Missing My Moms

My mom in 2014

My husband wished me a Happy Mother’s Day, when he woke today. Not long ago, I told him I miss BOTH of our moms. His mom died in 2009 and my mom in 2015.

My mother-in-law with her cat.

My mother-in-law was a gem. She always treated me like the daughter she never had (she was mother to 3 boys). She was more a mom to me, for over the 20 years I had with her, than my own mom lived many miles away. If I was lucky, I saw her once a year and sometimes, not even that much. Mostly we communicated by phone or email.

My mom yearned to connect with her birth mother but the state of Tennessee refused her persistent requests until she gave up. Less than a decade later, the state came to the conclusion that victims of the Georgia Tann scandal should be allowed to have their adoption files but no one ever told my mom. In 2017, as her descendent, I was allowed to receive it and saw a picture of my genetic maternal grandmother for the first time.

Post-Partum Depression

Giving a baby after giving birth is not the end of the story for many birth mothers. To be fair, there are a lot of links about adoptive mothers suffering post-adoption depression. Mostly due to unrealistic expectations about getting what they wanted. Some become depressed because adopting didn’t fix their underlying issues. Few think about the birth mother after she gives up her baby. Post adoption depression is the depression that a woman feels when her child is adopted away from her.

The reported rate of clinical postpartum depression (PPD) among new mothers is between 10-20%. In many cases of postpartum depression occurs within four to six weeks after birth because of the extreme hormonal changes; however, symptoms can appear up to 18 months after birth. Many birth mothers believe that they can’t experience postpartum depression after adoption. However, postpartum depression after adoption is as common.

I found content at this website – LINK>Texas Adoption Center – helpful for discussing the issue. There is much more there than I have time to cover in this blog today.

What are the signs that you are experiencing post-partum depression after giving up your baby ? Postpartum depression is defined as an episode of major depression associated with childbirth. Almost 600,000 women are diagnosed with postpartum each year and many cases of PPD go undiagnosed and untreated.

The symptoms of regular and delayed PPD are the same. However, the symptoms of postpartum depression and the “baby blues” are different. The “baby blues” refers to the feelings of sadness, worry, fatigue, and self-doubt that nearly 80% of birthmothers feel after delivery. This typically only lasts for a few days or weeks and resolves on its own.

In postpartum depression, estrogen and progesterone levels decrease significantly after delivery. As you work to balance the physical and emotional demands of giving birth and placing your baby for adoption, these changes can affect the chemistry of your brain. Physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, self-esteem issues, and the emotions of making the best decision for you and your baby play a significant role in developing delayed PPD. Postpartum depression after adoption is similar to other episodes of depression that can occur during life. While the “baby blues” typically go away within 10-14 days, PPD is characterized by a daily loss of interest and joy in life that lasts.

The most common signs include:

Loss of interest in activities you used to enjoy
Weight gain or loss that isn’t associated with your diet
Changes in your appetite
Unexplained crying or constant crying
Fatigue
Loss of energy
Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or hopelessness
Changes in your sleep patterns
Suicidal thoughts or attempts

In addition to talking to a doctor or therapist (postpartum depression is a medical condition), you can be kind to yourself. Focus on your health and well-being. Don’t isolate yourself and be patient as you process such a major event in your lifetime.

Reproductive Discrimination

Struck v Sec of Defense

This case straddles both the issues of abortion and adoption. Story courtesy of LINK>Teri Kanefield. You can read the entire essay at that link.

Susan Struck joined the Air Force at the age of 23 in 1967. The recruiter warned her that she would be discharged if she got pregnant. She was sent to Vietnam. When Struck learned she was pregnant, her commanding officer gave her a choice: Get an abortion or leave the Air Force. At that time, abortion was legal in the armed services. Struck refused an abortion on the grounds that she was Catholic — although a lapsed Catholic. She wanted to give her child up for adoption and remain in the Air Force.

According to Air Force regulations, when an officer became pregnant, a board of officers was convened to hear the case. On October 6, 1970, Struck appeared before the board and asked if she could use her accumulated leave to have the baby, arrange for the adoption, and then return. The board refused her request. A few weeks later, on October 26, the secretary of the Air Force reviewed the findings of the board and ordered Struck to be discharged effective October 28, 1970.

