Adoption: Exploitation or Reproductive
Choice?
By Laurie Frisch
When trying to approach people with my concerns
about adoption and it's effects on adoptees and natural mothers,
I have been stymied by the response. Churches, pro-lifers, feminists
and others had difficulty comprehending why adoption surrender
(really, surrendering all parental rights is not an "adoption")
as obtained today in the United States might not be considered
a woman's choice.
When speaking with a pro-lifer about why someone
who apparently cared so much about a child before birth suddenly
seemed not to care about the child's well-being after the child
was born, he immediately replied "It's a woman's choice."
Granted that's an ironic use of language from a pro-lifer. But,
he seemed quite serious. He thought he was protecting women,
even while he was pointing them in the direction of services
that would counsel a woman by telling her essentially that adoption
is no big deal and "Your child will thank you for it",
services that would not provide complete, honest information
such as a parent would expect when making a life-changing decision
regarding their child's well-being.
Before you feminists lambaste me for lingering
with pro-lifers, I have to say it is a feminist I turned to
next on this issue, attempting to get some protections put into
place for naive mothers and their children. The response? "It's
a woman's choice." Just like the pro-lifers, many feminists
truly believe that they are protecting women by making this
"choice" available.
It's commonly believed that a woman faced with
an unplanned pregnancy has three choices: Get an abortion, surrender
her child for adoption, or keep her child. This availability
of choices is supposed to provide a woman with reproductive
protections. A woman should not be forced or coerced into any
one of these or else it is no longer a choice.
It is the second of these choices that I wish
to address: The idea that a mother who signs a surrender document
freely chooses to surrender her child for adoption.
Before I get started, I'd like to compare the
surrender/adoption choice to an abortion choice. Many women
would prefer not to have extensive delays prior to an abortion
– it's medically safer to have an abortion earlier for one thing.
So, if she chooses abortion, it's to her advantage to get the
abortion as soon as possible. If she does, she may have minimal
effects, and experience relief afterwards.
Having spent the last year and a half doing research
on the effects of adoption on the women who surrendered their
parental rights and supposedly made a free choice to do so,
I can say authoritatively that surrender choice is not like
abortion "choice" where less information may be desirable
and a woman may have minimal effects afterwards. There may be
a few instances where it's true, but I have yet to run into
any mother who has given birth and was anything like "relieved"
to have lost her child. If she truly hadn't wanted her child,
she would have gotten an abortion. Even if she wanted an abortion
initially and could not obtain it for some reason, by the time
her child is born, she is as bonded to her child as any mother.
It's nearly always true that she cares about her child and what
was best for her/him more than she cares about her own well-being.
The rates of mothers surrendering parental rights
have declined since the 1970s due to the decreased stigma associated
with single motherhood. With this decline, the adoption industry
has doubled it's efforts to obtain babies, especially healthy
white infants from intelligent, educated mothers. The use of
shaming as a means to obtain babies has diminished, leading
to a false sense that women's rights are being upheld. However
mothers are still being lied to about the effects of separation
and legal risks.
After hearing her whole life that "everyone
benefits" from adoption, a mother is primed to think her
child may be better off with someone else.
In addition to lies and information hiding, the
intense solicitation to obtain babies now includes offers to
pay "expenses" far beyond pregnancy-related costs.
These "expenses" include scholarships, car payments,
entertainment, house maintenance, credit card payments, personal
loans. How does this compare to soliciting to buy children from
families off the streets in Cambodia? THAT is considered criminal!
Yet, in the United States, many people seem to
view the promotion of baby abandonment for profit as
acceptable. I can't help but think a child who discovers she/he
was sold by her mother or by both parents, will NOT come back
later and say "Thanks for considering adoption."
"Thanks for considering adoption." is
a slogan being promoted in the Infant Adoption Awareness Training
funded by the United States government. On October 17, 2000
the U.S. Congress, under Public Law 103-310, amended the Public
Health Services Act to authorize specific activities pertaining
to Infant Adoption Awareness (title XII, Subtitle A). The legislation
requires the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human
Services (DHHS) to award grants to adoption organizations to
develop and implement programs to train the designated staff
of eligible health centers in providing adoption information
and referral to pregnant women "on an equal basis with
all other courses of action".
