On My Mom, The Sex She Had, and The Adoption She Didn’t Plan
May 9, 2015 11:37 AM   Subscribe

"For my mother and women like her, now in the final chapters of their lives, people crave a narrative that forces adoption as the only possible solution." "Overwhelmingly then, adoptive parents, like myself, decide how the mothers who birthed our children should be perceived."

"As it is, we don’t typically take the time to consider how our random entry into privilege gives us adoptive parents power that we acquiesce to withholding from our children’s mothers. The dirty little secret is that, in reality, many women enjoy sex. Many have it outside of marriage. Many have affairs. Many drink and smoke and take drugs, lucky enough to be among those who do not develop a debilitating addiction. Many raise children while suffering economically or working to quell the effects of a mental illness. But only those who lack power face the potential for condemnation and coercion, loss and abandonment."
posted by xarnop (39 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite


 
We don’t typically take the time to consider how our random entry into privilege gives us adoptive parents power that we acquiesce to withholding from our children’s mothers.
Damning. But not wrong.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 12:27 PM on May 9, 2015


Is it me, or does this article somehow overlook the possibility that some birth mothers would still nevertheless have chosen to give up their children for adoption even if they had had the option to have availed themselves of the help the author is scolding people for "withholding"?

I do get the author's point, but it still seems a bit reductive or something.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:06 PM on May 9, 2015 [9 favorites]


I dunno, there is stuff there worth thinking about, but as someone who had close family adopt recently some of it really rubs me the wrong way.

The biological mother of my nephew did not plan the pregnancy, and she was drug addicted, but my family members did not force her to put the child up for adoption. She realized that in her circumstances it just wasn't realistic for her to raise an additional child and one day my family members got a call from the agency.

I had enough money to adopt and so decided to do that instead of helping her out financially or supporting organizations that work to keep families in need together.

We're going to aim this guilt trip against adoptive parents? Adoption is a very, very expensive process in the United States. On top of that, adoptive parents take on the financial obligations of raising a child for at least 18 years. They didn't just give away hundreds of thousands of dollars to the birth parents instead? That's a reasonable criticism? Okay, well maybe aim that at everybody else besides the adoptive parents. Hey you, with the two biological children, why don't YOU give up $100,000 to some stranger so they can support their kids?

The problem is we live in a state that does not support kids with everything they need, no matter who is parenting them. We need to work together to change laws so single parents or parents in otherwise challenging situations can handle the burden. Adoptive parents are the last people who are the big problem here.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:08 PM on May 9, 2015 [23 favorites]


"I do get the author's point, but it still seems a bit reductive or something."

There hasn't been a lot of research on birthmothers welfare after the placement, and most has been done speficially by or for adoption agencies seeking to show how well they fare later-- but if statistics like this reflect anything at all
"10) Do you regret that you terminated your parental rights? Do you wish you could turn back the clock and never do it?

Yes – 65%
No – 9%
I don’t know – 3%
Sometimes – 23%"

and this
"6) Were you forced by your parents (or anyone else you relied on to support you) to terminate parental rights? By this I mean, were you threatened with homelessness, being kicked out, or anything else?

Yes – 49%
No – 47%
I don’t know – 4%"

The reality may be a lot closer to the narrative of coercion and force of the loss of wanted children, than the preferred narrative of the birthmother who is grateful for adoptive parents to take the baby responsibility of her hands. It's an uncomfortable truth, and one that is often erased for the easier to swallow one, but the truth is birthmother narratives are not very popular, the public have a bias for adoptive parent stories and truths about adoption.

The other sad thing I've seenover and over online is that birthmothers who don't conform to the popular narrative of adoption as "the best thing" or speak out that injustice occurred to them are shunned or publicly shamed and scolded adding further injury to trauma and resulting in a lot of powerful voices of women who called out for reform being silenced.
posted by xarnop at 1:43 PM on May 9, 2015 [21 favorites]


Birth mom of son in open adoption plan here.

I can't imagine any circumstances under which I would have wanted to be a fulltime parent. When I see a young woman with a stroller that practically dwarfs her, I sigh with relief because I feel like I dodged a bullet. My son, who'll be sixteen in June, is a good kid who wants to go to Tisch School. Suffice it to say that Tisch wouldn't be a possibility had he stayed with me.

