Always Connected

Birth moms never lose their connection, even when the baby has been adopted.

The perspective of many adoptive moms is that they have paid tens of thousands of dollars to have their own baby – the birth mom never mattered in their own calculations.

Inside their savior minds, the baby is now theirs. Adoptive moms tend to make everything about themselves including the adoption. When this graphic appeared in an adoption group, the adoptive moms criticized it as being disrespectful of them. It is also the truth – about every baby ever born of a mother (which all of them are at this time in our civilization – thankfully, we are not Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – yet.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World written in 1932 there is a scene at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre’s Embryo Store, where embryos gestate ectogenetically under dim, red light: “The sultry darkness . . . was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon. The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus. The hum and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air.”

Embryos need to develop, a process that for each is best carried on under dim light. But the representations of embryo culture in Brave New World extend the comparison, for they reveal a heavy dependence on a variety of visualization technologies, from microscopy to cinematography. Thus the tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre features “the yellow barrels of the microscopes” lit by the winter sun; the Director’s description of how fertilized ova are transferred, in their embryonic culture solution, “onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes,” where they are “inspected for abnormalities”; and a description of how x-rays are then used to trigger the process of embryo budding, or “bokanovskification,” which produces up to 96 identical embryos.

Thankfully, we continue to develop inside our mother’s wombs. One can only wonder what human beings devoid of that human connection during development as a fetus would be like but one thing is certain – in such a “brave new world” no mother would have to relinquish her infant to a stranger and any couple who wanted to adopt would have a ready supply but I for one am not willing to go to that world. I hope we never do.

One adoptive mom (bless her clear sighted heart for knowing this much) wrote – I just don’t understand what is so difficult of a concept for adoptive parents to grasp that a human being can love more than one person. Why is it such a big threat for a child to know and love their freaking parents! And how in the hell could this saying be disrespectful? It is TRUE. And just because they(we) are now raising the child does not deem them(us) worthy of more love or any kind of additional respect!

The Blessings Of DNA

This morning I was reading, repeatedly, the sad stories of mothers who gave birth and were denied an opportunity to hold their newborn babies because they had made a decision to surrender their child for adoption.  I suppose some psychologist at some time decided this was a wise course of action – though totally misguided in reality.

Then, I read a story about a woman who surrendered a daughter 17 years ago and now she has shown up as a match at Ancestry because this young woman had her DNA checked.  My adoptee mom tried this too without any real results but she was so ahead of her time.

The availability of inexpensive DNA testing has been a large measure of my own success in discovering ALL 4 of my original grandparents (both of my parents were adoptees).  It has played an interesting role in my own life as well.  I have two children conceived with the help of a donor egg as I had passed reproductive age when my husband wanted to have children (we married with him being happy I’d been there, done that, no pressure on him).

Because of my own unique heritage, I have now given to each of my sons DNA test kits for 23 and Me.  I also gave my husband one.  It is a bittersweet decision because our donor has also had her DNA tested.  Though my children grew in my womb and nursed at my breast and have known only my own self as their mother for decades, at 23 and Me it now shows that another woman is their mother.  We are a brave new world of people but there is nothing un-natural or unusual about my children.

My donor said to me, “Who would have thought this could happen 20 years ago?” and that is the truth.  Families touched by “adoption” of some sort are legion now and the tools to reconnect all the threads of our existence are within easy reach of every one of us.

I prefer reality to fantasy and live with the truths.