This training and colorful feel-good brochures
are being provided to those involved in health care. As short
as the training is, it can hardly provide much understanding
of the complex life-long issues surrounding the loss of a child
to adoption. There is no requirement that this training inform
trainees of the life-long emotional consequences of surrender/adoption
to mother, child or other family members.
While other mothers are counseled carefully about
the importance of a mother spending time with and breast feeding
her infant on the child's well-being, a pregnant mother vulnerable
to "giving up her baby" is still being led to believe
her child will be better off without his mother. She is called
a "birthmother", giving the impression it is possible
to be an ex-mother, to just forget your child and go on with
life.
While other single mothers are caring for two
or three children and frequently receiving support from their
fathers, naïve mothers are led to believe the entire burden
of support should be theirs. The parents of these mothers such
as these are led to believe their daughter will be better off
without her child as well, with the effect of cutting off yet
another important source of support for her.
There are so many websites and personal advertisements
that cover only advantages of surrendering all parental rights
(which they call an "adoption"). Are there really
disadvantages for a mother who surrenders her child?
Evelyn Robinson identifies the following effects
on mothers in her presentation "Adoption and Loss - The
Hidden Grief":
"[mothers who have lost children through
adoption] experience the same outcomes as other people whose
grief is disenfranchised and suppressed. They become depressed,
they have low self-esteem, they develop emotional disturbances
and sometimes physical illnesses. Sometimes they withdraw
from society or succumb to substance abuse. Sometimes they
have difficulty forming healthy relationships. Their grieving
often becomes chronic.."
In "A Keynote Address: Known Consequences
of Separating Mother and Child at Birth and Implications for
Further Study" Wendy Jacobs, B.Sc., B.A. provides an overview
of the effects of separation/adoption that have been known since
1941. Ms. Jacobs states that one reason mothers experience problems
following surrender is the trauma of separation from their babies:
" Back in 1941 Florence Clothier wrote
about the traumatic psychological effects on the mother of
separation from her baby. She said this trauma is inevitable.
"
In "Adoption and Loss - The Hidden Grief",
Ms. Robinson wrote:
" Many parents and children who have been
separated by adoption are still suffering because they have
endured a grievous loss in their lives which has not been
acknowledged. Often they also feel guilty and inadequate because
they have not resolved their grief. The central issue in dealing
with disenfranchised grief is to validate the loss. Family
members who have been separated by adoption need their loss
to be validated and their grief to be acknowledged."
The problems are intensified by the secrecy in
adoption. To combat the intensification of these ill effects,
experts have promoted open adoption, to allow the adoptee to
stay in touch with her/his heritage and natural family and allow
a mother some contact with her child. Unfortunately, open adoption
is now being used as a "carrot" to lure in mothers
who would otherwise have kept their child. People who are seeking
a child frequently pretend to be interested in open adoption,
fully intending to close the adoption as soon as possible. Even
when the adoption stays open, the mothers (and other children
if they have them) are at the mercy of the adopters as to what
kind and how frequent the contact will be.
While open adoption may leave the natural mother
feeling used and anguished, other family members expecting continuing
contact with their grandchild, niece, nephew or sibling are
affected as well.
Many of those who have been "touched"
by adoption loss compare adoption to a veneral disease. A woman
who lost her granddaughter to adoption put it this way:
"Adoption: the gift that keeps right on
giving. Giving Depression, giving misery, giving a complete
wreckage of people's lives, giving an endless torment."
One mother whom I'll call Sylvia compared the
emotional impact of the loss of her child to adoption to having
her child torn out of her arms by enemy soldiers.
"At first, I believed it was my fault.
I though it really must be best for my child like I was told.
I thought I deserved this harshest of punishments for having
a child while still in school, unmarried and unable to support
it. Over time, I recognized that the 'soldiers' were adoption
vultures, which had been hovering, looking for me or any other
pregnant woman to exploit."
Whether Sylvia and other mothers consider themselves
responsible for the loss of their child or view it as due to
the influence exerted by the adoption "vultures" makes
little difference. It's still incredibly traumatic for a mother
to lose her child and have it raised by someone else.
