Pregnant? Considering Adoption?

It's been a bit of an adoption carnival at Dawn's this week. One of the things Dawn herself mentioned that got my attention was that when someone wants to research adoption from the crisis pregnancy end of things, there is a dearth of unbiased information available. It's really true. It's been bugging me a lot lately that there is no adoption equivalent to the kind of counseling they offer at abortion clinics for women who are considering abortions. That is, there is no truly disinterested party whose job it exclusively is to talk a woman through her options, her feelings, her values and support her process and decision-making. Even when adoption agencies offer terrific counseling, it's still and adoption agency, bottom line. Adoption agencies keep their lights on at least partly by completing adoptions. Adoptive parents are paying most of those bills. (This is not true of women's health clinics that perform abortions. Abortions don't pay their bills.)

So I've decided that this year, on Nat's birthday, in honor of Mama Rose (Nat's first-, or birth-, or natural-, or biological- or just "mother"), I want to add my google power to the cause of offering any women out there who may be considering placing their babies in adoptive homes a different point of view.

I'm not unbiased. But my bias is somewhat unusual. I am an adoptive mother of two beautiful, fabulous, deeply loved children whose mothers placed them with my partner and me shortly after birth in the expectation of open adoptions. So far, we have held up our end (and then some) of the openness agreements we made with these women. I am not anti-adoption. I think adoption, though always laced with at least some loss and sorrow, can be a wonderful thing and I believe deeply in the idea of people making family without regard to blood ties.

That said, if either of my daughters found themselves in a crisis pregnancy they wanted to carry to term, I would move heaven and earth to make sure that the only adoption that happened would be a family adoption in which my partner and I adopted the baby and kept it within the care of the immediate family.

I feel this way for several reasons:

1) Every adoption professional I've ever met--many of them very good, ethical people--has been on "side" of prospective adoptive parents. Even folks who treat pregnant women well and help them in all kinds of great ways identify themselves with prospective adoptive parents. I am not suggesting this is universally true. But it is overwhelmingly true, given how many of these folks I've dealt with over the past four years in obtaining a foster license and adopting two children.

2) Most of the time, open adoption agreements are not legally binding. This means that an adoptive family can promise a pregnant woman anything, then once the adoption is final, they can disappear at will. Few pregnant women go into making an adoption plan fully informed of their rights and the true loss of those rights after the adoption is final. (Usually, once an adoption is final, the mother who gave birth to the baby has no rights at all.)

3) Relinquishing a child for adoption causes grief and suffering to the mother. This grief and suffering tends to be underplayed by most adoption professionals. Prospective adoptive parents are often told that birth mothers "forget" and/or "move on" and have better lives after the adoption. Worse, sometimes we're told that birth mothers are/were unworthy of their children and it doesn't matter how they feel. We are encouraged to believe that we are saving a baby from a terrible life by adopting her.

I would not want my daughters put into these kinds of situations or characterized in these ways.

Being single, young (a "teen mom") or poor are not good enough reasons alone to relinquish a baby to adoption. It is very important that anyone considering adoption for a baby she is carrying or parenting read about what others in her position have experienced and what they advise. Here are a few places to look for information outside the adoption industry:

Girl-Mom
Webring of Birthmother Blogs
Keep Your Baby
Concerned United Birthparents (CUB)

Here is a link to an organization for adult adoptees pressing for their rights to know where they came from:
Bastard Nation

You might also like to read The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler. It's about what it was like to relinquish a baby for adoption in the 50s and 60's.

Here's a video on YouTube of some birthmothers discussing their experiences.

If you are pregnant and considering adoption, please be sure to do a few things to protect yourself:

1) Make sure you have the full legal story about exactly what your rights are in the state in which you live. How soon are you allowed to sign a relinquishment of your baby? Do you have any right to change your mind once that relinquishment is signed? If you have made an agreement for an open adoption, is this agreement enforceable by law in your state? How will it be enforced if necessary? If you can possibly afford it, hire your own lawyer to represent you in the adoption process. An adoption attorney hired by an adoptive couple works for them and their interests, not you. BEING A MINOR DOES NOT TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO YOUR BABY.

2) Find out what kinds of benefits you are eligible for as a mother of low income. You may be able to afford more than you realize.

3) Read about and talk to other mothers who have gone through what you are going through and listen to what adoptees say about their experience of being adopted.