But... let's not forget the many friends and family who chirped about "God's will" while I was making the decision, like I was Stella Dallas or something. The midwives who worked with me during the pregnancy, who were most definitely NOT chirping, gave me a book to read one of whose sentences I will never forget: "Every adoption is a tragedy."

Deciding to place my son for adoption was by far the hardest thing I have ever had to do. But for me, I'm glad I went through with the pregnancy. As I said, he's a good kid.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 1:54 PM on May 9, 2015 [26 favorites]


There hasn't been a lot of research on birthmothers welfare after the placement, and most has been done speficially by or for adoption agencies seeking to show how well they fare later-- but if statistics like this reflect anything at all
-
DISCLAIMER: This is not a “scientific” survey

*shrug* Big if.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:55 PM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Well the people in the survey are real enough. So erasing them entirely to justify exploitative crisis pregnancy response or deny that it happens is pretty cruel.

I have literally been in studies about birthparent trauma that were refused publication because they did not reflect "adoptive parent experience" enough.

It is so hard to get our voices out there, especially because of dismissive people like yourself. This will be my last comment in this thread. Among birthparent support groups so many women are currently saying "Finally, we are being understood!" those people are real whatever percent they make up and they count. They should not be erased to create a narrative that pleases adoptive parent comfort zones.
posted by xarnop at 2:01 PM on May 9, 2015 [19 favorites]


Well the people in the survey are real enough.

As are the people who helped Ron Paul win straw polls, but we can't take them to be representative of the whole picture without scientific surveys. I make no judgement on what those studies might reveal, just saying that unscientific survey is not convincing.

It kind of sounds like this is a personal issue you have forged into an FPP, as someone else who has been personally impacted by issues surrounding adoption I understand how important these issues are. Please make an effort not to erase the views of adoptive families in your presentation and I will try and do the same in return.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:07 PM on May 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


You're citing a survey taken on an openly anti-adoption website and using the results to prove that your chosen pov is the "reality" of the situation. How do these statistics outweigh the other opposingly biased research results you cited which were done by adoption agencies seeking to prove their own agendas?
posted by poffin boffin at 2:08 PM on May 9, 2015 [9 favorites]


Shaydem tanz
Eponysterical (Spirits/Ghosts/etc) (dance)
posted by hexatron at 2:09 PM on May 9, 2015


If even one person is being exploited it should matter. It doesn't matter that there are some who aren't, the fact that mothers who want their children are being pressured out of them due to social pressure and lack of privilege/resources should in itself be a problem.

The fact that instead of sane social services to help, the "help" being offered women in crisis pregnancies is literally a rumplestiltskein deal- sign over your very child, suffer the trauma, and THEN we will help your child financially" is innately problematic.
posted by xarnop at 2:10 PM on May 9, 2015 [11 favorites]


If even one person is being exploited it should matter.

Sure, we're on the same page.
posted by Drinky Die at 2:12 PM on May 9, 2015


On my end, I don't think this piece is meant to say that adoptive parents are at fault for the exploitative nature of currently accepted adoption practice and coercive societal beliefs about "worthiness" but that they have more power to control and reinforce that narrative to their own advantage.

I saw it as being about that and not that adoptive parents single handedly should solve world poverty.
posted by xarnop at 2:18 PM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Mod note: xarnop, it's fine to post this but once you have you need to let it be and let folks discuss it as they will, rather than threadsit.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:30 PM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


they have more power to control and reinforce that narrative to their own advantage.

My family member was put in mortal danger when giving birth to her first child and had to have her uterus surgically removed. Then, their daughter died of an extremely rare brain cancer as a baby. After a few years they dealt with an adoption system they had zero power to alter. Their choice was play along with that system or never have children. Their situation was also coercive. It's coercive from both ends. Could you give a concrete example of how they could have used their power to control the narrative regarding the woman they never met before the baby was already up for adoption?
posted by Drinky Die at 2:31 PM on May 9, 2015


(I'm not really allowed to answer, don't tease me here!) :) Memail if sincere. Carry on folks.
posted by xarnop at 2:44 PM on May 9, 2015


"Every bit of my mother’s life experience is informed by that single moment when her son was taken from her. It is a story that played out many times with many women before she lost her son and that has been repeated over and over again since. "

This from the original article could have been written about me. The son I was coerced into giving up for adoption is 47 years old, and this loss has shadowed my life and stunted my potential ever since. Even though we are reunited and my son is a fine man, much damage was done to me emotionally that cannot be remedied. In 1959, the mother of the woman who wrote the article had absolutely no choice. In 1968, I had little more than her when the man I loved whom I thought would marry me left me for another woman. I had been a nice Catholic virgin college student when I met him, and I was devastated. My life was shattered, and was never the same again, like a broken vase that can be glued together into a semblance of wholeness, but still shows ugly cracks and leaks when filled with water.