With the help of the ACLU in Washington state, Struck took her case to court. Colonel Max B. Bralliar, commanding officer of the Minot Air Force Base, testified that Struck “demonstrated excellent ability in the performance of the managerial aspects of the work units and an excellent knowledge and application of nursing care principles,” and that she was highly dedicated with a “professionally correct and mature attitude.”

Meanwhile, Struck returned home to have her baby and arrange for the adoption. She gave birth to a girl, who she called L.B., which stood for “Little Baby-san” or, if she was in a different sort of mood, “Little Bastard.” She selected the adoptive parents, Julie and Art, who agreed to Struck’s terms: the baby would be raised Catholic, and Struck would be allowed to visit. On December 10, 1970, the adoption was finalized. Julie and Art named the baby Tanya Marie.

On June 4, 1971, the district court ruled against her, so she appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Five months later, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s order. She filed a petition for rehearing, but was again denied. One of the judges dissented for two reasons: first, men with temporary periods of disability were not discharged, and second, he found it irrational that only the natural mother, not the natural father, was declared unfit for service after the birth of a child. With the dissent, the ruling was 2-1 against Struck.

Susan Struck wanted to take her case to the Supreme Court. Because Ginsburg was then the director of the ACLU’s newly-formed Women’s Rights Project, Struck’s case found its way to Ginsburg’s desk. Ginsburg thought Struck’s case was the perfect case to challenge abortion laws as unequal under the Fourteenth Amendment. The gender distinction in the Air Force policy made absolutely no sense. Once the baby was adopted and Struck was legally no longer a mother, there was no reason to deem her unfit for service.

Moreover, Struck’s case made two vital points: A woman should decide whether or not she would have an abortion, and abortion laws naturally discriminate on the basis of sex or gender. As Ginsburg said, nobody is for abortion. What people are for or against is a woman’s right to choose. For Ginsburg, the issue wasn’t about privacy. It was about autonomy. It was about a woman’s right to control her own life and her own body. Moreover, the facts would make the case unlikely to trigger a backlash.

Ginsburg planned to ask for a narrow ruling that would make the public aware of the issue without turning the abortion question into a hot political mess. To Ginsburg’s regret, as she was working on Struck’s case, another case–the case of Jane Roe–made it to the Supreme Court first. The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade extended the right to privacy to the right to have access to an abortion.

Ginsburg believed the Court’s ruling was too broad. The sweeping decision caused the abortion laws of forty-six states that restricted abortions to be instantly rendered unconstitutional, even the most liberal of them. Ginsburg feared the decision would turn the issue into a political one, mobilizing the pro-life movement.

Falsehoods Are Common

A CPS lawyer is arguing that her clients (social workers) didn’t know that
you cannot lie in court in order to take a parents’ children away from them.

This came up in a thread where someone questioned – The mother was 19, they put her age as 16. I was 17 when this was dated, but this family wasn’t made known to me until March, 2018. 6 months into the pregnancy after being excluded prior. I am just wondering why her age isn’t what it actually was and if anyone has any ideas as to why she was listed as being younger? The dates are also listed differently.

I don’t really know the answers to this specific situation but I saw this behavior back in the mid-1930s in the surrender papers prepared by Georgia Tann related to my mom’s adoption. The ages of my genetic maternal grandparents were deliberately misrepresented as were the occupations of my grandparents.

It was noted – There’s quite a few court cases on YouTube where child protection workers were caught lying and forging documents to the courts or injecting themselves into families. There are so many lawsuits.

One person noted – The information packet my sister received also had false information like this. I believe this is a common practice in adoption. It was supposed to contain her identifying information and it was this bizarre package of lies and it was literally redacted in a lot of parts. I had no idea things like that happened in adoption until she showed me her redacted information package of lies and she told me how common it actually is for information to be falsified. It makes it more difficult for the adoptee to get to the truth/find their biological families.

One youth/family counselor wrote – When working with kids who are involved with Div of Children and Family Services (in Illinois specifically) I’ve experienced my kids caseworkers and the supervisors changing constantly. I really believe a lot of the records that are kept are incomplete and false because of high staff turnover rate, low oversight, rampant unchecked bias, and pure laziness on behalf of a lot of the workers. They care a lot less about the paperwork being true and more about it matching whatever case they are arguing to the judge. It’s maddening and makes it difficult for EVERY entity involved to know what is even going on. That is absolutely insane, and a very clear example of how harmful it is that these adults (Child Protective Services workers/shady adoption agencies) simply don’t care to make sure the information is truthful or correct for the kids’ sake at ALL. The paperwork serves them, not the kids. None of it serves the kids.

