I caught myself in the market one day when asked if he was adopted – I replied ‘oh no we bought him.’ I struggle with not wanting him to feel like he was a purchase. Do you ever feel like you were not bought ?”

Money will always be a complicating factor. It is often said of corrupt practices “follow the money.” That makes sense. Who is gaining wealth at the expense of whom ? Just one of the reasons that the whole system of adoption is being looked at deeply and reforms to that practice are being discussed.

Shocking Statistics

Private adoption is illegal in other countries. America has made the buying and selling of children a business; a multi billion dollar industry. Children are the commodity.

A woman writes – “I spent the first 16 years of my adoption experience as a ‘birth’ mother in complete isolation. It was preceded by the nearly 10 months of family-conducted isolation during my pregnancy. Such is the life of a shamed pregnant teenager. I had personally never known either an adopted person or a natural mother. ”

Clearly isolation isn’t simply for a time of a global pandemic. Young women have been isolated for decades in order to relieve them of their baby when it is born.

She goes on to acknowledge – “If I could relive that day (when she gave birth) again, I would run from that hospital with her in my arms and never look back. I would take my chances with being homeless and the foster care system.”

The truth is that “better” life for your child is nothing more than a different life.

Over time, she came to see – that an adoption agent and her very own mother reduced her to a bodily function for total strangers. It has landed her in trauma therapy. She didn’t receive counseling before or after the adoption by the agency. She had secretly held herself together somehow all these years only to discover she had been suffering with PTSD stemming directly from the adoption itself.

There is a world full of adoptees and natural moms in Adoptionland who have found each other in virtual space and are a kind of sisterhood that understands each other’s pain. I belong to a group like that. I have learned so much from reading about the direct experiences and points of view. So much so that I no longer support the commercial practice of adoption.

Surrogacy Is A Separation

I have known of two cases of surrogacy directly. Both utilized donor eggs. One was a mother who was being treated for cancer. She did die when the twins were about 2 years old and the father, who was directly their genetic father, remarried. The other one is a family member. The wife takes a lot of drugs to manage her mental health issues. They had a lot of failures but did eventually succeed and the little boy is now 5 year old and I am happy for my brother in law that he could be a father.

I didn’t question the practice at all until I began to discover my own genetic roots (both of my parents were adopted). As part of that journey, I began to learn a lot of things about infant development. No matter how you spin it, babies are being separated from the woman they’ve shared a home with for 9 months. The woman whose body nurtured and cradled them. They know her scent, her heartbeat. That’s who they know. And they are born and handed to someone who smells different, some stranger they don’t know.

There have also been cases where a surrogate mother became so bonded with the infant in her womb that it took a court case to separate them and contracts between a couple and a surrogate are much more explicit now about what is being done and for whom.

It hasn’t been all that long since The Handmaid’s Tale was making current news and the forcing of women to complete a pregnancy they don’t want for the purpose of handing their baby over to a prospective adoptive couple, often with undertones of evangelical Christianity seeking to convert the world to their philosophies, is very real even now.

One woman commenting on this situation admitted, “I seriously considered being a gestational carrier (their baby in my body, not my biological child) and when I learned about adoption trauma I knew I could never do it. How awful to take a baby from their only life connection. It’s cruel. It only serves to gratify the adults’ needs.”

Being Charitable

What are you actually saying to your adopted child as an adoptive parent about what your motives were ? There are cases – I suppose – like true orphans. However, among the thoughts about reforming adoption in general, instead of buying a baby to raise as your own, is the radical idea of helping the mother in danger of losing her child. Her crime may simply be lacking the financial means to raise that child.

Clearly, if you can plunk out tens of thousands of dollars to obtain another woman’s baby, you could go very far in your ability to charitably help keep a baby and mother together. Sadly that is not the kind of thinking that motivates most adoptive couples. Most are self-absorbed, only thinking about what it is they desire, and rarely considering the emotional price and mental anguish someone else (and often more than one someone else – the original mother, the adoptee, any subsequent siblings) will have to bear for you to fulfill your personal desire.

You will be held accountable for every decision you make regarding adoption.

Don’t you think your adoptees will have enough sense to realize that in 9 out of 10 cases you could have helped their parents keep them vs adopting them ? Do you think you’ll never be asked this question or held accountable ? In cases where infertility was the reason for adopting (as most cases actually are), don’t you think these children will have enough sense to realize they were your second choice ?