And yes, this story is not at all unique, it has happened to countless other mothers, and continues to happen today, in a different context but the coercion still goes on. There is big money in adoption today and there are sites all over the internet looking for naive pregnant women. Those from an Evangelical or other conservative religious background are most vulnerable. There is a big ugly adoption industry out there still preying on women at risk.
posted by mermayd at 3:04 PM on May 9, 2015 [19 favorites]


Adoption in the United States is taking babies from poor women and giving them to rich women.

Our entire national discourse about adoption is designed to obscure this fact.
posted by Avenger at 5:35 PM on May 9, 2015 [21 favorites]


Increasing funding so that poorer people can afford children and public funding to cover the costs of adoption would be a good start so that rich people wouldn't be the only people who can afford it. There are a lot more families who would be willing to take on a child offered up for adoption if it was financially possible.

My family member has a good job and a wealthy family, but even then the associated costs were almost backbreaking.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:41 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Could you give a concrete example of how they could have used their power to control the narrative regarding the woman they never met before the baby was already up for adoption?

Seek out an open adoption. Meet the birth mother. Make sure she's not being coerced.

I have a friend that adopted via an open adoption. The birth mother wrote about her experiences openly on her blog. She's never expressed regret and spoke about how it gave her joy to see this new family she's still a part of.
posted by Dynex at 8:17 PM on May 9, 2015 [5 favorites]


Could you give a concrete example of how they could have used their power to control the narrative regarding the woman they never met before the baby was already up for adoption?

Say no to working with an agency that works with coercive pregnancy crisis centers, that doesn't primarily serve birthparents, that demands adoptive parents go through basic parenting training and adoption counselling ahead and after the adoption, that has real support for everyone in the triad, not just a wall of cute baby photographs in the waiting room....

Basically, right at the start, the adoptive parents have the most power in the system because they're bringing in the money and social power. They can choose to partner with an agency that puts adoptees and birth families at the table, or they can choose an agency that will give them a child as fast as possible and sells them a happy ever after story.

And at this point, these parents often still are dealing with infertility grief and/or the hero rescuer-model of adoptive parents that gets aggressively wallpapered over all the gross stuff of the adoption industry. So they've got the power and no motivation to use it well, so big shock, the adoption industry chugs along.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:43 PM on May 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


I find myself frustrated by articles like this because there's nothing in them that isn't true, and yet they always feel like an oversimplification to me. I'm an adoptive parent; I know for a fact that my son's mother regretted placing him for adoption; I know that his father wanted custody of him because we went to court over it. I am painfully aware of the ways that racial and economic differences affected the situation. In particular, once we were in the custody dispute with the Tiny Tornado's birthfather, CH, was significantly hampered in his efforts to gain custody because of educational deficiencies, a lack of familiarity with the legal system, lack of financial resources, and language differences—his deposition demonstrates how difficult it was for the lawyers to understand his AAVE, and his difficulty in understanding the language used by the lawyers.

But I don't regret adopting. I can't bring myself to feel I did something wrong. And when I read something like this article, I want to "yes, but," or "yes, and" everything. Yes, kinship adoption is a possibility: CH's plan was for his mother to care for the baby until he was able to do so himself. But one of my fears was that if CH gained custody, the violent and abusive birthmother would also regain access to the baby, even though she could not have gotten legal custody or parents rights back. I also feared exactly what has happened in the subsequent years, which is that CH has been in and out of jail on drug charges. I don't believe in adoption as a means to bring children out of poverty; I'd much rather see that happening for families and communities. I push back when people suggest that our son is better off with us, because if the goal is to get as many kids as possible into middle-class and/or white families, we should be moving babies around like chess pieces all the time. There are really good reasons we don't do that.