An advocate notes – They just flat out lie and there was actually a case about it in California, I believe where they argued the right to lie. While some cases may be due to understaffing, a lot of it is just flat out corruption. They want that Title IV funding (LINK>Title IV-E – Federal Payments for Foster Care and Adoption Assistance) and they have to destroy families to get it. It always shocks me when people act like CPS/DHS/Adoption agencies aren’t corrupt. Because they are. Systematically. It is insane how many families have told me stories like this. It is absolutely a product of how the system is set up.

Is It ?

Adoption is often compared to human trafficking by adoptees and birth mothers. It is easy to see the connection – money is exchanged and a baby is tendered.

“Adoptions resulting from crimes such as abduction and sale of and trafficking in children, fraud in the declaration of adoptability, falsification of official documents or coercion, and any illicit activity or practice such as lack of proper consent by biological parents, improper financial gain by intermediaries and related corruption, constitute illegal adoptions and must be prohibited, criminalized and sanctioned as such.” ~ UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner

One thoughtful response was this – We can no longer afford to ignore those who have been taken, stolen, and trafficked through adoption / for adoption. There are far too many who are victims of war crimes, colonization, and cultural genocide to dismiss the fact that adoption is a criminal industry.

Human trafficking is not just sex trafficking. Multiple sources have indicated the fastest growing criminal industry in the world is the buying and selling of people. It is a $150 billion dollar industry. Surrogacy is a $14 billion dollar market already. It is projected to increase to $129 billion within the next ten years.

This is the future of adoption. While we argue amongst ourselves, the industry continues to grow and expand into new markets. We think we are winning this war as adoption programs are being investigated and closing. However, the industry is simply refining it’s operations and shifting markets.

Understand that adoption was created as a cover for human slavery and human trafficking over 400 years ago. Read Adoption: What You Should Know by Dr. Janine Myung Ja (Vance) for this important history of the adoption industry. (Essay LINK>Dear Adoption, Don’t Use Me from Janine’s twin sister, Jenette Yamamoto)

What we’re up against in the U.S. is that the government has taken a narrow definition of human trafficking as sexual exploitation and forced labor. Monetization of social media content based on the child’s adoption, and turning them into “child influencers” is not considered human trafficking for forced labor in the U.S. simply because they were “adopted” and not trafficked.

Family Transmission

In my own family, with 2 adoptee parents, I have seen how awareness of their adoptions and acceptance of this a being one of the most natural things in this world (note – it is NOT), led to my 2 sisters giving up their babies to adoption. This is an effect that transmits itself down family lines or so I do believe.

Reading a story today in the Washington Post that I arrived at via Reddit (which my sons do but I have rarely visited) by LINK>Amber Ferguson about a woman who was denied an abortion in Texas and subsequently placed her daughter for adoption. She notes that “We know this story doesn’t reflect the experience of everyone who has been denied an abortion or experienced adoption.”

She linked the Washington Post story, LINK>After abortion attempts, two women now bound by child, which seems to have allowed me to read it. In that story, this caught my own attention – Evelyn, who gave up the baby, was adopted by her own parents at 3 weeks old. Her parents were in their mid-40s at the time and had not been able to conceive naturally. Although Evelyn had always felt close to them, she was petrified to tell them about the pregnancy. “My parents are in their early 70s. I didn’t have a job or any money. I didn’t want to put it on them to raise the baby,” Evelyn remembers thinking.

She had dated a guy she met on social media and they had casual sex. The relationship went downhill swiftly. When her pregnancy test revealed the truth, a single thought swirled through her head: I can’t have a child. I can’t have a child. I can’t have a child. The relationship with her baby’s father ended after she told him about the pregnancy. She immediately began making plans to have an abortion.

She was six weeks and four days pregnant, so the clinic’s staff advised her to go to Oklahoma before that state adopted an abortion ban, too. Evelyn has been reunited with her own birth mother, Tamela, who lived near the Oklahoma border. Her birth mother was a teenager when she became pregnant with Evelyn. With the encouragement of her adoptive mom, Evelyn had found her on Facebook in 2016. They stayed in touch. Evelyn hoped she would be able to understand her predicament. Tamela says she was surprised by Evelyn’s call but immediately understood her fear. “You don’t think it’s going to happen to you, that you’re going to get pregnant so young. And it’s scary. It’s very scary because it happened to me,” Tamela remembers thinking. Evelyn remembers Tamela telling her that she was making a good decision and that ending the pregnancy would be best for her future.