4) Realize that no matter what you plan to do, as long as you are pregnant and before you sign a relinquishment your baby is your baby and you are a mother, with all the rights of a mother. You get to decide who can or can't be with you at your baby's birth. You get to put the name on your baby's birth certificate. You get to decide whether you will sign anything or not, no matter what you told anyone before the birth and no matter if someone has helped pay your expenses before or at the birth.

Adoption is sometimes necessary or the best possible option for a mother and her baby. Plenty of adoptees grow up happy and healthy and well adjusted. Plenty of birthmothers believe they did the right thing, even if it is painful. But this is NOT the only story and it is never simple for anyone. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

A Few PSes:

1. Please check the comments to this post below. Many readers have additional resources linked there.

2. For more on my own experience of and feelings about adoption, click "Adoption" under the categories list at right, or click here.

3. In retrospect, this post was also about my long-brewing annoyance at the movie Juno and how it seems to make adoption--from a birth mother's perspective--look hip, easy--almost fun--and erases much of adoption's complexity and pain. For my review of Juno, see this post.

Comments

[Catherine]

Thank you sooooo much for this post. Thank you thank you thank you...

[June]

Can we print this up into a pamphlet or something??

[Jenna]

Yet another reason why I think you're the Bees Knees.

A link for expectant parents trying to find out the info about the legalities (because their agency might not be forthright with the info) is childwelfare.gov . They have a state statutes search that covers each state's info about placement, open adoption enforcement and consents (as well as a myriad of other things). I use it frequently when researching for other mothers.

[Natasha]

I totally agree with everything you've said here--and that this is information all women considering placing their children in an adoptive family have a right to know.

There are situations, however, where it is *not* up to a pregnant woman whether or not she places her baby with an adoptive family--for example, social services is already involved in the woman's life, and her baby will be TPR'd at birth and placed in a social-services-selected foster/adoptive home. In such a situation, mom has *no choice* but to place her baby with an adoptive family--one way or another. This non-choice happens more often than we'd like to think.

[Meira]

Should we all link to it to up the google rating?

[KarenWB]

As a mother whose story was featured in "The Girls Who Went Away" (Karen I, Virginia), I would like to thank you for educating people against adopting. Many don't realize that there are humane alternatives to adopting such as kinship care (which you mentioned) and legal guardianship which ensures the child maintains his or her original name and forever access to natural family and all information about heritage.

Adoption HURTS mothers and their children. Please don't adopt.

KarenWB
Richmond, VA
www.babyscoopera.com
www.adoptionhealing.com (co-author, adoption healing for mothers)

[PhoenixRising]

God, I miss the presence of Allie Crews.

If you're considering placing your baby: Google her name to find her essay, 'When I Was Garbage'.

You are not garbage.

And even if you were, even if all those messages about how unworthy you are to raise your kid were absolutely true, your child deserves to maintain her connection with you and your family if there is any way you can make that happen.

I'm also biased. I'm the mom to a child who was abandoned at 5 weeks and will never recover from that loss, the sister-in-law to a wonderful 40 yr old woman who paced her newborn in an open adoption 22 years ago and has never seen him, and a friend to an adult adoptee who was placed at 8 months and has been in reunion since she was 35.

I'm also a member of Bastard Nation and an advocate for an end to the failed experiment of secrecy in adoption.

Can I link to this post to raise its Googlerificness?

[Mirah Riben]

Thank you! As one of the women in the video. I can verify that everything you have said is right.

Origins-USA.or advocates for mothers rights and keeping families together. We are working very hard to get the word out. But there is big $$ in adoption and that make it hard to counter all the pro-adoption material.

Mira Riben, author
The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry

www.AdvocatePuublications.com

[Julie]

I follow this discussion, as well as the ones on other blogs with great interest and some concern. I absolutely agree with most points. Adoption agencies are corrupt, if not at least self-serving businesses. Birth/First mothers are taken advantage of. Birthmothers and adopted children experience pain, loss and grief. I truly do "get it".

But at the risk of sounding like a defensive adoptive mother, I have a hard time with blanket statements that ALL adoption is wrong and hurtful. My daughter was born crack exposed and abandoned. NO family member would take her because of her extensive medical needs. If adoption wasn't an option, where would she have gone? Surely adoption is a better alternative than a long term care facility? And our son's birthmother CHOSE adoption because she absolutely does not want to be a parent. Shouldn't that be her choice? Should she be forced to parent when she has no interest in doing so? Not all women have a desire to be a mother. She was perfectly aware that by chosing to parent she would be eliglibe for ADC (Aid to Dependent Children) as well as low income housing which would have put her into a better financial situation, she still chose adoption. And yes, she knew what she was "getting herself into" because she placed her three other children prior. Is this not truly as Pro-Choice as it gets? She also did NOT want kinship care because of her family's extensive history of addiction and abuse. Again, her choice. And yes we have an open relationship with her and we honor and love her as a member of our family.