In fact, people are often surprised to learn that, in our custody dispute with CH, "the best interests of the child" was not a legal consideration. We were not allowed to make a case that the baby should stay with us because we have more resources than CH. The legal question the court considered was whether CH had met the legal requirements to establish his paternity, so everything hinged on questions like whether a certain document was signed properly and in a timely manner, and whether he filed his paternity case within the time limits set by the law, and so on.

Even as I deny the idea that we were motivated by some twisted kind of "save a kid" altruism, once the baby was with us, the idea of returning him to the neighborhood his father had grown up in, to be "educated" in Chicago public schools, to have his possibilities shut down and his potential squandered in the same ways his parents' had been: that felt different. I wasn't about to do the literal or metaphorical equivalent of driving around poor neighborhoods plucking children off their families' front stoops, but I wasn't going to do the metaphorical equivalent of throwing a child I loved and was responsible to into a lion's den, either.

False dichotomies like this one frustrate me as well:

I had enough money to adopt and so decided to do that instead of helping her out financially or supporting organizations that work to keep families in need together.

First, there is no reason a concerned person can't do both. Our first match fell through when the mother decided to parent the baby. We'd spent somewhere between $1500-2000 on expenses for her; a caseworker from our agency helped her get current on the rent on her apartment, negotiated with her bank to reduce multiple overdraft fees so she could get her account back to a positive balance, helped her get past-due bills caught up, and helped her shop for household necessities and groceries, as well as arranging for her and her 10-year-old daughter to have a Christmas tree, Christmas dinner, and gifts provided by another organization. As sad as I was when I didn't end up with the baby I hoped for, I have never for a moment regretted helping the mom. I don't know what difference it made in the long run, if any, but even giving her a little breathing room for a month or two was a good thing.

Second, working to keep families at need together is a long-term job. But there is a baby right now that needs to be cared for. If his mother hadn't placed him for adoption, our son would certainly have gone into foster care. At that time, his father's identity was unknown. His mother had left the hospital AMA something like 12 hours after her c-section. She was drug-addicted and homeless at the time, though we paid (via our agency) for her to stay in a hotel. The means by which the mother asked to receive funds that were meant to get her into an apartment strongly suggests that she converted it to cash, probably for drugs. She refused the agency's offers to find a rehab program, a half-way house, or a shelter placement for her (I'm not judging her for that; the options on offer were pretty dire, and she'd been through at least some of them before.) The baby, meanwhile, was going through drug withdrawal in the hospital nursery.

There was no family there to keep together. And there was a baby who was, no matter what else happened, going to be better off in a permanent placement than in foster care.

So, yes, I chose to adopt a baby, primarily because I felt that our family had room for one more and because I love having kids. It was a selfish choice, and I'm not going to sugar-coat that. I adopted because I wanted another baby and didn't want to go through another pregnancy. But it's just BS to talk as if my partner and I had some other option to support the baby and his mother, as if transferring some of our financial resources to them would have been a solution to the problems they faced.

Finally, I want to say that "adoption" is about a thousand different things. The kind of adoption the author's mother went through, coerced to place her baby, is a terrible chapter in our history. Currently, the avenues to adoption and the types of adoption are overwhelming: domestic infant adoption, either same-race or interracial; international adoption; private and public adoption; foster care and foster-to-adopt. They all have their own issues. Personally, my research into international adoption leads me to believe that it is absolutely unconscionable as an industry. At the same time, I don't judge families that choose it, because that's not my place and being judged doesn't help a family once it's been created. I won't get into what I see as the ethical complexities of domestic adoption, including my own. It's also a mess, and definitely intertwined with economic and racial inequality. Our family lives right in the middle of that mess.

The idea that our options were to either adopt a baby OR pour the equivalent resources into an intractable social problem with no clear solutions is ludicrous. When you sit down to eat dinner every night, do you see your options as either to feed yourself OR spend the equivalent money and time working to end hunger?

And a quick footnote:

I know that a lot of people are very firm on using "birthfather" and "birthmother" for an adopted child's biological parents. I have found that in contexts where it's not necessary to make a distinction between me and my son's birthmother, where it's clear from context, that I tend to just call her his mom, and I've done that in this post. I absolutely understand the desire to affirm the strength and reality of adoptive families, the authenticity of them, but insisting too strongly on "birthparent" language feels a little like denying the reality of that first family and our son's connection to them. I know it doesn't matter to them; they don't know what the hell I call them. It matters to me, though, and I just in case it ever matters to my son, I want to be always treating his other parents with respect.
posted by not that girl at 10:43 PM on May 9, 2015 [34 favorites]


I was born in NY on January 7, 1967. And adopted immediately thereafter.

