The Exploitation Problem

What could be wrong with a couple who has experienced infertility and has the financial means adopting the baby of an unwed mother ? Many people would see nothing wrong with this.

The problem is that behind this happily ever after scenario is a great deal of exploitation. In both of my parents’ adoptions, this was a definite factor, even though my mom’s parents were married. There is a great deal of money changing hands in the domestic infant adoption industry.

So, let’s consider domestic infant adoption. Only a newborn baby will do for these adoptive parents. They desire to only adopt a newborn baby. Let us judge this as selfishness. Maybe you as the hopeful adoptive parent just want to have the baby “experience.” Maybe you believe you’re getting a “blank slate” (that was what Georgia Tann who was involved in my mom’s adoption would tell her prospective parents). The truth is babies are NOT blank slates. Maybe you want the “as if born to” parenting experience (being there at the very beginning and you as parents being the only ones the child will ever know). Maybe you think this is as close as you can get to having your “own” child.

Some reality checks –

1. You are NOT needed. There are over 100 hopeful adoptive parents/singles/couples for every ONE newborn baby that is available to adopt. These babies are in high demand and sought after. They won’t age out of foster care, if you don’t adopt them. Furthermore, they have biological genetic families. Contrary to popular belief, there are very few women who just don’t want their kids. Imagine the desperation, fear and poverty you must live in to give away your own child. Adoption rates have gone down drastically over the last year. Why? Because families have received so much more financial help and resources due to COVID. With help and support, even more mothers are parenting their own children.

2. If you’re a hopeful adoptive parent glad that “support” from the government is stopping to increase your odds of getting a baby – you are not adopting because you are a good person.

3. If you’re praying for a woman to feel desperate enough to give you her baby – you are not adopting because you are a good person.

4. If you match pre-birth with a pregnant woman and coerce and manipulate her during her pregnancy – your desperation is showing and you are not adopting because you are a good person.

5. Agencies are a for profit business and often are not at all ethical. Know this, if you’re paying thousands of dollars to adopt through an agency – you are not adopting because you are a good person. You are adopting because you have the money to do so (or have raised the money through a Go Fund Me or other such platform).

6. A standard adoption practice is for the hopeful adoptive parents to be present in the delivery or hospital room. The agencies tell the birth mother that “this is just how it’s done.” Know this – it’s done to make it harder for the mom to change her mind, when she sees her child. If you’re there breathing down her neck while she is giving birth and in that moment when she first meets HER child – you are attempting rob her of the only precious moment with her baby that she may ever have. And maybe she WILL change her mind and her baby will be glad that she did.

7. If you make her feel guilty for wanting to keep her baby, the same way the agency will – you are exploiting her. If you employ an agency to call Child Protective Services on her (mind you, just standard adoption practice) when she wavers regarding giving her baby up to you, just to scare her into going forward – you are exploiting her.

8. So, the mom has changed her mind and is going to keep and parent her baby. Then, you fight against her decision by using the legal system or the agency does it on your behalf – you are exploiting her.

9. If the father is not on board with the adoption and his rights are being completely ignored – you are exploiting the father.

If any of this is true of your circumstances – you are guilty of exploiting a difficult time in someone’s life. A situation that will likely change for the better given time. You will leave a baby with lifelong trauma from sundering that child from its original family.

With Privilege Comes Judgment

Growing up, I remember being told not to judge, to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before judging them. I need to understand the other person’s experiences, challenges, thought processes, etc before judging their own personal choices or lived stories. It is true that judgments keep us safe, help us make friends, accomplish our goals, and all sorts of wonderful, important stuff.

The idea of privilege has become really controversial in some circles, even offensive. Usually the people who are offended by the idea of privilege are the people who have it. And when someone who has had some experience – maybe they have experienced being judged, as being inferior, because they were living in poverty, or they had a bad experience in foster care or in their childhood while being raised by adoptive parents – we should do our best to listen to their stories with compassion, realizing that because we did not have that experience ourselves, we cannot really know how bad it was for them. We need to simply give them the benefit of the doubt and open our heart to their pain and/or trauma.

So, too often when people are simply trying to share whatever awful experience they have lived through, someone will feel triggered and quickly counter this person’s lived experience with the words “not all” – which is simply meant to shut the person up and not allow them to revel their own experience honestly. Maybe you are a foster parent or an adoptive parent or do social work or work for the government in some kind of child welfare or government assistance office and you are feeling judged by the story you are hearing. You are desperate to point out that you are not one of those kinds of people yourself. And it’s wonderful if you are not. However, you should restrain yourself at such a time, take comfort and be confident in the knowledge that the story you are hearing is not about you but about the person telling it and their experience. Allow them to revel their own truth without dismissing it by inserting why you are such a good person (and in fact, maybe look long and hard at your own heart to determine is what it actually is that is being triggered. Is it your sense of being some kind of savior to some segment of humanity ?).

