How adoption agencies 'turn' vulnerable women into spokespeople for relinquishing

Catelynn and Tyler, spokespeople for Bethany

Is adoption in America a business? Yes, it is a billion-dollar a year business. How do you get more babies to satisfy the customers, the prospective adoptive parents? How do you get other women to give up their babies? 

You get still-stunned mothers who have relinquished their children recently--brand new birth mothers to jump in and convince others that they too can do the "right" thing by giving up their children to better fixed folks. Catelynn and Tyler of Sixteen and Pregnant and Teen Mom
fame are Bethany Christian Services' most visible new recruits who help convince other young couples to give up their babies to strangers. That is the kind of marketing tool used by the unscrupulous but ever present Bethany, an adoption and family service agency, with over 70 sites in 30 states and 13 other countries.*  

I just picked up this tweet from the Bethany website: RT @TylerBaltierra: @Bethany Cate and I will be speaking next week @ Penn state!!! Come c us #uwontbedissapointed

Sickening.  

Lorraine

But before reality TV, before the Internet was the tool it is today, Bethany used recent birth/first mothers the same way. Earlier in the month we featured two posts that arrived at First Mother Forum as comments. The writer has since been in touch with us privately, and we are today sharing more of what occurred when she--more than two decades ago--was blindly led into being a poster birth mother for Bethany. She relinquished in the late Eighties via through what Bethany then called "an extremely open adoption. Today it would be described as "semi-open,"--annual visits, letters, gift exchange. It evolved into a fully open, then completely closed, adoption.

We hope this post will serve as a wake-up call to women who recently gave up their children, whether through Bethany or some other adoption facilitator, to not turn into first mothers who urge others to take the same path.--lorraine

THOSE PROUD BIRTH MOTHER BLOGS...     

A phenomenon I’ve found especially troublesome are agencies encouraging newly-counseled, newly-relinquishing/placing mothers to erect and write blogs on “the birth mother experience”--blogs that tend to lean toward, or stop just short of, advising pregnant mothers to place their children. Not all blogs are the product of this encouragement, but bear with me.

Before the Internet, newly-relinquishing moms were recruited to write for their Crises Pregnancy Centers’s (CPC) newsletters, and to speak on agency panels to couples hoping to adopt, "mentor" pregnant mothers, as a part of CPC-sponsored “counsel.” As I've revealed here earlier,  I was one of them, and I admit I sounded a lot like the newer birth mom bloggers, "proud" to be a birth mother.  

I wrote and said what I’d been counseled to write/say, using words and ideals I’d been spoon fed--words forged by others to define an experience I couldn't yet wrap my mind around; one that my own words could not then--so early on--begin to convey.  Would not, fully, for decades. But to go back to the beginning, before I gave birth, a horrific night I remember as clearly as if it happened yesterday. The sound of squeaking chairs, the murmurs and nervous laughter of hopeful couples, the butterflies ascending from my solar plexus, my pregnancy counselor's announcement to the assembled group, the strange new name with which she introduced me:  

"This is Alicia" she said, "one of our 'birth mothers.'" [Ed: she was still simply a pregnant young woman, not a "mother."]

I was around seven-and-half-months pregnant, my belly swollen beneath a maroon tent of a dress. During the previous week's counseling session, my counselor had made a request of me. Something important, she'd said. She asked me to talk to prospective adoptive parents--an "opportunity to educate...to make birth mothers more real to them." I'd been hand selected as I was "especially mature and responsible."  

And it was good to feel valued--by anyone--after my family, and my child's father, had abandoned me. She wanted the people hoping to adopt to know that birth mothers were not merely careless derelicts, devoid of maternal love. She knew I wanted to parent. She knew I was actively seeking resources to do so, but she'd told me she was not allowed to help me locate said resources. I'd grown to like her, to believe she had my and my child's best interests at heart. I believe, even now, that she was as naive as I was at the time. I trusted her. I felt beholden to her. But I didn't understand that she was, first and foremost, a facilitator on the path to adoption of my baby.

