In Defense Of

I do believe in all the reforms I have previously written about – retaining identity and family history information, not changing names or birth dates and not listing adoptive parents as the original parent. Beyond that is a consideration for guardianship rather than permanent adoption.

All that said, from direct experience, adoptive parents have been a part of my own family’s life in positive ways. First of all – my grandparents by adopting each of my parents. On each side, they were a positive influence on my life and the lives of my siblings as well as on my parent’s lives. They were good people who meant well. What we now know about the wounds suffered by adoptees was not known at the time they took possession of my parents.

My mom’s adoptive parents modeled financial security for us and affirmed the value of advanced education. My dad’s adoptive parents modeled faith and uncompromising personal values for us. My dad’s adoptive parents may even have been responsible for keeping my parents together by getting married and preventing me from being given up when my teenage mother found herself pregnant. I am grateful for that much.

Each of my sisters gave up a baby to adoption and these two children are fine adults. In one case, my niece is showing us what a good and consistent mother she can be. Even though she has been reunited with my family, she has remained steadfast in her appreciation for the people who raised her.

My nephew could not be a higher quality person. His adoptive mother has gone the extra mile to answer the identity questions that evolved as he matured. It appears that even my sister either didn’t know who his actual father was or chose to name the person who had the financial resources to help her make what has proven to be a quality choice as a substitute mother. Given my sister’s very evident mental illness, it is for the best that she didn’t try to raise him.

All that to say, while I remain firmly of the opinion that there are better ways to provide for the welfare of children than adoption, it is not that the adoptive parents in my own family’s life were to blame. It was naive ignorance and the intention to do good – which all of them have.

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.

Hard Questions

Adoption makes this true.

The questions carry a completely different weight than they did just months ago before we adopted. A place where my heart screams that he is mine forever but that same heart plummets into a deep ache knowing the gravity of loss he has already faced. The loss of the mother in whose womb he grew.

He will always know he’s adopted. I tell his story to him every night at bedtime. I ask all the normal questions.

I wonder about the day he will ask about his birth parents. Will there be a constant ringing in his ears to know them? Will he feel the guilt of reassuring us, as the adoptive parents, that the ringing has nothing to do with us?

Will I be able to honestly, deeply, and fully lock arms with him while he searches for answers?

I can wait for the hard questions but know when you start to ask, your worth is immense, your value is priceless, and I will always and forever, be right by your side.

A true story. One worth pondering if you are planning to adopt. Someday, that child will want to know where they come from and why they are not being raised by the people who conceived them.

When You Don’t Control The Narrative

When adoptees are little, it is natural to fixate on matters such as birth and death, and to even try to appeal to and please the adoptive parents by talking about the adoption in a fairytale way (as a safety mechanism for survival; trying to be always in good graces, and assure one’s self that everything is fine, because your identity and sense of security are fragile). Adoptees suffer complicated emotions like grief, loss, and triggers in isolation.

Some adoptees believe their feelings are always wrong. They are expected to think about everyone’s feelings but their own. No wonder so many adoptees are people pleasers (which enforces the ‘good complaint adoptee’ persona as a necessary expression and explains why so many adoptees are afraid of speaking out – fearing rejection by the larger society). It can leave them with a lot of issues related to control because they feel like their life story isn’t their own. Everyone else is defining it for them. Personally, I tend to rebel at being forced to do anything that isn’t my own idea to begin with.

Imagine the adoptee then. Effectively kidnapped at a very young age, many on their first day on Earth. It’s no wonder some infants who have been separated from their mother and placed with complete strangers scream for quite a long time. There is evidence in my mom’s adoption file that she required sedating medication to calm down. So sad.

If they are nothing else, adoptees are survivors – IF they make it to adulthood, even a little bit intact – though many exhibit behaviors that are self-harming. Many become victims of an effect similar to Stockholm Syndrome. This is a condition which causes hostages to display a psychological cooperation with their captors during captivity. Sadly, adoptive parents are a variety of captors. Adoptees must exhibit a fierce loyalty to their adoptive parents because their very survival is at stake.

Worth a few minutes to watch – Blake Gibbins, an adoptee, telling it like it is. “Kidnappers with pretty stories.” https://youtu.be/kvBHlrLuats

Trying To Do Better

Though fraught with its own challenges, Open Adoption is an attempt to do the process better by considering the needs of the adoptee and their original parents with equal compassion to the needs of the adopting couple.

Generally speaking, there will be a higher level of personal interaction among the parties. This interaction may take the form of letters, e-mails, photos, telephone calls and visits.

Some of the pitfalls that may occur include an abuse of the trust that the original parents have placed on the assurances of the adopting couple. Interactions may lead to a variety of disappointments. When the adopting couple has invested in the unborn child, financially and emotionally, the original parents may feel obligated to go through with relinquishing the baby. If the adopting couple changes their mind shortly before or after the birth, it may place the child in a state of limbo and cause a referral to foster care.

In agreeing to an open adoption, the adopting couple may find the original family has greater expectations than they anticipated in agreeing to the situation. Within the extended birth family may be individuals who are not conventionally stable which may even be part of the reason the child was surrendered.

Some of the original justifications of closed adoptions have included fears that having duplicate mothers, fathers, grandparents and other extended family would make it more difficult for the child to assimilate into the new family unit. If contact between the original and adopting families ceases for whatever reason, the adoptee could be left feeling even more rejected than is commonly the experience for adopted children. There can be social complications for the child among their peers.