The clinic’s doctor estimated that she was nine, possibly 10 weeks along and handed her a prescription for mifepristone. She should dissolve the pills under her tongue to start a medication abortion, according to the prescription she received from the clinic. She was told to take the remaining four pills, misoprostol, “orally” at home within 48 hours. She didn’t take the second dose until she returned to her home in San Antonio, nearly two days later. She wanted to be at home where she would have more privacy, Evelyn says. Her stomach had started to cramp. Then she saw the blood clots in the toilet. She bled for hours and had spotting for a couple of weeks. Confident it had worked, she says she didn’t bother to make the follow-up doctor’s appointment the clinic had strongly recommended.

When she still hadn’t gotten her menstrual cycle, she took another pregnancy test and was stunned when it came back positive. At the hospital, Evelyn fainted when she saw that there was a heartbeat, and was in and out of consciousness for about five minutes. Perhaps it’s time to consider adoption, the midwife told her. “No, no, no, I can’t go through with the pregnancy,” Evelyn responded.

Evelyn says she didn’t know the pills sometimes didn’t work. It is a rare occurrence, but she later learned that 3 percent of medication abortions fail when gestation reaches 70 days, or 10 weeks, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The odds of failure increase if the patient waits longer than prescribed to take the second dose of the medication, several medical experts said.

She hadn’t seriously considered adoption, despite being adopted herself, until it became too late to even have a surgical abortion. Having reached that point, she knew that was the only option. Evelyn says she knew adoption could be positive. Her parents had given her an ideal childhood.

You can read the rest of the story at the Washington Post link above.

Not The Way To Do It

Bill Maher sometimes does a piece on his weekly program – “I Don’t Know It For a Fact…I Just Know It’s True.” Today, I read this – every country seeks to end intergenerational welfare dependency by seizing the children of parents who are on public assistance or are likely to be on public assistance and adopt them out to serve as the as-if-born-to-children of working individuals. There are some facts though at this LINK>Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2022 Adoption Savings Data report on how much money the government saved in 2022 by adopting out the children of the poor. Judges that administrate these cases are employed by the states that save the money if the child is adopted out. Public defenders are employed by the states that save the money if the child is adopted out. If Child Protective Services was truly about protecting children rights – they would protect them without changing who they are or who they are related to. They’d just protect them as is.

The truth is the federal government pays tens of thousands of dollars in bounty money to states for each welfare dependent child adopted into non-welfare dependent homes. The federal government has adoption quotas for states to meet. Adoption credits and tax breaks mask a massive child trafficking effort to decrease the number of welfare-dependent children and adults in the country. The state is the entity that took it upon itself to remove the child from the care of their parents, therefore, the state should provide for all the food, clothing, medical care, educational needs, transportation, dedicated social workers, and facilitate visitation with biological kin. In foster care situations, the goal should always be a reunification of the children with their biological parents if at all possible.

If states were forbidden from seizing foster youth for adoption, and they had to permanently pay to support foster youth by paying the caregivers a salary and by providing for all of the needs of the foster youth, while simultaneously protecting the kinship rights and identity of the foster youth – you’d better believe the state would be removing a whole hell of a lot less kids than they are removing today. The state would limit removal to situations that are truly dangerous to the child and they would return the child to the care of their parents as soon as it was safe and possible whether that was 10 days, 10 months, or 10 years.

Foster care children are much safer with paid caregivers. The state would have fewer children in care, caseloads would be smaller and caseworkers could give the children in foster placement the attention they deserve. They could monitor them more closely for signs of abuse or signs of an incompatible placement. The state would be motivated to spend money on programs that reunified children with their families because it would be cheaper than paying for all the child’s needs while in foster placement, in addition to paying the foster caregiver and caseworker salaries. It would prove less expensive than having to pay out, when they lose lawsuits, where children have been abused by their foster caregivers.

Mary Baker Eddy

In my reading today, I learned that Mary Baker Eddy (the Christian Science founder) was a mother of loss, having given up her son to adoption. I went looking and it appears to be true but interesting to me is how women were disenfranchised at that time. I am only slightly familiar with her philosophy, for I once had a friend long ago who was steeped in it.