Even if she has been persuaded that it is the
best thing for her child, it will still be the most traumatic
event of her life and the loss will continue for her throughout
her life. If she can stand to face it at all, she will have
to look to events like the massacre of an entire group of people
in Rwanda or the German concentration camps and extermination
program to find something that compares to the horror of it
for her. Like the Jews who encounter people who deny the concentration
camps that took their loved ones even existed, she will have
to face those who deny her motherhood exists – and so deny her
the opportunity to experience her very real grief as a mother.
She learns she must repress her grief and never
speak of her child. Her very existence, as a mother, is completely
unacceptable to society – she might make the adopters feel bad!
Anyway, wasn't this her choice? It's her own fault.
In The Adoption Reunion Survival Guide,
Julie Jarrell Bailey & Lynn N. Giddens, M.A. quote studies
that suggest as many as 40-60% of mothers suffer from unexplained
secondary infertility (or else cannot bear the thought of having
another child) following the loss of a child to adoption.
Of those that do have another child, they find
that no other child will ever replace their lost child. They
tend to be overprotective of subsequent children, fearing that
they too will somehow be taken.
The importance of the mother-child bond and other
family bonds is well known to psychologists. Mother-child bonding
begins before birth and it cannot be broken. This bond is not
the same as the attachment that may develop between an adoptee
and the people who have adopted him/her.
In her book Primal Wound: Understanding the
Adopted Child (1993), Nancy Verrier wrote of her adopted
daughter:
"I discovered that it was easier for us
to give her love than it was for her to accept it."
Those women (and families) who have had a child
illegally taken from them and who fight to get their child back
face strong opposition from a public that believes the child
has "bonded" to the people with whom he/she is currently
living. In Journey of the Adopted Self, Betty Jean Lifton,
wrote:
"Now therapists are beginning to understand
that there are primal strivings behind the adoptee's need
to reconnect in some way with the [natural] family. .... The
Argentine psychiatrists were amazed at how easily some of
the "disappeared" children, who have been adopted
by the military families responsible for murdering their mothers
in the late 1970s, had been able to adjust when returned to
their original families years later."
The need for real information in surrender/adoption
choice is not just a desire, but a right that women must have.
Essentially, in a surrender/adoption situation, a woman should
be counseled with the same respect she would be given as a parent
considering major surgery for her child. She should required
by law to be presented clear, honest information about the long-term
effects of separation/adoption on mothers and adoptees. A woman
should never be subjected to manipulative lies (Adoption is
in a child's best interests, people with material possessions
will love a child better than his/her own parents, "loving"
option, etc. ) and mass-produced highly fictional "Dear-B___mother"
letters which are actually false advertising and nothing more.
Consider that an honest advertisement from many
potential adopters might read something like this:
PREGNANT?
Our own baby is our dream. But we can't have one so yours
might be our last hope. My wife is willing to settle for the
idea and I am going along with it. We can't understand why
anyone would part with their baby and we will never respect
you for it. We want only a perfectly healthy white infant
and she/he better love us and be grateful after all we've
been through! Contact our lawyer at xxx-xxx-xxxx.
Can you imagine the uproar if those desiring fetal
tissue for research or medicine solicited women with ads similar
to those put out by adoption lawyers and agencies?
PREGNANT?
It's our dream to complete our research on xxxx
and we need fetal tissue to do it! We provide scholarships,
pay expenses, etc. You'll aid people with x, y and z diseases
and give them life!
Women should not have to be vulnerable to solicitation
for their child. To protect women (and children), there should
be no money exchanged by adopters for a child ever, not even
to pay for associated counseling services, medical bills or
expenses.
There is much evidence that a mother's (and father's)
consent to surrender parental rights as it is being obtained
in the United States is not a choice.
To be a choice, the parents must be informed by
having all the effects of separation on adoptees and their natural
families plainly spelled out and understood. Honest language
that is not discriminatory against natural families must be
used.
To be a choice, parents should understand that
a person's circumstances (financial, marital state, etc) change
over time. When a father gets laid off from work, a family should
not immediately be thinking of ridding itself of the "burden"
of their "adoptable" children and likewise a mother
whose resources are slim today should not immediately think
it is wrong to obtain help to make it past this temporary situation.
