Safe Haven Babies

How does one preserve the identity and heritage of a baby dropped off under Safe Haven laws ? Is this a case where adoption is the only recourse ?

Safe-haven laws are statutes in the United States that decriminalize the leaving of unharmed infants in specially designated places. The child then becomes a ward of the state. Safe-haven laws typically allow the original parents to remain nameless in a court proceeding to determine the child’s status.

Some states treat safe-haven surrenders as child dependency or abandonment and a complaint is filed against the parents in juvenile court. Other states treat safe-haven surrenders as adoption surrenders and void all parental rights.

Of course, eventually, the ease of accessing inexpensive DNA tests and the matching sites 23 and Me as well as Ancestry may reunite the child with some member of their original family.

Yet, in the meantime, what to do ?

Critics argue that safe-haven laws undercut temporary-surrender laws, which provide the buffer of time for parents who are unsure about whether to keep or relinquish their children. Supporters argue that anonymity protects infants from potential abuse by their parents. Fathers can find themselves shut out of the child’s life without their knowledge or consent.

And I still do not have the answer to my initial questions . . .

Each Small Death

. . . is just a season where a part of us is shed to make way for a new one. ~ Jonas Ellison

This quote captured something in my heart. When I was already into my 60s, I lost first my mom and then 4 months later, my dad, to the normal processes of life that end in one’s death. When they died, none of us knew who their original parents were. They were both adopted and their adoptive parents were also dead.

Turns out my original grandparents were all dead as well.

But there is “new” life in me because I now know so much more about my authentic family history. I know there is a lot of Danish in me because of my paternal grandfather who was an immigrant. And there is a good deal of Scottish in me because of my maternal grandmother.

On my paternal grandmother’s side is a long history that includes an ancestor who wrote a journal that is still in print. It is considered to be one of the best records of early colonial life in New London Connecticut spanning a 47 year period from 1711 to 1758. Yes, before our Revolutionary War. His home is on the national register and a museum now.

That leaves my maternal grandfather. His own grandfather was 2nd Lieutenant in the Confederate Army from 1861 through 1864. He fought in the battles of Shiloh, Chattanooga and Spring Hill, as well as other less notable engagements. There are actually Confederate connections on my maternal grandmother’s side as well. Not that I take any real pride in that, it just is the honest truth.

All of this is “new” to me. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever expect to know about these people but learning about them and meeting some living descendants has made me whole again. Even though it was too late for my parents, losing them opened up the path for me to know these things about my family history.

All that to say, if you are in a similar circumstance by all means push ahead. Inexpensive DNA testing and the matching sites that include 23 and Me as well as Ancestry are making it possible for many people who’s past was clouded by adoption to finally know who and from where their roots are grounded in reality.

Opportunists Everywhere

Georgia Tann may have facilitated the most adoptions in the history of the United States (believed to be from 5,000-10,000 children impacted over 3 decades of time) but there were others pursuing the same opportunity to enrich themselves by taking children from unmarried, white girls and placing them into wealthy homes – whatever the market would meet. The time period is known as the Baby Scoop Era and it’s range was approximately the end of World War II and the early 1970s. The social mores of that time period were a factor as well.

One such “business person” was Dr. Thomas J. Hicks, who sold or gave away more than 200 infants from the ’40s to the ’60s. Some of the infants were illegally placed through a local Akron OH woman who was a black-market adoption channel.

Most of the girls who went to the Hicks Clinic were young, unwed and poor, trapped in a depressed mid-century Appalachian mining community. Many were teenagers whose parents were struggling to feed the mouths already under their roofs. An unplanned pregnancy had serious consequences, even beyond the obvious social stigma.

The TLC network will highlight this story in a six part, three night special titled Taken at Birth.

Dr Hicks was a father of three, who was married to a Baptist Sunday school teacher. Hicks died at age 83 in 1972. At the time he died, Hicks was without a medical license, having surrendered it to avoid prosecution following his 1964 arrest for performing abortions.