Privilege is something your life gives you that is good. By being able to see those aspects as a privilege, you should also be able to realize that you have had access to something that some other people didn’t. Often in adoption land, as in real life, those with privilege and those in government service too often treat the underprivileged poorly and that is un-necessary. They have it hard enough without you piling on.

The truth is, adoptive parents hold the dominant view in society. Their perspectives rule when it comes to creating the perceptions that people with no experience with what adoption is like in general, believe it to be. Adult adoptees are too often either silenced or dismissed. Money rules. The financially privileged hold the power in society over the less fortunate – who are too easily overlooked or not seen at all. Adoption is almost always a case of allocating a child. Taking a child out of a poverty stricken family and placing that child into a rich one. Georgia Tann didn’t hide her belief that doing this intended engineering of a child’s life led to better outcomes for that child than leaving them in their original poverty-stricken family. So the truth is, money matters.

Just as it was with Georgia Tann, money continues to be the motivation in our modern times. There are people making a LOT of money by taking money from rich people, in return for giving them the opportunity to experience parenting. An experience that infertility or the tragic death of their biological child may have robbed them of. Money can buy you the opportunity to parent a child. Only people with money can afford a domestic infant adoption. This is the reality. And some determined people without financial good fortune will even set up a Go Fund Me page or some other kind of charity outreach to get the money to adopt a child. But the fact remains – the adoption industry is doing very well at generating a lot of revenue for itself.

Evolving Perspectives

The topic came up with my husband last night as he is organizing lots of family history and photos into labeled binders for our sons if they ever should become interested “someday”. How should he label my Grandmother Dittmer ? I said adding Adoptive was just too cumbersome though it was necessary in certain communities and situations.

I was so excited when after 60+ years of living I finally knew who all 4 of my original grandparents were (both of my parents were adopted, they died knowing next to nothing about their own origins). I realize I am fortunate to have achieved so much in so little time. My dad’s mom was unwed and his father would have been lost to all of us but she knew who the father was and left us breadcrumbs. DNA has done the rest.

For awhile since, when I think of grandparents, I think of these original ones. They are the blood and genetic lines I am honestly related to – but I never knew them. I know “some” about them from meeting cousins and an aunt (though most not in person) and receiving photos and stories from these relatives that I am truly more grateful for than my words can ever express.

Lately, something else has happened in my evolving perspective. I am able to re-own my adoptive grandparents. After all, they were the only grandparents who reside in my childhood memories. They had a great deal of influence on me in so many ways. Primarily, that had a lot to do with the proximity I had to them that sadly my own grandchildren now do not even have them me and much to my own sorrow that the circumstances of all of our lives as such.

My dad’s adoptive parents taught me humility. They were poor and god fearing Church of Christ people. Since learning my origins, I also realized the “miracle” that my mom was not sent away as a high school student un-wed at the time of my conception to have and give me up to adoption as well. I believe I have my dad’s adoptive parents to thank for that and primarily my Granny. I also have her to thank for waking me up to leave an unhealthy long-term romantic relationship which opened the way to meet my husband (now for over 30 years). We spent many weekends with these grandparents and attended church on Sunday many times with them. I honestly do love them both.

My mom’s adoptive mother (shown in the image above) was a wealthy, formal kind of woman. My mom called her “Mother” to her dying day and we called her “Grandmother”. She taught us the manners of the upper class and what life is like for them by taking us on fabulous trips as her companions after my adoptive grandfather dropped dead shortly after his retirement in his 60s. My adoptive grandmother lived to over 90 years. She could be very difficult and cruel in her judgements. I respected her. Love might not be the best word but she had good intentions. She grew up in Missouri in much the same circumstances as I live now. By the strength of her own will, she made her life better than the world she originated in.

So, I can acknowledge today, a subtle shift – I have two phases of grandparent. My childhood grandparents who were that for decades of my life. And my actual grandparents who are forever lost to any ability on my part to know them in person but I am somehow – who and what I am – because of them.

Without Us

It is difficult being a woman. It is difficult being a mother. It is difficult being a wife, a daughter or a sister. Sometimes it is difficult having women friends. Today is International Women’s Day.

