The Shift

Adoption shifted the focus of charitable organizations from providing homes for truly homeless and orphaned children to the profit motivated supply of infants to childless couples with the financial resources to afford it.

A number of reasons were used to justify separating mothers and their infants. Not because it was profitable – of course.

Punishing unmarried mothers, preventing a reliance on public assistance which might raise the cost to taxpayers – the planned removal of white infants from white unmarried mothers who were deemed unfit for whatever reason – including a perception the mother was neurotic for wanting to keep her baby – was perpetrated by adoption social workers.

Unmarried mothers were sometimes viewed as breeding machines when the demand for these infants exceeded supply. A high demand coupled with low supply increased the pressure on unmarried mothers to surrender their babies.

It isn’t difficult to see how this created serious abuses around a mother’s relinquishment of her child. Georgia Tann opportunistically profited from the shift.

Approval

I came across a perception recently that adoptive parents are always hungry for stories coming from adoptees. That what they are really seeking is approval that they are doing the right thing.

As adoptees are speaking up more in these modern times about how adoption has impacted their lives and affected their choices, the people who always had the privileged position in the adoption triad are now questioning their motives (or should be, if they aren’t).

What’s been done cannot be undone and the results are a fact of life. That is the case for all of the adoptees in my own inner family circle.

But caring people should be paying attention because prospective parents could still seek to help a life be more stable by looking to the foster care system and offering a permanent solution for the older youth incarcerated within it.

Society could find it in it’s compassionate heart to be supportive of young women who find themselves pregnant with inadequate resources to parent their child. We could find ways to help them rather than leave them at the mercy of a profit focused business model seeking to effectively sell their babies away from them.

Every person and every action affects the whole collective. It is said that the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can cause a tsunami of good around the world. Adoptees are fluttering their wings these days.

You’ve Come A Long Way

Until very recently, a woman would not chose to be a single mother. A lot depends on her financial resources or ability to access available resources which does vary a lot. I know more than one woman who made the choice to parent without an “official” father (though every baby has a father, somehow, even if that father was a sperm donor).

From the dawn of the adoption business (and it is a business), single mothers were no longer encouraged to parent their child but instead to surrender the child to adoption. I know this was already happening as early as the 1930s. Babies ended up adopted because “Unmarried women didn’t raise their children back then.” said by one original mother after reunion.

Unmarried women were treated with contempt for doing what nature intended. I remember running up against this belief unbelievably in today’s modern times. My paternal grandfather’s step-granddaughter (he had married her grandmother as a second wife) said my grandmother was a “Scarlet” because she was unwed. In effect, she was judging my grandmother as morally deficient. I didn’t appreciate the contempt she expressed.

I suspect that my grandmother didn’t know he was married when she first started dating him but I am certain she did know by the time she knew she was pregnant.

The sad fact was – If you were unmarried and pregnant, you weren’t valued. A “Baby Daddy” was valued even less. It is interesting I only ran up against that derogatory label for a father recently at a writer’s conference.

Anyway, adoption is changing. As I explored my dad’s origins with the Salvation Army, they told me they had to shut down their unwed mother’s homes because of Roe v Wade. I’m certain that has played a role but I suspect an equal or greater role in that demise is that single moms are treated with less derision today.

Gender Inequality

Somehow, in my own family’s experiences, it seems to me that the financial and real life burdens of parenthood fall mostly on the mothers.

Both of my grandmothers conceived my parents with the help of men 2 decades older than them and yet the burden fell solely upon my grandmothers. Until the marriage I am presently in, for myself and each of my sisters, our ability to parent the children we conceived was directly impacted by our ability to provide for them, therefore, we were robbed of that joy in life.

There continues to be a huge inequality in how women are paid and in the costs they must bear as mothers in regards to their careers and their ability to create enough financial strength to provide for all the basics in life.

No wonder women experience so much dissatisfaction and no wonder many of them do not feel that marriage is a beneficial situation, even if they are also dependent upon the male half of their couple for their financial support. Many times the male half refuses to provide that support or in some way, if the woman has any qualities to offer, will exploit her contribution or wealth for his own comfort and success.

I don’t know how, as a society, we fix this imbalance and make economic support more equal for the majority of people, and especially for the parents of children – but I do know we are not there yet.

Reform

Late last night I waded into a lengthy thread in a private group here at Facebook related to adoption. More specifically, they are on a mission to mostly, if not completely, end adoption. The most compelling and highlighted “voices” are those of adoptees with the mothers who lost a child to adoption given the next highest priority. Adoptive Parents (or those who hope to) can find themselves under heavy fire and not all of them can cope with that.

I do believe the voices in this group speak honestly a perspective that really needs to be seriously considered.

Other than financial inheritance questions which primarily affect wealthy adoptive parents and the children they adopt (I am familiar with that from my own family’s dynamics), there really is NO good argument for ever adopting a child.

There are alternatives – taking in a foster care child who really needs a home and providing for it (not adopting it and accordingly to my understanding, foster care is generally considered temporary and reunification with the natural family is the goal). Another alternative is guardianship and NOT changing the child’s identity at all (no name change, falsified identity, birth certificate tampering). When the child (who generally has no say in the adoption process) becomes an adult, then they can decide what kind of formal or informal relationships they want going forward.

One other suggestion would be for a couple who believes they want to adopt to basically become a kind of loving aunt and uncle to a mother and her child. Provide the support that the mother’s own family and society may not be willing to give to her.

Though not all adoptees admit to being harmed by having been adopted, the majority have wounds, may be in therapy or commit suicide at a higher rate than the general population.

ALL adoptions require the separation of a child from its natural mother and all children would chose the natural mother if financial support and mental health requirements could be met to allow them to stay together.

A High Price

While adoption may “succeed” in one sense, providing the financial aspects of a child’s survival and in the best cases even love, it comes at a high price.

A price so high that I question why the practice is used so cavalierly.

I think we could reduce the incidence of children removed from their original parents without ending the value of adoption for the children who will do better if they are raised by other surrogate “parents”.

Many adult adoptees believe the particulars (birth name, birth date, actual parents) of a child’s original identity should never be changed. That the surrogates should not be “parents” but guardians instead. The process still needs to be “better” than the average “foster care” which seems to result in less than optimum outcomes at times.

Same Kind of Different as Me

In the movie, Same Kind of Different as Me, Ann Mahoney has a decidedly un-glamorous role. I could not find an image for that but this is the woman who portrays Clara. During a beauty makeover, at the outreach center that provides meals for the homeless, she shares her story. Her child was taken away from her because she couldn’t provide for him and she breaks down into sobs and tears over that loss.

This is an all too true story for too many women who have their children taken away from them over economic factors. There are activists today who seek to help single mothers find the resources they need to parent their children rather than surrender them to adoption. I think that is a beautiful thing.

At the funeral at the end of this movie, one sees her holding the hand of a little boy as she leaves a single yellow rose along with the many other homeless people who’s lives had been touched by Debbie Hall, the true life inspiration of love that is the center of this movie.

Most people probably don’t even really notice that moment in the movie, but I did. I’ve been focused on issues of mother/child separations since I realized that this happened to both of my original grandmothers (both of my parents were adoptees who never knew their original mothers beyond the first few months of their lives – probably around 8 mos for each).