The 14th is here! At least for me it is, for those of you in North America, you'll have to wait a bit longer!
I really enjoyed this project and getting to know Suz from Writing my Wrongs.
Suz surrendered her first born child to adoption in 1986 after a five month stay in a maternity home, known as Gehring Hall, located one thousand miles from her family home.
She was intimidated and coerced into placing her child and experienced deceit, isolation, promissory notes, and threats of lawsuit, denial of contact with family members and legal professionals and restricting knowledge of legal process.
She is the founder of ehbabes.com. The site and associated support group provides search, support and reunion assistance to those separated by the Kurtz network of agencies. In this capacity she has successfully facilitated over 200 reunions for members of ehbabes.com. She is a family preservationist, and supports adoptee rights and open records.
I really enjoyed getting to "know" Suz, and working on this interview project together. I hope you enjoy getting to meet her as well. Here you can see the questions I posed to her, and her answers. Over at her blog you can read her questions to me and my answers.
If you are an adoption blogger, consider participating next year. Enjoy!
Do you think it is possible for a mother to make an "informed decision" when considering adoption, if she has never lived through the experience of placing a child before?
Short answer: If she is considering before birth and has never placed a child before, no.
Longer answer to this largely depends on what you consider to be “informed” however in my opinion the answer is still likely “no”. Please keep in mind that I speak from the voice of a U.S. mother that surrendered to a closed adoption orchestrated by a baby broker. I was a resident in a maternity home for five months. Very little if any of my “decision” was informed. My decision was under duress, extreme coercion, fear and threats of lawsuits. Clearly, I look at adoption and choice through the lens of that experience.
Giving birth to a child or adopting one to parent is an enormous life changing event. The event changes your life physically – relationships, housing, financial demands – but also in the case of mothers who give birth - chemically. You now have a bond, a piece of your soul walking outside your body. As you allude to, unless she has done this one before, she has no framework to measure this against. She can rely only on what others tell her and they may not tell her the truth. More importantly, what they may have felt or experienced will not necessarily be what she experiences. A woman who conceives a child in rape may have entirely different feelings towards the child than a woman who conceives a child with the love of her life. Suggesting they should or can or will feel the same afterwards simply because they both push a child from their vagina and then place the child for adoption dehumanizes them both. It invalidates the very real – and very unique - feelings they will have – positive or negative – towards their children.
I do believe mothers can make better decisions, more educated ones, but truly informed does not happen until you have lost your child and lived with that loss. That is informed in the worst way imaginable. I prefer to say mothers can make an educated decision rather than informed. However, this may be semantics to some.
Bottom line – experience is the best teacher and it is often a mean one that will slap your heart with a ruler for the rest of your life. Pick the classroom you wish to spend the rest of your life in wisely.
What are your thoughts on the impact of openness in adoption for the first (natural/biological/birth) mother?
Coming from a closed adoption status, I do not feel I am qualified to answer. I want to hope it is “better” for the mother and child involved but I don’t believe we can truly know until those individuals speak for themselves.
Openness seems to be our latest social experiment with adoption. Open adoption is our latest attempt to say “Oopsie, we might have made a mistake with this closed business. Let’s try this instead.” Is it better? Or is it like most adoptions – just different? Does it introduce an entirely new set of problems never seen before? Claud wrote about this recently on her blog. Her post was more in relation to why mothers who accepted open choose to close them but it is somewhat related to this question you pose. (http://www.musingsofthelame.com/2012/11/when-birthmother-closes-open-adoption.html)
I can offer that I was promised semi-open (it was a carrot to get me to bite deeper into the poisoned apple). This was supposed to mean that I was going to get updates on my daughter regularly, photos, a letter, etc. It soothed me, made me feel better; I would at least know she was alive. Less than a year after I surrendered to the baby broker I learned this was a lie and it was never going to be. This sent me spiraling into an even deeper abyss of trauma. I hung my sanity on that semi open adoption closet rod. It was not easy to pick myself up once it fell to the floor.
I found my daughter in 2005 (she is now 26 years old). While she has refused any contact or meeting, it is comforting to me to be able to follow her online, to see her tweets, read her own blog, and see photos of her. Even with that peek, it hurts me daily. I work hard at reconciling that I have a child that does not want to know me or her siblings. I work hard to fight the dissonance. Adoption did not give my daughter a better life; it gave her a different one. Adoption did not make my daughter happy to know me. It made her something else entirely. In my own version of cognitive behavioral therapy, I tell myself daily that adoption did this; it is not about me, or her, but the trauma and the pain it causes to one of the most primal relationship an individual can have. With that frame of mind, I want to believe that openness likely reduces the trauma for mothers but does not by any means eradicate it. Additionally, as seen in my own life, it can even reignite it on a daily basis forcing the mother to work hard at retaining a positive emotional state.
As to the children in the relationships, I am not comfortable stating. I do, however, look forward to when that generation grows up and can speak for themselves along side adoptees from closed adoptions.
Currently in Australia, there are only a handful of voluntary adoptions each year, and international adoptions are on hold until further notice. If you had the opportunity to shape the developing adoption practices of a wonderfully resourced nation, what would you do?
Also a complex question (you ask great ones!). Below are just a few suggestions.
1. Focus on family preservation first. Make sure the children being adopted truly need to be, meaning confirm they are truly orphaned without a single family member that can care for them.