[Catherine]

It doesn't matter whether it was just yesterday or years ago, regardless of what people think... a birthmother doesn't "get over it" and not a day goes by that we don't remember our children. Even though I am very blessed with the adoptive parents that I chose, there are still some regrets out there. I still have nightmares, and question myself on the "what if" aspects of the adoptions. I ask myself if there are things that I would have done differently, or if given the choice, if I would change the decisions that I made... Sometimes I wish people understood and believed that birthmothers really do have feelings and emotions too. So many think that we are just crack addicted teenagers who sleep with every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there, and are addicted to god knows what drug... And it's not true damn it. I am only 3 classes away from my bachelors degree... I have a great paying job... and yet I still chose adoption at the time (less than two years ago)... Some of us simply want more for our child(ren) than we ourselves can offer, or maybe it's just not the right time in our lives to be parents yet... The point still remains... We're people too. Birthmothers should be better informed about the pros/cons of adoption, and they should be WELL informed of what services are available out there to help them instead of instantly pushing them towards adoption... Grr... I could go on and on about this all night, but I will say one thing... From talking to Shannon in email and on the phone... She's an adoptive parent that actually GETS IT, and for that, I am thankful to know her and her partner...

[Lula]

Julie, I don't see anything in Shannon's post to indicate that she's completely opposed to adoption. This bit was, to me, the crux of her post:

"Adoption is sometimes necessary or the best possible option for a mother and her baby. Plenty of adoptees grow up happy and healthy and well adjusted. Plenty of birthmothers believe they did the right thing, even if it is painful. But this is NOT the only story and it is never simple for anyone. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

I too believe strongly that the option of adoption needs to be available for women who don't feel able to parent but also find themselves unable to have an abortion (for whatever reason). But I also think it's necessary to openly acknowledge that ALL THREE of the options available to a woman once she's pregnant can potentially mess with her head, and that ALL THREE options will alter her life permanently in some way. The time-limited nature of pregnancy being what it is, permanent decisions have to be made without the possibility of knowing ahead of time how one will feel about the decision over the rest of the life to follow. I agree with Shannon that the least we can do WRT adoption is to provide space for women considering that path to get unbiased information and non-judgemental support without any hint of side agenda going on.

The only place I can think of right now where she might get that is a clinic like Planned Parenthood, but I don't know offhand what adoption-related resources they rely on for patient education. I have a big fat bias against the "crisis pregnancy centers", since most (if not all) of them exist specifically to dissuade women from having abortions -- sounds to me like they can be places where adoption is pushed hardcore. My suggestion is always to run screaming from those places, though I do hear that some offer practical support for women who plan to raise their children themselves. I don't know how hit-or-miss the experience is from center to center WRT adoption pressure.

A resource I like for pregnancy-options discussion, esp. early on when abortion is a more accessible possibility (assuming you have money and a clinic within reach):

http://www.pregnancyoptions.info/

"Our Bodies, Ourselves" also does some great discussion about adoption, including acknowledgement of possible long-term impact.

[sster]

I just googled your post title and it's the first hit! Wooohooo!

[Nicole]

"The only place I can think of right now where she might get that is a clinic like Planned Parenthood, but I don't know offhand what adoption-related resources they rely on for patient education."

Even Planned Parenthood isn't a safe bet, for exactly the reason you're thinking.... some of them get their education from (drumroll) the National Council for Adoption.

The NCFA was granted over $6 million (federal money--our tax dollars at work!) to implement infant adoption awareness training. So for several years, the NCFA has been a huge (probably the sole, in many many cases) training source on adoption for workers in mental health clinics, Planned Parenthoods, etc.

So... even MENTAL HEALTH AGENCIES... even independent counselors not professionally affiliated with adoption organizations... are getting severely biased, and sometimes outright wrong, information on adoption.

I have a post up about the NCFA's latest "Factbook." If anyone is interested and has the time, they devoted a couple chapters to the Infant Adoption Awareness Training--so you can see for yourselves just how exactly professionals of ALL kinds (not just agency pros) are being trained. "Nondirective counseling" my arse.

[Lula]

Thanks, Nicole. I've heard about the IAAT in passing, but haven't read material myself -- I'll go check that out. Much appreciate your input!