Tag: Poverty

Family Preservation

Today, I discovered a whole world of efforts to preserve natural families and reduce the incidence of adoption to those children who truly need a family.

As the child of two adoptees, who barely avoided becoming one myself (my mother conceived me in high school out of wedlock) and as the aunt of my sister’s children given up for adoption, or taken from them by caring grandparents who proceeded to poison the poor child against their own mother and her family, and as someone who lost custody of my own daughter without intending to, simply for economic reasons – I really care about being part of the evolving trend of doing everything humanly possible to keep mothers and their children together.

Today, I discovered familypreservation365.com and their related efforts.  In googling for images, I found there are many people out there trying keep families intact.

Adoption is a valuable alternative when there isn’t any other.  It should be used sparingly and for all of the right reasons.

No Support

I came across a graphic today (clearly of a political nature but I won’t point fingers), the truth is we do not support mothers and children well enough.  I thought adoptees were orphans but most actually do have a natural family from which they were conceived.

It is also true that the financial motivation for a mother to give up her child is two fold – one is that she has no financial or familial support to raise her own child.  The other is that the baby that is in demand is usually white.  Within communities of color, there is generally more support for an unwed or single mother and less demand that she relinquish her baby.

The points in the graphic that I saw this morning run in a continuum.

[1] Restricting access to birth control

[2] Restricting access to abortion

[3] Lack of employer support

[4] Loss of employment due to pregnancy

(I experienced this one in the early 1970s and I was married and working as a sales clerk in the infants department at Sears)

[5] Restricting access to the nutritional supports of WIC and food stamps

[6] General lack of health insurance

[7] Lack of employer or caregiving support during a child’s illness

[8] Denial of unemployment if fired due to having to care for a sick child

[9] Lack of funding for after-school programs to provide a safe place for children until the mother finishes work

[10] Lack of fair pay for equal work

Government run for the wealthiest citizens simply doesn’t care about the poverty experienced within most families in this country.  My guess is they would prefer we go the way of the dinosaurs.

Cutting Ties

There is one simple and critical fact – the adoptee was there, experienced being “left” by the biological mother and handed over to strangers.  It makes no difference if the child was a few minutes or a few days old.

For 40 weeks he shared an experience with a person with whom he likely bonded in utero, a person to whom he is biologically, genetically, historically and psychologically, emotionally and spiritually connected.

~ from The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier

If the above is true, and my heart tells me that it is so, then how much more intense was the separation for both of my parents who had been with their natural mothers for months.

In the picture of my maternal grandmother holding my mom for the last time, after she had already been left in the Porter-Leath Orphanage – only for temporary care while my grandmother tried to find some way to provide for them both – I see the joy on her face.  I see her head craning in the direction of her mother as the nurse holds her so they can make some photos of her for my adoptive grandmother to approve as the little sister she was seeking for her previously adopted son.

I am told my dad’s mother was still breastfeeding him when my Granny took him home with her.  What must he have thought the next time he was hungry?

I can understand the need for children to be adopted when they are true orphans without family or being honestly abused.  However, poverty should not be the reason women lose their children.  In my family, that was always the reason a child ended up adopted.

One reform that has been suggested (and based on comments by adult adoptees in a Facebook group I belong to, seems relevant to their own feelings in maturity) is that there be only a form of guardianship where the child keeps their own name and heritage but has the security of a permanent home.

My parents were forced into false identities with made up names and altered birth certificates and not allowed to discover the truth even after well into their adulthoods, and truly, they died not knowing anything about the families they were born into.

The flaw in that “reform” idea is that it would be too much like foster care, robbing the child of a sense of family.  In reality, the only real solution is finding methods of keeping mothers and their children together whenever possible.