2. Require that ties to family of origin remain in tact. This means fully open access to birth certificates, no amended birth certificates, no sealing of records.
3. Require that foster children/children are placed first. An infant residing in the arms of their mother is NOT an orphan. If we truly put the needs of children first, put those most in need first. In the US we have this nasty little thing called the Adoption Tax Credit. It should be reviewed and revised for appropriateness.
4. Tell prospective adoptive families that they aren’t adopting a child rather an entire family. Children come from somewhere and that entire family constellation becomes part of the adoptive family whether the adoptive family likes it or not. Help prospective adoptive parents understand this reality and work with them to incorporate it into their lives.
5. Hold adoptive parents legally responsible for keeping open adoptions – open.
6. Return children that have been trafficked or stolen to their families of origin – without question. Reverse the equation. If the stolen child has been with their adoptive families for a period of time, give them visitation, make it an open adoption but make the biological family the primary custodian.
7. Take the money out of adoption. Set a fixed fee for all administrative costs. Make for profit adoption illegal. Anything but this makes children a commodity to be bought and sold to the highest bidder.
I could go on but wont. My position should be clear. If adoption is truly for children who truly need families, put the needs of those children first.Not the needs of for profit agencies or needy infertile parents.
From my experiences living abroad in countries with a strong social safety net, where access to health care and housing are fairly certain, and there is less stigma surrounding solo or unmarried parenting, I have observed that voluntary adoption statistics in those countries are so low, they hardly show up. Please speak to the way that resource and culture affect a woman's options during pregnancy, and what an ideal scenario might look like for a woman considering parenting, abortion, and adoption.
First I am overjoyed to read that you see this in countries with strong social safety nets. How wonderful for those mothers and children! Family preservation activists’ cite this fact regularly. It is comforting to hear it from someone who has witnessed it first hand.
This is a complex question to answer. I could go on for days! Short answer: To understand resource and culture I recommend reading books like The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler or Rickie Sollingers’ Wake Up Little Susie. Watching Ann Fessler’s film A Girl Like Her would also help.
Ideal scenario? I bristle a bit at the word “ideal” for to me it suggests a one size fits all approach. Adoption myth perpetuates this. All babies are the same blank slates. All mommies are created equal and we can swap out one with another and call it a fabulous day. Ideal suggests single and to me, homogeneous. It is wrong. We are humans but we are unique. Wildly different circumstances can lead to a crisis pregnancy and each one should be viewed as individual and special and unique. Options, true options education should be provided by an objective, unbiased third party with no stake in the mothers’ decision. This should not come from the father, the priest, the parents, or the individuals closest to the mom – they will have power over her – and not necessarily good power. They will mix their own interests with hers.
Discuss abortion from a clinical and emotional perspective. Have her talk to or read about the experiences of those who have had an abortion. Be sure she has access to a broad spectrum of experiences.
Discuss adoption – in depth and honestly. Have the mother talk with other adopted individuals. Understand legal rights (or lack thereof). Understand trauma that can be caused. Understand that she may never have more children (secondary infertility). Understand as much as possible. (And yes, it can be overwhelming but she has nine months or more to do her research). Tell her about revocation and how, if, when it is even possible. Encourage her to take the child home with her for a week, two weeks, a month.
Understand parenting (it is never easy, always changes your life, is always expensive at any age or marital status). Understand what social resources might be available to her. Connect her with the organizations and if needed, take her there personally to talk to them.
Hold fathers accountable for the children they create. Give them the option – without question – to parent the child should the mother choose not to. Require mothers to notify fathers that they are pregnant and considering adoption. Dispose of Putative Fathers Registries.
Read this fictional blog post I wrote for more some additional thoughts http://writingmywrongs.com/2008/04/17/white-flag-realities/
Could you share a highlight, or special moment from your work in reunifications?
I call it the “soul cry”. It was the first reunion I facilitated. K was adopted through the network of agencies I surrendered my daughter to. We met online. I forget who found who. I should ask her that (we are still friendly). I had formed a support group and website for individuals separated through that network of agencies (ehbabes.com). K was from a closed adoption of the early 1980s and she asked me to help her find her mother. She had a good bit of information and using that in conjunction with my own information about the agency, I was able to locate M, her mother.
During one frantic day while K was running between college buildings in NJ, I was emailing with M. I was attempting to confirm the match using information only M and K would have. Unknown to me, K had held back a bit of information (I highly recommend this, btw, keep something very private even from your searcher). When I spoke with M, she referenced a piece of jewelry that she had given the agency to give to her daughter. I was not familiar with this item and when I questioned K later, she told me all about it. It was a match for certain.
At this time, I spoke with M on the phone versus email. I rang her up, she answered and I introduced myself. Before I could say another word, I heard her soul cry out, not her heart, not her throat, not even her voice. I heard her soul. Through the most agonizing gut wrenching tone, I heard her say “is it my daughter?” Four simple words, expressed, questioned, begging, pleading from the deepest, darkest, most pained parts of M’s soul.
It was indeed her daughter.
It is a sound, a cry, I have never heard in my life. It is a sound that rings in my ears daily and moves me continually to work towards more searches, more family preservation, less unnecessary separation of mother and child.
It is my adoption reform tinnitus.
