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.

Did The Child Need Another Home ?

It’s the end of the month of August. I didn’t know there was such a thing as “Child Support Awareness” but it is probably the most crucial issue in whether a child is raised by the couple who conceived them or adopted by people who have no genetic relationship to them.

Adoption has primarily served couples afflicted by infertility who have the financial ability to “buy” a child to fill their need. One can argue the semantics but that is what it comes down to.

What are the other situations in life where we cannot have something, so we feel entitled to take something belonging to someone else ? In the case of adoption, that something is a human infant.

If it were a car in a parking lot, it would absolutely be considered stealing to feel an entitlement to take it because one couldn’t obtain one any other way.

People who adopt want to feel good about adopting someone else’s baby. They justify this by saying things like “the child needed a home ANYWAY… they were giving the child away regardless …. someone else would have adopted if not me….”.

What if, instead of selling the baby of a struggling parent to wealthier people, society decided to support the parents in keeping and raising the child ? Many of the emotional and traumatic impacts of adoption would cease to exist. Adoption is a process in serious need of reforms.

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.

National Infant Adoption Reform Act

There is more than one effort and while none of them have succeeded completely, awareness means that improvements will continue to progress, or so I do want to believe.

One women’s story –

Losing my son to an unnecessary adoption has been devastating. A part of me died, and my children have been traumatized by being unnecessarily separated. It has given me insight into the billion dollar industry of infant adoption. I have been driven to bring awareness to the injustice of coercive persuasion that exists today. There is no accountability and no consequences when an adoption professional participates in coercion of a mother in crisis. Adoption so often is a permanent decision made by a resourceless, overwhelmed mother facing more often than not temporary crisis. This was my situation.

All I needed was someone to tell me to take my son home from the hospital and to really sit down and eliminate and/or break down the obstacles I felt I was facing. If mothers are given support to not feel she has to make a decision before leaving the hospital is imperative to give the mother time to bond with her child and her hormones time to level off. I have done exactly this with over 50 mothers and showed them that what they were facing was temporary and did not warrant a permanent, lifelong, traumatic separation for both herself and her infant. It has been life-changing for all of them, and they are so very grateful.

No mother should be in contact with any adoption professional prior to the birth of her child. Pre-birth anything creates obligation and focus is taken off the mother and her child and the very special experience of childbirth. Money needs to come out of adoption. It will eliminate adoption fraud, it will eliminate coercive persuasion that paying ‘expenses’ for a pregnant mother in crisis creates. No mother should be able to sign any relinquishment papers until she is 6-8 weeks post partum, and has been cleared of post partum depression. A mother is considered ‘disabled’ for weeks by insurance companies after having a child, yet a mother in crisis is expected to make a permanent lifelong decision hours after going through one of the most wonderfully beautiful and traumatic times in her life. This needs to change. Mother’s need support and families need protection.

To read a proposed bill to reform adoption, go here –

http://www.adoptionbirthmothers.com/adoption/niara-national-infant-adoption-reform-act/

It’s Better To Know

Searching for where an adoptee came from requires a special kind of courage. It might be opening up a “can of worms” has my dad always believed. There could be disappointment. The relatives one finds are real people with real flaws and also a kind of beauty because they are a connection. It is better to know who you are rather than live in a mystery.

For an adoptee, the connection to one’s ancestors has been broken. That matters. When adoption is in one’s family history, those impacted only want answers and the truth. There isn’t a desire to disrupt anyone’s life. If relatives want to meet – wonderful – those I have met have been very helpful in filling in the understandable gaps in my ancestry. Sharing the stories we weren’t there for can help us to heal.

Loss of the most sacred bond in life, that of a mother and child, is one of the most severe traumas and this loss will require long-term, if not lifelong, therapy. If not therapy, then answers and a knowledge of something that is real and not falsified.

Finding one’s roots does not deny the love and value that one gives to the people who were there in life thanks to adoption. The aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents in my own life are treasured and held precious even if there is no true genetic bond with these.

A life can be symbolized by a circle – birth, maturity, old age and death – completion, rebirth or heaven. Coming to know my roots has also been a kind of completion, a bringing the arc of my life full circle.

Acceptance

My adoptee mom shared with me before she died that she had to stop working on the family tree at Ancestry that she had been creating from the lineage of the adoptive parents (my dad was also an adoptee). She said “It just wasn’t real to me. I am adopted.” Then she added, “Glad I was.” because she had reached a place of acceptance that she would never know her origins and whether having been adopted was actually a “good” thing or not.

Acceptance is a phase of grieving. My mom grieved that her original mother had died before her search began. Arriving at acceptance can feel lighter, more balanced and has the ability to realize what all of our experiences have brought to us.