Unlike my sister and cousin, I haven't had any urge to go looking. ( My sister used 23 and me, and I was surprised at this real-world example of big data... If we could all get on VistA as a unified EHR, like 50% of our problems with delivering care would disappear. )

Anyway, if anyone is fretting about any decisions they made 48 years ago, don't. Take heart that everything on my side worked out about as well as can be expected in any life, there's ups and downs, and you enjoy the Perfect Moments as they come... I got no complaints about how this panned out. Thank You and Take Care!
posted by mikelieman at 12:25 AM on May 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


I just want to say that I favorited certain things in this thread due to my mother, who gave up a child in 1960. We don't really talk of it nowadays, but when she told me decades ago (in shame), it didn't seem like much of a choice. She never even found out whether it was a girl or a boy.
posted by megafauna at 12:41 AM on May 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


Seek out an open adoption. Meet the birth mother. Make sure she's not being coerced.

Yeah, that's what they did. Around 60-70% of adoptions now are open. It was 1% twenty years ago. It's a situation that is steadily improving.
posted by Drinky Die at 1:03 AM on May 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


"coerced to place her baby, is a terrible chapter in our history. "

Please don't act like it doesn't still happen. I love your voice on adoption but women are still very much coerced out of their babies, even here in the US, and often given little to no options to be able to keep realistically.
posted by xarnop at 5:02 AM on May 10, 2015 [7 favorites]


For those who would like to know more about this subject from the perspective of mothers who have surrendered a child, check out the Concerned United Birthparents site:
http://www.cubirthparents.org/
Also, read
"The Girls Who Went Away" by Ann Fessler. She interviewed many unwed mothers who surrendered before the early 70s, most of whom were sent away to homes for unwed mothers and given very little choice about surrendering or raising their children.

Yes, of course there have always been some mothers who freely chose surrender as their own uncoerced best alternative in a bad situation, and there will always be such mothers, which is why adoption will go on, and should. Not all of us who have been scarred by adoption are anti-adoption or against adoptive parents. There will always be a need for some adoptions. But please do not dismiss the real problem of mothers who did not and do not have a genuine choice about the fate of their children. We deserve to have a voice and be heard, just as those who portray adoption as the perfect, pain-free solution to unplanned pregnancy. It is just not that simple, and since there is money to be made, there is corruption in the adoption industry, both international and domestic. This is not the fault of adoptive parents, they are victimized as well by shoddy, greedy adoption practitioners. The original article here is not the best written thing I have read on the subject, but the fact that mothers were coerced and continue to be coerced into surrender regardless of what is really best for them and their children is a sad fact, and should not be dismissed or ignored even by those who have benefited from adoption. Injustice hurts everyone. Let the painful truth be told!
posted by mermayd at 10:03 AM on May 10, 2015 [4 favorites]


Please don't act like it doesn't still happen. I love your voice on adoption but women are still very much coerced out of their babies, even here in the US, and often given little to no options to be able to keep realistically.

xarnop, I have never in my life for one moment pretended it doesn't happen. I know it all too fucking well, in fact.
posted by not that girl at 10:11 AM on May 10, 2015 [7 favorites]


You're citing a survey taken on an openly anti-adoption website and using the results to prove that your chosen pov is the "reality" of the situation. How do these statistics outweigh the other opposingly biased research results you cited which were done by adoption agencies seeking to prove their own agendas?

Yea, really. I also think it's extremely bullshit to make an FPP essentially just to fight with people who disagree with you using biased studies from openly pro-your-side organizations. And that site is like, anti choicer levels of weird.
posted by emptythought at 1:29 PM on May 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


Not to jump into a fight or anything (except, here I go . . .)

Please make an effort not to erase the views of adoptive families in your presentation and I will try and do the same in return.

But . . . standard operating procedure is to promote the adoptive family point of view at the expense of birth parents. The article outlined a situation in which a woman gave a child up for adoption where the birth mother was not impoverished, or on drugs - a story and a viewpoint that is not normally shared! And yet the first "opposing viewpoint" stated in this thread is a personal story about a birth mother who was on drugs?