I was in a difficult romantic relationship with a dangerous man. He lived in dangerous ways and he was dangerous for my own self to be with. More than once he physically hit me. I’m not denying that my own behavior may have pushed him over the edge those times but I also know that whatever holds a man back from harming a woman, if he is able to break through that barrier even once, the risk then exists that it will be easier for him to go through that same barrier the next time. So eventually I left his physical presence. I planned my leaving carefully to be able to safely go. I saved money from what was allotted to me for groceries by buying wisely over a long period of time and I left without saying goodbye. After I was safely at a distance, I notified him that I wasn’t coming back.

It took that courage of leaving to put me into alignment with meeting my husband, so I could live in this deeply nourishing place where I feel very safe and am contented. And it took other actions too, like being brave enough to place a personal ad in a weekly entertainment newspaper in St Louis, without which I would have never come in contact with the man I married a little over a year later. Traveling through life is a lot like being in a car where I always know that I can never actually get truly “lost”. All roads eventually go somewhere and one can always backtrack and find a “somewhere” that we recognize. Leaving can be like backtracking to where you were comfortably confident in your own self, after the damage an abusive relationship can inflict upon a person. I know that all experiences – the good and the bad – end up somewhere else eventually. In that there is a great deal of comfort and a real confidence for living through it all.

My family supports the regional women and children’s shelter. They support women and their children to survive domestic violence and end up in a better place. They help keep mothers and their children together. If you have the opportunity to do anything that will keep a mother together with her children, please consider doing so. The future of our humanity depends on us being here.

They Aren’t My Relatives

Even before I knew who my original grandparents were and something about their stories, back when I was cleaning out my deceased parent’s residence, I began to have an awareness that so much stuff my parents stored in their house as they were executors of their own adoptive parents estates, was not actually relevant to my life. As a historian, it did pain me to send to the landfill tons of genealogy and binders full of personal recollections from a life of far flung traveling, because in reality, I’m not related to those people.

This awareness came back full force yesterday as my family has been going through an extreme phase of de-cluttering. As I now approach my own 66th birthday, I seem to be even more able than ever to let a lot of irrelevant stuff go.

Of course, I do acknowledge those relationships that helped to shape me in my youth. The adoptive grandparents and the aunts, uncles and cousins related to them had influence in my life and I do have fond memories of loving gestures and concern, as well as any opportunities that actually did come my way through these people. There will always be a place in my heart for these people who chose to love and nurture my parents and because of them – for us who were the children and so were treated equally as being somehow “related”. Though we weren’t, not really.

Now that I do know who my original grandparents were, it is these people who I think of as grandparents and there are new aunts but most of that ancestral level of relationship has already died and I’ll never be able to know them but second-hand through those who are my true cousins in a genetic sense.

While I honor and acknowledge the more direct relationships that came my way because of the adoption of my parents, the siblings and ancestors of those adoptive grandparents have lost all meaning for me. I am simply not related to those persons and their familial history holds no interest for me any longer.

My mom belonged to Ancestry and found she had to quit working on the family trees that were based on the circumstance of having been adopted. She said, “They just weren’t REAL to me.” I understand. In a short period of time, I have come to feel the same way.

Not Real

This is complicated. It is weird growing up knowing your grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins are not really related to you. That is what it is like when BOTH of your parents were adopted. Adoptees experience adoption as individually as any two people experience reality.

My mom had to stop creating the family trees on Ancestry because she said to me, it just isn’t real. She somewhat hollowly said she was glad she was adopted but I knew from long years as her confidant that wasn’t totally true. She was glad that as a Georgia Tann baby she didn’t end up in worse circumstances. She ended up in a wealthy home with privileges.

So much so, that when she conceived me with a boy that came from very humble beginnings, her parents really felt disappointed that she had married below her class. My adoptive grandparents never shared family holidays until I was well into maturity and then I only remember one occasion when the 3 of them were all present for one Thanksgiving (my mom’s adoptive father having died long before that time).

While my adoptive grandparents certainly played their roles for real and had an enormous impact on all of our lives, now that I know the truth of who my parent’s original parents were, that is who I think of when I think about my grandparents, even though I had no in life real experiences with them.

At my age, it is not uncommon for one’s parents to have died and if that is so, one’s grandparents have also died. It’s not that I think those adoptive aunts, uncles and cousins are not really “good” people – they are.

Yet, now that I have cousins and one aunt who are genetically related to me, I’m all about slowly without a lot of force, experiencing their lives and all that unfolds in any human life as a way that I can become better acquainted. To build familial relationships with people that share some of my genetic DNA during whatever time we have left in this world.