A local probate judge who didn’t have any knowledge of what Dr. Hicks had been doing, and so had no allegiance to him or his family, decided to look into the situation. There were an estimated 200-plus babies that had gone to Akron Ohio from the Hicks Clinic.

Two hundred babies? To Akron?

Hicks started out from compassion but soon saw there was money to be made and turned his efforts into a business. Dr. Hicks housed pregnant mothers in the attached apartments to the right of his clinic and at his farm and in an abandoned telephone company building. A local woman in Akron OH then informed desperate, childless couples who paid $1,000 per baby that their baby was ready for pick-up. Most of the babies were passed through the back door of the clinic along with a forged birth certificate. No record of biological parents was maintained making it particularly difficult for “Hicks Babies” to discover their roots.

McCaysville Lost and Found serves to facilitate searches and provides a communal link for Hicks Babies and their families. Their mission is to support of those beginning, in the middle of or who have already completed their birth quest.

Not Bad, Not Good, It’s Life

Even though I have learned so much about the process of adoption – how it affects an adoptee, how it affects the original parents and how it affects those adoptive parents who try to fill a void, it is the truth of my own family, the one I was born into and I would not exist if the adoptions had not happened.

One of the success stories in my own family is my nephew. When I met him and his adoptive mother, she admitted to me that for a long time, she felt that she should not have been in the picture. When she learned about my nephew’s mother, about her struggles in life with mental illness, this gave his adoptive mother a lot of peace about their situation.

She has been a champion for my nephew. She has been with him every step of the way as he sought to discover his origins. She has supported him in his desires and has even gone the extra mile, smoothing the way for him.

Yesterday was his birthday. I sent him greetings by way of her email. She replied to me last night with the good news that he has met his birth father and has discovered he has two half-siblings, a boy and a girl, who are only a little bit younger than him. All of them have welcomed his arrival in their lives.

His birth father is not who my sister named on the birth certificate. The kindest explanation is that she didn’t actually know who fathered her son. My nephew’s adoptive mother actually paid a private investigator who triangulates DNA to discover the true identity of my nephew’s father.

Beyond being probably the best adoptive mother I’ve known in my lifetime, within her nurturing, my nephew has become an amazing young man. He is the Assistant Emergency Management Coordinator in the town in which he lives. He is now a Lieutenant in the Fire Department and holds down a job at the local utility. I am very proud of the high quality person he has turned out to be.

The Modern Foundling Wheel

Safe Haven Baby Box – Indiana

I first read about this concept in the book Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy while I lay in hospital having just delivered my oldest son. Mothers could abandon newborn babies anonymously in a safe place known as a Foundling Wheel. This kind of arrangement was common in the Middle Ages and in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A modern form, the baby hatch, began to be introduced again from 1952 and since 2000 has come into use in many countries, notably in Germany and Pakistan but exists in countries all over the world under various names.

Now in the United States, there is the Safe Haven Baby Box which is found in Indiana. Although every state in the US has a Safe Haven Law, anonymity is the benefit of the Baby Box. A Safe Haven Law requires the one relinquishing the baby to actually walk in to an authorized facility and physically hand the child off to a person. The one relinquishing is going to be asked some questions.

I am decidedly pro-Life because 9 months is a lot to ask of any woman who does not want to or cannot for whatever reason parent a child. However, if abortion is not accessible for whatever reason, an anonymous method of giving the child away safely is preferable to infanticide. And no, I do not think abortion is infanticide though there are plenty who would argue the point with me.

Although a baby left in a Baby Box is not going to know anything about their origins, inexpensive DNA tests and matching sites could still reveal some things about their origins in a future time once they reach adulthood. I know, it worked for me. No, I wasn’t relinquished but both of my parents were.

To Whom Do You Belong ?

My mom was fiercely an individual, even though to all surface appearances – she was passive and submissive. I think I am, in a lot of ways, like her.

Even though she was appreciative and showed responsibility towards her adoptive mother as she aged and needed assistance, my mom knew clearly that she did not “belong” to that family.