Don't get me wrong, I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea that supporting organizations that help impoverished women is somehow going to cause no unwanted babies to be born and is somehow preferable to adoption. But I think this article was kind of amazing because it put into words something that my family has gone through and I honestly have not seen it elsewhere.
posted by chainsofreedom at 3:38 PM on May 10, 2015 [4 favorites]


Mod note: Xarnop, if you need to make a MeTa, do so, but we've asked you already to dial it back. People will react how they will, and part of the deal with posting a thread is that you concede your right to criticize people in-thread for not responding how you want them to. Thanks.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 3:54 PM on May 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


The Baby Scoop was horrible and shameful and we should never go back to those days. But I grew up with girls who genuinely wanted to place the babies they had as the result of unwanted pregnancies for adoption, and were either so scared of the very real social stigma they would face for doing so that they raised children they didn't want to, or did place them and ended up being virtually pilloried and scarlet-lettered.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:03 PM on May 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


. The article outlined a situation in which a woman gave a child up for adoption where the birth mother was not impoverished, or on drugs - a story and a viewpoint that is not normally shared! And yet the first "opposing viewpoint" stated in this thread is a personal story about a birth mother who was on drugs?

Drug addiction was widely discussed in the article and the reality of the situation with my family is the birth mother was drug addicted. I don't know what to tell you there. I don't really consider my viewpoint here opposing, it's just how life went for my family.
posted by Drinky Die at 5:17 PM on May 10, 2015 [1 favorite]


Part of the real problem I think is that we're socially encouraging people that 'adoption is always an answer' to a lot of the real problems and pressures modern women face - including men's fear of commitment in their prime childbearing years. But those babies have to come from somewhere. If adoption is always to be an answer, then there need to be endless babies to feed to the maw of disappointed and betrayed women.
posted by corb at 7:22 PM on May 10, 2015 [3 favorites]


Well, there are other options besides adoption now such as surrogacy.
posted by Drinky Die at 7:39 PM on May 10, 2015


I just want to comment on the survey way up above where a majority of women who gave their babies up for adoption say they regret that decision. That cannot, scientifically, be given a lot of weight. Hindsight. Feelings and opinions that are much easier to say now, years later, when there is nothing to be done about the situation, are quite different from putting that person back in time and seeing if they would actually do something differently.
posted by DMelanogaster at 7:13 AM on May 11, 2015 [1 favorite]


Years before concepts like "adoption trauma" were going around, my cousin talked openly, even as a very young child, about the difficulty he had with being adopted. The family narrative about it seemed like it was quite damaging to him. People talked about how his mother had adopted him when she thought she couldn't conceive, and then she went on to do so. His takeaway from that story was that his adoption had been a mistake. To me, that is a classic example of the kind of story that results from adoption being seen as a solution to infertility, rather than one solution for that particular child.

When he met his birth parents, they turned out to be still together, married and with other children. They were much more prosperous than his adopted family. My aunt reacted badly to this reunion, ostensibly on grounds of disapproving of their lifestyle, but possibly it was just really hard for her to give up any of the control she thought she had secured with a closed adoption.

If I have a point here, it's that the whole process of adoption used to be so unquestioned. Infertile? "You can always just adopt." I've actually heard that quite recently. But people who have experienced it have always found out that it wasn't so simple.
posted by BibiRose at 7:43 AM on May 11, 2015 [2 favorites]


Told family member about this thread in case I was possibly putting some words in their mouth they would disagree with or in case they wanted to add anything.
If you do want to add another thing that adoptive parents can do to balance the scales a little bit and reduce the chances of coercion, I would say this "pre-matching" thing is a problem. I could expound on that if you wanted it for a comment.
-
So basically, most people when they do private infant adoption "pre-match." That means that very early in the pregnancy, the firstmother selects an adoptive family. This has various consequences, some which firstmothers experience as positive consequences, but which increase the risk of coercion, regret, etc.

Once pre-matching happens, the adoptive parents are advised to 'court' the firstmother. Give her gifts. She begins receiving financial support paid by the adoption agency out of the proceeds the adoptive parents will pay. Adoptive parents pay the agency even if the adoption falls through.

These are two potentially positive consequences - financial support she may really really need, and also an opportunity to get to know and develop a relationship with the adoptive parents. A deep relationship before birth can help set the stage for open adoption. It doesn't always, but it can.

