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.

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.

An Inconvenient Truth

Adoption is not the gray area it is often portrayed by the industry as. It is more black and white, with that overlap of gray.

As difficult as it may be to fully realize, in order to adopt, on some level you are okay with taking someone else’s child from them. You may not even be willing to consider the pain it causes the original mother and/or father.

This the inconvenient truth at the heart of becoming an adoptive parent. You may want to “believe” you are some kind of heroic savior but you really are simply wanting something (a child) that for whatever reason you don’t believe you can have any other way.

Some people can do this and function adequately to parent that child. Many adoptees, even though they have LIVED that condition, can’t reconcile the thought that this was okay with their adoptive parents.

This is not to judge or dismiss the reality that some children may actually fare better than they would have with their original parents. I can see this in my own family dynamics. Because I have the kind of faith that believes given a long enough view throughout time, it all works out – both at the physical level and in the soul karmic level.

There are always excuses on the part of adoptive parents. What if this ? What if that ? But I did this or I did that. If I had not, then what MIGHT have happened to that child ?

I respect ALL of the adoptive parents that are a part of my family’s life story. The adoption reform movement wishes only that adoptive parents recognize that their decision to adopt a child was driven by a desire to fulfill their own “selfish” motives. To be honest about that. They can admit simply that they wanted kids and couldn’t have them using their own reproductive capabilities. It was always about what they personally wanted for themselves.

It’s not the only thing that would make adoption concepts more honest but it is a beginning on the adoptive parent side of a complicated equation.

A Brief History of Adoption

Willa Cather said that those who gave up carried something painful,
cut off inside, and that their lives had a sense of incompleteness.

Before Georgia Tann, some states had laws that insisted a single mother breastfeed her baby for at least six months. This was to encourage the mother to become emotionally attached and raise her child – thus relieving the state of a need to care for them in an orphanage at public expense.

After Georgia Tann popularized adoption, these babies became a marketable commodity, and this necessitated the separation of mother and child. During the 30s, mothers were sometimes blindfolded during labor to prevent them from seeing their baby.

By the mid-40s, adoption was nationally popular. White single mothers were EXPECTED to surrender their babies to adoption. This policy was endorsed by the Child Welfare League, The Salvation Army, Catholic Charities and most psychiatrists and psychologists.

It was even predicted by a social scientist, Clark Vincent, that in the future, all white newborns from single mothers would be seized by the state – not for punishment – but in the scientific best interest of the child, considering the rehabilitation goals for the unwed mother and the stability of the family and society overall.

Such a concept was even advocated by the author, Pearl Buck, who asked Georgia to collaborate on a book about adoption. Georgia Tann died from the complications of cancer after dictating only two chapters. By then, the scandal of her baby stealing and selling operation seems to have discouraged Buck from pursuing the topic to its completion as a book.

Even so, Georgia Tann had influenced Pearl Buck’s thinking – in a 1955 article in Woman’s Home Companion – Buck advocated legislation forcing single mothers to surrender their babies for adoption – thankfully such a law was never passed.

Social pressure was enough to separate many single mothers from their children. By the 1950s, 90% of white maternity home residents surrendered their children. It is because I understand how close I came to being given up for adoption as I was born in 1954, that I consider it a miracle that I wasn’t. My mom was only 16, unwed and a high school student when I was conceived.

Adoption came to be seen as the perfect solution for infertility. Birth control and abortion were considered threats to the availability of children for such women and it would seem are viewed the same even today.

My source for this information is The Baby Thief: The True Story of the Woman Who Sold Over Five Thousand Neglected, Abused and Stolen Babies by Barbara Bisantz Raymond.

A Better Way ?

Will the business of buying and selling human beings
continue to be an option for those who cannot conceive children ?
~ The Baby Scoop Era

I really don’t expect it to end anytime soon. Having learned all that I have learned over the last year plus, I do not think that adoption is generally a good way to go. There are wounds inflicted on mother, child and even the adoptive parents.

Thankfully, medical science has progressed to the point that many couples who were previously unable to conceive are able to now with assistance. Single women who’ve been unable to find a partner to parent with them can still have children and raise them well.

Medical assistance comes in many forms and sometimes involves more than two people in the genetics and biology of a child. This is the real world we live in today.

With assisted reproduction techniques, babies grow inside their mother and have all of the advantages of natural conception. Therefore, there are no wounds, just a more complicated genetics.

With inexpensive DNA testing, those people who do chose to conceive a child in this manner would do well not to hide it from the child who comes into existence in this manner. Discovering such a reality unexpectedly can wound almost as much as separating a child from its mother can.

Infertility and Adoption

Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption
by Vanessa McGrady

At this point in my own journey, I know quite a bit about adoptees, their issues and wounds. I know a bit about birth parents. I have learned less about the adoptive parent.

Of course, I had four of them – my grandparents – but they weren’t adoptive parents to me, they were my grandparents. It is interesting though, how now when I think about grandparents, it is the original grandparents that I have come to know, that I think of as “my grandparents”.

The issues related to adoption are complex and diverse. I’ve seen letters from my mom’s adoptive mother about how happy she was to receive my mom, for her to become her daughter. I believe it was my dad’s adoptive parents love for him that kept me in the family, instead of being given up for adoption myself.

In the excellent book, The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier, one learns about a lot of the issues. Nothing I have read yet, touches on the issue of infertility that begins the journey of most adoptive parents, like the book I am reading now – Rock Needs River. This book covers the issue well. She also touches on the powerful feelings that an adoptive parent feels towards the child they raise.

I listened to an interview with McGrady today. Here’s a few takeaways.

“Where do I come from?” and “Where do I belong?”
are questions that confound and comfort us
from the time we are tiny until we take our final breath.

Birth parents are marginalized. The decision not to be a parent.
Feminist parenting – about non-gendered opportunities.
Small aggressions are the things we need to stop.