To be a choice, all resources available should
be clearly understood. This includes financial support from
the father, government aid, parenting classes, young parents
groups, potential sources of low-cost but high quality baby
items (garage sales, Salvation Army, etc.). When a mother has
chosen to give birth to a child conceived in rape, she should
be taken seriously and helped with suggestions when she asks
how to answer questions (posed by strangers, friends and the
child) about her child's father.
To be a choice, family members should never be
advised to withhold offers of support if they wish to help.
No one should ever be told that it benefits a child to be abandoned
by his/her own parents in favor of an "adoption plan",
just because the child's parents are not married. These things
should be illegal.
To be a choice, there should be no pressure or
mention of any kind of the people who are clamoring to adopt.
In fact, the choice should be made with the idea in mind that
the child may not be cared for at all adequately if surrendered
for adoption because there is no guarantee of any kind that
it will. Most adopters of infants "pay" for a healthy
child that will love them. They will return "the merchandise"
if they are not entirely satisfied (and possibly sue the agency
for wrongful adoption) and the child could find himself/herself
abandoned to "the system".
This is even true in an "open" adoption.
Mothers want their child to have some contact with their natural
families and know their origins. They frequently "choose"
open adoption over keeping their child, when their resources
are (to the best of their knowledge) limited. They believe they
will minimize the trauma for their child. Naively, they trust
the friendly potential adopters and their verbal promises. But,
an "open" adoption may become closed at any time without
consent of the natural parents and all contact cut off.
To be a choice, the resources available to parents
to keep their child must be known and readily (not begrudgingly)
available.
To be a choice, fathers should be required by
law to provide financial support and such support readily obtainable.
The United States government should stop blaming and penalizing
women who are caring for their children as if they were the
ones not taking responsibility. Mothers should not be pushed
out into full-time jobs when they have small children to care
for. Training and other resources that will help low income
women to find higher paying employment should be provided. When
children who are living with one parent find that parent absent
because he/she must work full-time or more, it's the children
who suffer from this and it's not right.
Without these protections for women, it can hardly
be fair to call the surrendering of parental rights a "choice".
Without these protections, it's not a protection of a woman's
reproductive rights but an exploitation that ignores her rights.
It's not a protection of children's best interests, but ignores
those interests.
The primary reason for this exploitation is to
provide people with the dream of having a child "of their
own". I call this a dream because the reality is that the
child is not "their own" even though they may "own"
it legally. The lack of acknowledgement of their natural family
as a part of their reality is troublesome to adoptees. For adoptees
who experience this possessiveness, this desire on the part
of adopters to "own" them, it is a problem into adulthood.
Many of you may be learning about adoption loss
for the first time today. One of the inherent characteristics
of oppression is that the victim's voices are silenced.
Social workers and others have typically spoken
for natural mothers and adoptees. Websites with adoption forums
(which give the appearance of being open to all viewpoints)
frequently delete unwanted posts, just as they "deleted"
the unwanted mothers. When they post adoption stories, only
happy, grateful stories will ever be posted. They will never
post a story from an adoptee who describes her surrender/adoption
(or foster care for those whose adoptions were terminated) as
unsatisfactory and questions why her mother was not helped to
keep her.
In addition, a language which is negative and
discriminatory against the natural family has been generated
by the adoption industry. If you can control language you can
control people's thoughts.
According to the adoption industry, phrases like
"own child" must never be used, but must be replaced
by "biological child", giving the impression that
a mother is simply an egg donor. The phrase "give up"
is also on the list of words, evidently too many natural mothers
realized that they did simply "give up" hope and "give
in" to the pressure and lies. The word "adoption"
itself is taboo and has been replaced by "placement"
to give the impression that natural mothers have control. No
mention is made of the extra money paid by adopters to get their
advertisement in front of some naïve pregnant woman ahead of
others' ads. The term "FOB" (father of the baby) is
used on the Gladney Center website to refer to a child's father.
Generalizing and calling fathers FOBs is de-humanizing language
similar to but even worse than "birthfather" because
it is so close to S.O.B. While some fathers may shirk their
responsibilities (and thus merit name-calling) a great many
might be pleased and proud to assist mothers in nurturing and
taking responsibility for their children if fathers were encouraged
(and required) to do so, rather than being shunted off to the
side or dispensed with as quickly as possible in the interest
of finalizing an adoption.