Adoptees will likely struggle with what it means to belong to two families. Coming to terms with that, could also make comfortable – duality, complexity and ambiguity. An adoptee may be able to see both/and rather than either/or.

What will always be true is that an adoptee can never be not adopted. That’s a given.

Adoption can add an element of compassion. There is no getting around the reality that the adoptee was given up. Taken in by strangers. There are consequences to both.

Healing can happen when an adoptee can accept that what happened, happened. This was their fate. They were surrendered by one mother and raised by a different one. An adoptee can’t avoid the pain that is part of that experience.

Platitudes such as “everything happens for a reason” or “it’s all part of God’s plan” are not helpful. Nor are attitudes that an adult adoptee should simply “move on” or “get over it” or “stop dwelling in the past”. These are not helpful either. The past is an adoptee’s history, their identity, their connection to a concept of family.

Babies adopted shortly after birth experience a trauma so early in life that there is no “before” the trauma to return to. Consider that. Add to it the pain adoptees experience by being mostly invalidated by society.

So better words don’t include a non-adoptee’s judgement of what would have been better or worse. A simple acknowledgement of fact is enough. Adoption can’t be undone.

Even so, an adoptee can know that they are also a survivor with those kinds of strengths and gifts. The adoption system is deeply flawed. Seeking to reform it is a worthy outcome for having gone through the experience.

Adoption – Open or Closed – What’s Best ?

Today, in modern adoption, there are more open adoptions than there were in the past.

In an open adoption, a young adoptee may grow up alongside the parents who conceived them and gave birth, though these parents are not part of the family household the adoptee grows up within. Even so, there is sharing time together, visiting and writing to one another. In an open adoption, you see and get to know your original parents but you don’t have them as your parents.

Up until recently, most adoptions were closed and so, in order to know the people an adoptee was born to, they had to seek a reunion after they became an adult; or at the least, a much older child, as in a teenager.

If it were actually possible for any adoptee to compare the outcomes they would have experienced with each method, what would they choose in full awareness ? Would they want to know their original parents throughout their whole lives ? Do they think that knowing them would make their lives better or worse ?

Of course, there is no such choice for adoptees. Open adoption seeks to make the adoption experience better by taking away the secrecy and shame.

Are the issues the same for an adoptee whether it was an open or closed adoption ? Or does an open adoption simply create a whole new set of issues that didn’t exist within
the close adoption system ?

In a good reunion process, the adoptee is able to explain to the original parent(s) – their feelings of hurt, abandonment and/or anger – which were all caused by the decision of their original parents to surrender their child for adoption.

Can any child go through something as traumatic as being given up and still process it all at the same time – are they able to talk to the original parent about the feelings common among all adoptees at the same time as they are being experienced ? This is not an answerable question as the two kinds of adoption experience do not allow such comparisons.

It can be quite painful for an adoptee to hear about a birth mother who is satisfied with having relinquished her child for adoption. Yet, many such mothers were absolutely convinced at the time they made that choice that they were doing the best thing for their child.

Years later, many birth mothers wish they had kept their child, and that is why there are groups of adoptees actively working to encourage young unwed or troubled expectant mothers to make an effort to parent first before making a decision to relinquish their child to adoption.

The fact is – adoption exists – and it will likely always exist because there is a need and/or desire for that in some circumstances. The hard truth is that not all parents to be actually want to devote themselves to raising a child.

In seeking to reform the practice of adoption, the more we are able to ask piercing questions, explore with those involved the reason for their decisions and just plain understand at a very deep level all aspects of the experience, the better we will be able to shape the future of adoption into better outcomes for all concerned.

Naturally Reducing The Population

At the end of Real Time with Bill Maher for April 12, 2019, his rant is about population pressures in general and the over population compared to available resources which often drives migration. Maher noted that 18 to 35 year olds are having less sex than previous cohorts. That is a good thing. He advised masturbate don’t procreate.

He noted that more young people remain in their parental homes longer now. That is not a bad thing either. I have no expectation regarding my sons leaving our home. As I approached my senior year in high school, I simply knew my parents expected me to leave and had I not married a month before I graduated, I already had plans to share an apartment with a friend.

When I was in high school, my concern was not getting pregnant out of wedlock and I will admit that I simply got lucky. Having learned my adoptee parents’ origins stories and realizing my mother was pregnant with me out of wedlock and yet she was not sent off to a home to have and give me up, I got lucky then as well.

Another factor in young people having less physical sex may be the easy availability of pornography on the internet which I have read is more stimulating than the real thing and thus the real thing can prove disappointing.