She had to give up creating a family tree at Ancestry based upon both hers and my dad’s adoptive families because she knew clearly it was NOT “real” in the sense of genetic lineage.

Though my own work to recover each of my parents true family trees remains incomplete, I do intend to do that and thread them back into the identities I grew up with.

Most genetically based sites do not fully allow for complex relationships such as adoptive or reproductive assistance kinds of familial relationships; but because of my parents, I do recognize that DNA matters.

So in answer to the question, who do you belong to ?, I believe that both my mom and I would answer – our souls, that which created this physical lifetimes experience.

A Very Sad Reunion Story

In late 1996, a California woman named Terri Vierra-Martinez, had hired a consultant to help track her down the daughter she gave up for adoption. She sent a letter to the adoptive parents, Jim and Gloria Matthews, asking for a “reunion” with Jonelle.

“I was thrilled that Jonelle’s mother wanted to contact her, because Jonelle had always wanted that,” Gloria told the Greeley Tribune in January 1997. “But then I had to tell Terri that the little girl she entrusted to us is gone. . . . I had to ask myself, ‘Could I have taken better care of her?’”

The families ended up meeting, and Jonelle’s birth mother said she was grateful to know the truth. “This has put some closure in my life,” she told the Tribune. “Jonelle has always been part of my prayers, ever since she was born, and now — not knowing where she is — I’ll continue to pray for her.”

A crew digging this week in the rural land south of Greeley found human remains, Greeley police said. The Weld County Coroner’s Office later determined that it was Jonelle.

On December 20 1984, Jonelle had just finished singing Christmas carols at her Greeley CO school. Her father, Jim, was still out watching her 16-year-old sister, Jennifer, play a varsity basketball game. Her mother, Gloria, was headed to the airport to care for a sick parent in California, according to a story the next year in the Windsor Beacon.

When her father got home later that evening, he found the TV on and Jonelle’s shoes and shawl lying near a space heater. Jonelle was gone. It is still not known who took her or why or what happened to her in the final hours of her life.

One Retail DNA Test Away From Truth

If a child has been adopted or conceived via sperm or egg donor, that information is significantly about who that child is at a biological level and they deserve to know the truth. That truth can be introduced in age appropriate bits.

Withholding that information would be a lie and it is simply wrong.

Before anyone embarks on adopting a child or decides to utilize advanced reproductive assistance in order to become a family, it is important to become comfortable with what you are doing – BEFORE you do it. If necessary, seek counseling regarding your infertility issues. Denial will come back to haunt you.

There’s no reason for shame, no matter what medical assistance you needed, which includes IVF. Adoption, however, has its own unique circumstances. Every prospective adoptive parent needs to learn as much as possible about its impacts on every member of that triad before becoming embroiled.

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.

It Wasn’t Real To Me

My mom had her DNA tested at Ancestry because she hoped to find some of her original family. Since she had a membership, she started creating a family tree but all she could base it on were the adoptive families (both of my parents were adoptees).

Eventually, wanting to know my own heritage, I got my DNA tested. I didn’t even know at the time she had done hers. I think she was always a bit apologetic about wanting to know her origins because my dad was not supportive. He warned her she might be opening a can of worms if she learned anything.

My dad had this idea that once you are adopted, your original family ceases to exist and the adoptive family is all you should be concerned with. Sadly, he died with a half-sibling living only 90 miles away from him. She could have told him so much about his original mother.

When my mom and I compared notes about our Ancestry DNA results, she told me regarding the family tree, “I just had to quit, it wasn’t real to me.” I do understand.

I haven’t had time to get all of the work done but I did start new family trees for each of my parents and I am recording their bloodline information along with their names at birth and a recognition that they died under an assumed name given to them by their adoptive parents.

I loved my adoptive grandparents and my aunts and uncles and cousins through them. I’ve not lost anything, I gained a whole world based on truth. My family tree is an orchard, not so simple as the conventional ones are to complete.