Identity and family history are the most important reason for open adoptions. Denying the child access to that information violates basic human rights. Adoption will never be the perfect circumstance for any child but trying to do it better does matter.

Why One’s Name Is Important

This is an actual homework assignment. Now, imagine you were adopted. How do you answer these questions in a classroom where most of the other children were not adopted ?

One of the reforms most mentioned in the adoptee community is the importance of a child keeping the name they were given at birth. My mother, really cared about her birth name, once she learned what it was. My father discovered his birth name when his adoptive parents died and was surprised by it.

Changing a child’s name after adopting them is taking away their legitimate identity in an effort to pass them off as having come directly from you – as though you gave birth to them. In fact, adoptee’s birth certificates are changed to further the false story of their origins.

Certainly, in a more morally judgmental time, the idea was that adoptees were bastards who needed to be protected from the cruelty of being outed. Now single mothers give birth to children intentionally. Times have changed and so should how we protect and nurture a child who’s parents are just not ready to be fully supportive of them.

Every child has a right to their authentic identity and to their actual conception and origins stories. The time is now for a good reform.

You Should Be Grateful

Of all the unreasonable expectations people tend to put upon an adoptee, the demand that they be grateful for having been adopted is perhaps one of the most painful.

Do you realize ?

The adoptee lost their complete family in one foul swoop. They lost their mother, perhaps as soon as the day they were born. They also lost their identity, background information, heritage, genealogy, birth certificate, familiarities, equal rights, similarities, health information and a knowledge of where their inherited traits came from.

Adoption is the only trauma for which the traumatized are told by society that they should be grateful for it’s occurrence. Compassion that it happened to a person is a better expectation.

Motherhood Rights

What about women who do NOT want to know the children they gave up for adoption, do they have the right to not have their identities revealed ?

No, you have a child, you owe them an identity, you owe them at least this – their place in the chain of life.

Does such a mother have a right to be free of the trauma of confrontation ?

I don’t believe a confrontation would be traumatic.

No right to that privacy. Once you are a mother, you are a mother – even if you don’t raise that child. The issue in reform is when the rights of the original mother infringe on the rights of an adoptee.

Nature and Nurture

Almost 20 years ago, as I lay in the hospital recovering from the cesarean section that delivered my oldest son, I had this book and was reading it. It was a realistic and eye-opening perspective on motherhood throughout the ages including child abandonment.

In her book, Hrdy strips away stereotypes and gender-biased myths to demonstrate that traditional views of maternal behavior are essentially wishful thinking codified as objective observation. As Hrdy argues, far from being “selfless,” successful primate mothers have always combined nurturing with ambition, mother love with sexual love, ambivalence with devotion. In fact all mothers, in the struggle to guarantee both their own survival and that of their offspring, deal nimbly with competing demands and conflicting strategies.

It is any parent’s job to nurture the child’s nature. While my two sons are mash-ups of the same genetics, they are each quite different from one another. As parents, it is our job to respect their individual differences. It is our job to provide the nurturing most appropriate for their innate personalities.

A genetic connection allows parental recognition that yields useful insights about how we handle certain situations. Our boys are their natures. That’s the essence of who they are. We hope they enter adulthood with a solid sense of self and identity.

The adoption system is not set up to help adoptees understand or connect to their own natures and true selves in any way. It’s an identity and sense-of-self guessing game.

The adoptive parents are unable to offer a genetic connection insight. Adoptive parents are required to nurture a nature that is unfamiliar and new to them.

There are unique needs to parenting an adoptee. If there are expectations that the adoptee is able to go against their essence, it can become a struggle.

Nature is with all of us from the moment we are conceived. Each of us is programmed by the genetics and the womb that we grew to independence through.

Raising an adopted child is not the same as raising a natural child.

The most successful adoptive parents find a way to step back and observe the child they are raising so that they can encourage the child’s nature to blossom.

It is NOT a competition. Nurture does not need to fight against nature in a battle of wills to win it’s perspective. A child’s nature only needs to be nurtured in a way that is respectful with an understanding of their life’s circumstances.

People Still Buy Babies

In this day and time so far away from the scandals of Georgia Tann stealing and selling babies, I never expected to see someone actually talking about “buying” a baby. It troubles my heart though realistically, one doesn’t come by a baby without cost, even when that child is gestated in their body.

The bit of advertisement above came from a FB group called “Mothers United Against Anti-Adoption”. I removed the more personal, identifying information.

I’m not joining and I am NOT “anti-adoption”. I have simply come to understand that being adopted is way more complicated than I understood growing up or for most of my life (both of my parents were adopted).

I agree that regardless of how you become a mother (or father), the common thread is love. And whether we are natural or adoptive parents, we all go through the same kinds of challenges of feeling like an utter failure. As one adoptive mom said in a Huffington Post article –

“Some days I get tired of it all and just want to be a family. Not the adoptive family … just a family.”

A young woman approached the adoptive parent (it is a transracial adoption and so it was rather obvious), “I was adopted as a baby and it has been a wonderful thing. We need more families like yours.” I stared at her, stunned.

“She didn’t think what I assumed everyone was thinking. She saw beauty and love and hope and family. She thought we were wonderful and it made her smile.”

There are children who need alternative parents for whatever reason. What is perceived as “anti-adoption” issues are really mainly related to two core issues –

[1] Identity and Genetics – let your adopted child keep their original name and don’t have their birth certificate altered.

[2] Family Preservation – whenever possible, the natural parents should be supported in locating the resources to parent their children and given every encouragement.

For those times when a child actually does need alternative parents, then adoption fills a need.