Whatever the reasons, the current population uses 1.7 times more, almost twice the available resources that the planet has to sustain us long term. I don’t recommend wantonly killing off large segments of the population (though some elites and political types seem to favor such a solution) but if a lower birth rate could produce less stress upon the planet, I do believe that would be a good thing.

One final thought – many adoptees wish their original mothers had aborted them instead of giving them up. There is that much trauma associated with the practice. Considering that the planet is already overpopulated and some of those lives that the pro-life folks have preserved wish they had not been, maybe we all should drop arguments against the availability of safe and medically appropriate abortions. Just saying . . . one should think about it more deeply.

Links in the Chain of Life

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 ?

I’ve not met one yet who would not want to know what became of their child, though everything that can be thought of does exist. I would also wonder if it is a denial of pain long suppressed. I do know I have felt a bit “unwanted” by one genetic relative when I turned up. “Oh yes, I do remember hearing she had a daughter . . . ” an inconvenient truth, I suppose.

When a woman has a child, even if for whatever reason she gave that child up for adoption, it is my belief that child is still owed an identity, you owe them at least this.

Each of us wants to understand our place in the chain of life. Closed adoptions with sealed records are like the lock up there in the middle of the links of a chain.

Does such a mother have a right to be free of the trauma of confrontation ? How about the denial of joy in knowing where they come from for the child ?

In most cases, I do not believe a confrontation with one’s now grown child would be traumatic, unless the outcome of that child is one that causes a deep regret and sense of responsibility in the original mother.

I don’t believe that anyone who conceives a child has any right to privacy from that reality. A woman who insists on such a “right” is at the same time infringing upon the right of an adoptee.

Entitlement

It has been a long process for me of wrapping my mind around the issues of what is bad about adoption and needs reform. Forgive me a little rant and hopefully a bit of educating for those who care but really don’t know what the issues are. Thanks to an outspoken group of women who are adoptees, or have been in the institutional trenches, I am beginning to understand there are problems in adoptionland.

I’ll share a few as starters.

Going all the way back to the 1930s, and my own grandmothers – up through my own sisters, I believe they would have ALL kept their children – IF they had had the support they needed.

In adoption propaganda, it is often said that the original parents made the “most selfless decision” by giving up the raising of their own child. It is not selfish to want to keep your child, even when you are struggling to do so. It is not a selfless decision to give your child to someone else, it is an act of desperation.

The determining factor should always be what matters most for the well-being of the child. The dominant narrative in the adoption community has been stories of “selfless birth parents” who simply wanted a “better life” for their child. Of course, they wanted a “better life” and they would have preferred to have been the ones providing it.

There are alternatives to adoption for infertile couples – kinship care, legal guardianship without lying on birth certificates or choosing the charity of giving whatever kind of assistance the original Mom or Dad need to help them parent successfully.

I seriously question the agenda of Christians who push adoption. I suspect they are wanting to create more Christians by taking children who would not have been raised according to their own belief system, knowing that their way is the superior one of course, and indoctrinating these children into “the way” of their own religion.

And I am seriously concerned by crowd funding for adoption costs without any qualms on the parts of those donating money – while not once considering crowd funding to help a Mom or Dad keep their baby. Our values are misplaced people.

So are adoptive parents fears that the child will NOT be theirs PERMANENTLY supposed to outweigh what is now known to be better for the children?

What is known ?

Separation should be the last resort. We KNOW there is trauma from the separation, even if it happens at birth. We KNOW children need genetic mirrors. We KNOW people have a right to know the truth about themselves. We know so much that points to a practice where, based on the best interest of the CHILD, we should avoid the permanent legal and physical severing of a child from their genetic parentage and family through adoption.

Guardianship provides all the emotional support any child needs and as much safe permanency.

And another thought – if people are really so dead set on parenting, and they can’t reproduce (are infertile), they can still act as guardians and caregivers to older kids who really do need someone. In today’s society – unfortunately – there are a lot of kids that could use that kind of help.

Those who wish to provide a home for a child should be OK with not getting an infant and fake papers saying they gave birth to that child. This is denial and self-delusion on the part of infertile, adoptive parents – and it IS harmful to the child.

Every baby brought into this world and then given to someone else to raise is aware and does care about what happened to separate them from their original parents.

Please realize that there’s always a situation that makes the original parents feel they have no other choice but to give up their precious child. Whether it be finances, homelessness, the mother’s relationship with the baby’s father, or a lack of support during and after the pregnancy.

None of those “reasons” should be the determining factor leading to separation from their baby. They are all temporary circumstances which time may heal given resources when they are most needed.