A firstmother may appreciate the security of knowing there is a plan in place, and that may help her during the pregnancy. She will receive social worker support through the agency - and she is entitled to have her own agency separate from the adoptive parents' agency. If she elects separate representation, the adoptive parents pay.

All sounds good right? Well, what if she changes her mind when the initial panic begins to wear off. For example, what if her family - initially unsupportive - warms up to the idea. What if the challenges seem surmountable?

Well, should she raise the mere possibility of changing her mind she'll be pressured. She's received money from the adoptive parents. She would be disappointing them. They are counting on her. Those social workers that have been supporting her - well maybe now they use what they have learned about her to keep her on the 'straight and narrow.' They may make her feel that she'd be obligated to pay back the support money she had received.

So that, to me, creates a huge risk for coercion. A risk that I'm not sure is justified by the potential benefits of pre-matching. Seems to me that the entity benefiting most from pre-matching is adoption agencies.

Pre-matching didn't sit well with me. We wanted to adopt an already born baby. Where the firstmother had had a long time to think about it, no decisions were made in a rush, she was less likely to feel the heat of financial pressure and where she experienced her childbirth without the unfair expectation that she solve another family's infertility. Adoptive parents' infertility is not the responsibility of first mothers - or adoptees - to solve.

As an adoptive parent, adoption agencies do not want to hear what I just said. They want you to match early - it increases their chance of a "successful match." Now, it's true that they get paid certain fees even if a match falls through, but not the whole kit and caboodle. We were told we would never be successful matching with an already born baby. We were very lucky to do it. But if more adoptive parents were to push for it, we would have a more ethical adoption protocol in my opinion.

Also, I think the adoption tax credit should be eliminated for non-special needs adoptions such as my own. The tax credit just caused adoption agencies to raise their fees, and private domestic infant adoption is not something that in my opinion the taxpayers need to subsidize for families. While the cost burden is hard, without the tax credit it would likely be a less burdensome cost and it doesn't pass a moral needs test for me. Distinguished from the situation where we are subsidizing special needs adoptions (which are generally defined in the tax code to be specific medical diagnoses or children over a certain age). I guess I think the tax credit increases the risk of monetization and commodification of babies.

Oh! one more thing adoptive parents can and should do is (a) ensure their own adopted child has access to their original birth certificate, and to information about their first family, and (b) aggressively push their state of residence for change in adoption laws, including enforceability of post-adoption contact agreements and especially access to original birth certificates.

It probably sounds from this like I hate adoption! I hate the ethical lapses that are still really common in adoption, even if we're no longer in the rampant 'baby drop' era. I'm so proud to be an adoptive Mom, I treasure my relationship with his first mama, and I am grateful that she is part of our family too in a very important way.

So I think those are the things adoptive parents should learn, know and respect. I don't think the standard that adoptive parents should instead of adopting financially support the first family in the raising of the child, makes any sense. Others (including you) have addressed some good reasons why. But that doesn't mean adoptive parents are off the hook entirely, we can change a lot and I guess I feel - if we love our children, why not make the world of adoptees better for adoptees and first families?
posted by Drinky Die at 12:58 PM on May 11, 2015 [3 favorites]


Thank you, Drinky Die, you are an adoptive mom who really gets it right! Pre-birth matching with a pregnant mom has too much capacity and temptation for coercion and making the mother feel she owes the prospective adopters a child, no matter how she feels or what she wants or needs. The choice to surrender should be made after the birth, after recovery from childbirth, after seeing the child. I think 6 weeks after birth is a reasonable time to sign surrender papers, not on the delivery table and not under the influence of hormones and drugs. It is too big a decision to be forced into by anyone. There is plenty of time after the child is born for a mother who has been fairly counseled to realize that she cannot raise the child, and do adoption the right way, as a real choice. It is better for the adoptive parents who do not get disappointed by a mother changing her mind and better for the mother who gets to make a real adoption plan withou being pressured. There is also a problem with unscrupulous adoption providers who promise open adoption to lure pregnant women, and then counsel the adoptive parents to cut ties as soon as the adoption is legally final. I know young women who have been tricked this way, wined and dined and made to feel the prospective adopters were their best friends, then dumped like yesterday's trash once the baby was in their hands.
posted by mermayd at 3:57 PM on May 11, 2015 [5 favorites]


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