McClure’s magazine published “Mary Baker G. Eddy: The Story of Her Life and the History of Christian Science” under Georgine Milmine’s byline, in 14 installments between January 1907 and June 1908, when Eddy was by then 85 years old.

The articles offered examples of Eddy’s “marital, maternal, and domestic inadequacies.” Most notably the loss of her son: Eddy was widowed when she was 22 years old and pregnant, after which she returned to live in her father’s home. Her son was raised there for the first few years of his life, looked after by domestic staff because of Eddy’s poor health.

McClure’s alleges that she allowed him to be adopted when he was four. According to Eddy, she was unable to prevent the adoption. Women in the United States at the time could not be their own children’s guardians, per the legal doctrine of coverture. A married woman’s legal existence was considered to be merged with that of her husband, so that she had no independent legal existence of her own.

Born in Ontario, Canada, Georgine Milmine Welles, who went by her maiden name Georgine Milmine, had worked for the Syracuse Herald as a proofreader and had done some journalistic work. She wanted to write a 12-part monthly series on famous women in America, including Eddy, and had gone to Eddy’s home to ask for an interview but was denied.

She then went to Josephine Woodbury and Frederick Peabody, fierce critics of Eddy, and Peabody especially became extremely influential to Milmine’s research and her views of Eddy. Peabody was actually hired later on by McClure’s to collect affidavits. There is documented evidence that a number of Milmine’s sources were paid to give their testimony.

S S McClure saw Eddy as a “natural” for the magazine, because of her marital history and idiosyncrasies: “The material was touchy, and would attract a world of readers both of the faithful and the doubters. … The job seemed to [Willa Cather] a little infra dig, not on the level where she cared to move. But she inspired confidence, had the mind of a judge and the nose of a detective when she needed it.”

Childless Mother

I learned about this book today. From Pegasus Publishers comes this description – 1970, pre-Choice America. After their eighth move in her thirteen short years, the lonely only child of a high-ranking naval officer and a socially ambitious mother, Tracy Mayo longed for a normal adolescence – to have friends, to feel rooted. What she got was a pregnancy at fourteen and exile to a maternity home. There, she bore not only a child but also the weight of the culture’s shame. She was required to surrender her baby boy at birth and pretend it never happened. Twenty-two years later, her longing undiminished, Tracy set out to find him – and perhaps, through her search, to reclaim her self. Are we moving back to a world where women have no agency, stripped of control of their bodies and their futures? More than fifty years after one frightened, grief-stricken young mother was ordered to forget, Tracy’s story is even more important to remember.

A book note from KATE MOSES, author of Wintering, Cakewalk: A Memoir, and Mothers Who Think – In her courageous and beautifully rendered memoir, Childless Mother, Tracy Mayo breaks ranks with the institutionalized secrecy, shame, and silencing that shattered countless pregnant girls and young women prior to legalized abortion and open adoption.

You can also read an excerpt posted by the author courtesy of Severance Magazine at this LINK>The Still Point.

Tracy Mayo

An Evolving Approach

I don’t live in Florida and there may be aspects of this effort that I can’t know about. I learned about this organization, LINK>Embrace Families, from a post seeking a a home for a young woman before she turns 18. One kinship carer noted that – My cousin and friend was adopted at 17 years old. It was a long journey to her, but she prefers it that way. My aunt met her in a campaign of giving Christmas presents and progressed to a very unlikely adoption.

If this organization is true to their stated intentions, values and priorities – it is an example of how the approach to child welfare issues is evolving to be better than the old models. Their goal is to overcome the root causes of abuse and neglect through the programs they have created. Sadly, dominating local news where I live in Southeast Missouri is the story of the death of a 4 year old believed to be due to those causes.

They are committed to keeping struggling families intact and improving outcomes for children, teens and young adults. They feel their effort extends beyond the scope of traditional child welfare services. They feel that a child’s future should not be indelibly tarnished by events that brought them into the child welfare system.

They note that their investment in youth services ensures that teens and young adults in foster care have the supplies, resources and skills necessary to thrive personally, to achieve academically, and to prepare successfully for career and personal success. They provide the support needed for young adults to navigate the complex road to self-sufficient adulthood. This includes: mentoring, tutoring, youth advocacy preparation, housing support, academic support, career readiness, independent living transition planning, driver license training, and more.