Natural mothers are quick to point out other misleading
phrases. Joss Shawyer, in her column Voices From Exile, wrote
about how natural families are "touched by" adoption
in her article entitled "Touched By Adoption, With a Blowtorch".
(http://www.originsusa.org, click on "Voices From Exile").
Mothers who are traumatized, shamed and isolated
(and constrained in their thoughts by language carefully chosen
by the adoption industry) frequently take decades to face reality.
It is initially incredibly painful for a mother to acknowledge
that she has been used as baby-making machine to provide a baby
for someone else. Once the baby is in possession of adopters
the mother becomes a cast-off byproduct of the process.
Many mothers and adoptees are speaking out, via
their own personal websites or through groups such as Exiled
Mothers and OriginsUSA (internationally affiliated with mother
organization Origins Inc. (NSW Australia), Origins Canada, and
other Origins Branches; Origins Queensland, Origins South Australia)
as well as Adoption Considerations, AdoptionCrossroads.org,
AbolishAdoption, Adoption:Legalized Lies and many more.
However for the mother who finds the information
she needs a day too late, the presence of these websites is
no consolation.
To summarize, adoption choice is commonly perceived
as a protection for women who truly do not want their babies
– an option to abortion. In reality, adoption "choice"
as it is being implemented in the United States nearly always
ensnares mothers who truly do want their babies and would be
wonderful mothers. Most of these women will be married within
a few years after their child is born, often to their child's
father.
A pregnant woman who intends to give birth must
be viewed as a parent and deserves respect as a parent. She
is a parent, not "not-a-parent". She deserves real
information and kindly assistance to help her through a temporary
situation.
The "loving" option rhetoric designed
to separate babies from their parents should be illegal as should
any solicitation for babies or children. Whether the payment
offered is money, a television, potential scholarships, or just
"feeling good about doing the right thing" the truth
is, these people soliciting for babies and children are vultures
working to tear children away from the mothers who otherwise
would have kept and nurtured them.
No one should ever be allowed to pay money for
a child, not even to pay for associated counseling services,
medical bills or expenses. No one should ever be paid or provided
an incentive for adopting. No one and no organization should
be provided a bonus or incentive to get a child adopted rather
than returning that child to her/his family.
Let's stop the exploitation of women. Let's make
surrendering parental rights a real choice, by first calling
it what it truly is (surrendering all parental rights, not an
"adoption"), by eliminating the money in adoption,
by providing real help and real information for mothers, and
by removing all pressures on women to surrender their parental
rights including the false advertising and solicitation of mothers
for their babies.
Copyright © 2003 Laurie A. Frisch
REFERENCES
Bailey, J.J. & Giddens,.L.N., M.A.(2001)
The Adoption Reunion Survival Guide. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger
Publications, Inc.
Finnegan, J.P. (Feb 18, 2004), "Help Choose
Life Adoption Aid Specialty Plates"; The Illinois Leader
[World Wide Web] Available:
here.
Jacobs, W. B.Sc., B.A. (2002) "A Keynote
Address:
Known Consequences of Separating Mother
and Child at Birth and Implications for Further Study"
[World Wide Web]
Jones, M.B. (1993). Birthmothers: Women
who have relinquished babies for adoption tell their stories.
Chicago, IL.: Chicago Review Press.
Lifton, B.J. (1994) Journey of the Adopted
Self: A Quest for Wholeness. New York: BasicBooks.
Robinson, E.(2001) "Adoption and Loss
- The Hidden Grief" (Presented in New Zealand, USA, Canada,
England, Ireland, and Scotland) [World Wide Web] Available
here.
Shawyer, J. (2004) "Touched
By Adoption With a Blowtorch" [World Wide
Web] from her column "Voices From Exile".
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
, Administration for Children and Families. (no date given) "Infant
Adoption Awareness Training Program Guidelines" [World Wide
Web] Available
here.
Verrier, N. (1993). The Primal Wound: Understanding
the Adopted Child. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press.
WEBSITES
Abolish Adoption
Adoption Considerations
Adoption Crossroads
Adoption:
Legalized Lies
"Birthmothers"
Exploited By Adoption (BEBA)
The Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative(internationally
affiliated with mother organization Origins Inc. (NSW Australia),
Origins Canada, and other Origins Branches; Origins Queensland,
Origins South Australia)