It is still a rather new perspective and some adoptive parents have been able to own the facts and own their culpability in the messed up institution of adoption. What is done is done but things could be done better going into the future and that is why the idea of raising awareness and talking about ways that would be more life and family affirming is happening now.

If you do want to understand adoption trauma, then here it is – I have seen this for myself in an adoption triad group with thousands of members (all 3 sides of the adoption equation) – there really are a lot of very angry adoptees. Ask yourself, why is that, if adoption is such a perfect answer to everyone’s problems ?

For adoptees unfortunate enough to have been the victim of a shady adoption, the truth will probably come out in this modern day and time (much of that kind of story did not come out during Georgia Tann’s illicit 3 decades long scandal from the 1920s up until 1950). There will be damage that you (as an adoptee) may or may not ever be able to repair. The damage is deep – and comes out in bits and pieces – and in ways that are not always obviously related to the adoption directly.

Think About The Mothers

The family I was born into is heavily affected by adoption. Until I learned about the truth related to my mom’s adoption, I never thought much about how the mothers who gave up a baby to adoption were affected by what happened. I never thought about how it might have affected both of my sisters who each gave up a baby to adoption.

My first exposure was reading Lorraine Dusky’s book A Hole in My Heart. We have since become friends on Facebook and I know a lot more about what happened to her than only what she wrote in that book. She has been an activist for opening the sealed records in the state of New York. The effort was recently successful. Almost half of these United States continue to obstruct adoptees from knowing the truth of their origins. Adoptees are treated like second-class citizens denied the basic human rights that most people unaffected by adoption never give a second thought.

A friend in my writer’s guild once asked me at a conference as we were discussing my manuscript project, what does it matter if someone was adopted if their adoptive parents were good people and their childhood fortunate ? As I explained it to her, she understood in her own way that her genetic origins were simply something she took for granted. Whether she cared to know anything at all about her heritage, it was accessible to her. Not so for the adoptee.

The more contact I have with women who have lost their children to adoption, the more I understand the lifelong regret, sorrow and pain this causes them. Adoption is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Too often people think the problem that is today will always stay a problem forever. Change is constant, so that perception is never the truth but it is easy to lose sight of that in extreme need.

Not only do many mothers never know what became of their child, many adoptees exist in a black hole. If they know they were adopted (which is generally the case in our modern times and even for both of my parents, adopted in the 1930s, they knew they had been adopted even though they never learned anything about their own origins), there is this strange kind of existence and knowing they are not related to the people who are “their family” and genetic heritage ? the heritage that is their adoptive family’s possession, it isn’t their heritage.

And sadly, when one finally does know the heritage, as I have been blessed to discover my own (know all 4 original grandparents and something about each of their stories) and have contact now with true genetic relations, I don’t feel fully as though I belong to these families. We have no shared history. It is as though I’ve been robbed twice. Though I am grateful to at least have the truth now and not a false identity.

Almost Good Enough

So this morning, I was reading the story of a couple who adopted a baby and finally got around to fulfilling their intention (when she reached the age of 6) to make this understandable to the child. They used this book to open their discussion.

What is interesting is that within this adoption discussion community it wasn’t the book or that they had “done the right thing” in making their child aware of the circumstances around her entry into this family, but the issue turned out to be no effort to remain in contact with the original mother. The couple’s response was – “Currently we do not have contact. When our daughter wishes to seek her out, of course.”

That did not sit well with this group. She was told – “You shouldn’t wait until your daughter asks.” And she was questioned as to why she had not. Furthermore, “If you wait, it could be harder to find her first mother or something could happen to her (there’s no shortage of adoptees who have searched and found a grave at the end of the search – and I will note here, that is what my own adoptee mom found and it broke her heart). Also, what if she goes on to have other kids and your daughter has siblings? It’s another important series of conversations you guys need to prepare to have with your daughter.”

Another adoptee goes on to share, “I was too scared to ever ask anything about my birthmom because I sensed how anxious that made my adoptive mom. So, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that your daughter may have that loyalty we talk about adoptees having and not want to upset you guys by asking questions.” I have seen this my self with my niece, who my sister gave up at birth for adoption. It is a real and deep concern for many adoptees. Very common.

Adoptees deserve their truth – however that looks – and however they process it. It’s the adoptive parent’s job to be ready to help their child navigate the issues and to be a soft landing place as the reality sinks in.