So when she asked me to speak to people looking to adopt, I agreed. I sat alone, a one-woman panel, poured awkwardly into a stiff chair. The couples addressed me as a kind of composite. To them, I was a learning tool, a guide book of sorts. I was all "pregnant birth mothers."

They asked me questions like:

"Do birth mothers prefer parents with a college degree?"

"Do birth mothers have a problem with homeschooling?"

"Do birth mothers change their mind?"

When I returned home, I drew in my journal. A huge belly, hands reaching for it. A barely visible, faintly-sketched woman behind it. The group's collective view of me, at least the view that had come across in their questions and responses, had sifted into me.  

I'd never heard the term "birth mother" before I darkened my counselor's door but, as a writer, I know language is a powerful thing. That one little word inserted before "mother," when assigned to me, while pregnant, was a wedge...and that night it insinuated itself into my consciousness, helped to groom me toward relinquishment. Toward what would come to be a koan -- a mother, but not a mother.

It would be years before I realized it had not been "an opportunity to educate," a way to "make birth mothers more real."  I had been merely a living, breathing "how-to-gain-a-pregnant-woman's-favor" manual. It was the most humiliating night of my life.

And the social worker? Some years later, she confided that I'd tried harder than anyone she'd ever worked with to find ways to parent. A couple of years after my eleventh-hour relinquishment/entrustment, she left the agency unwilling to play God anymore. 

WHEN STILL STUNNED BY LOSS OF MY BABY.... 
In that state, I truly believed the love I had for my child was so permanently bound to another’s through relinquishment and placement (including an entrustment ceremony), was so vulnerably encompassing and obvious to everyone involved...that it alone would surely see all of us through. To see it otherwise, when it was too late to alter the course, would have been devastating. 

Typically, the writing/speaking/mentoring invitations were first issued when we were mere weeks or months post-placement, still in degrees of shock, still in the earlier stages of grief. We continued to be asked until we lost interest in speaking, or simply could no longer tow the agency-endorsed line. 

A birth mother mentor I met while I was pregnant spoke of the whole thing with such confidence and bravado that she nearly glowed. She’d made a plan. It hurt at first, but the plan was working the way she’d hoped it would. She had no regrets. She had served God. A couple of years later, I am sure I appeared to be somewhat like her to a new mother I mentored. The doubts I had I kept to myself when speaking to other prospective "birth mothers." 

Still unaware that open adoption agreements weren’t a legal aspect of the adoption, I assured the new mom that open adoption guaranteed ongoing contact with one’s child, I assured her that a forever-extended family would form and bond in the wake. I assured her that children were naturally grateful to be relinquished/placed/adopted. 

When it didn’t turn out that way for her and her son, I figured she just hadn’t chosen well, she just hadn’t done it right, she was just unlucky. I assured her that God would open a window where the door to her child was clearly closing.  

THE NIGHTMARE OF THE PANELS

And the agency orchestrated panels?

We moms (anywhere from weeks to two years post-placement) would file into a room, take our seats, and try not to look too deeply into the assembled crowd. The feeling that comes to me now, remembering those times, is emotional nakedness; an attempt to keep my hands over my most private parts. We used words terms like “adoption plan” and “God’s plan for families” and “surrender” and “sacrificial love.” And we’d do our damnedest to keep from breaking down. Polite tears were fine, but nothing guttural.

Some of us saved that for after, when we confided to one another that we’d felt just a little bit like carnival attractions. That we had a collective gut feeling, based on the Q/A period, that we hadn’t quite gotten through. Some of us kept our lips stiff until we got home. Some of us managed to get through with only a few whimpers.

One mother (who had relinquished only a few months before participating on her first panel) stands out in my memory.   She would eke out a few words, tremble, and start to cry. Hard. Her head falling into her hands. Then she’d muster her courage and try again. In the end, she couldn’t continue, and I thought maybe she wasn’t as strong as the rest of us. Not as brave, somehow. But that wasn’t it at all. I now believe she’d been strong enough to defy polite stoicism we were supposed to show. Despite the admiration she’d stood to gain in that room, she was courageous enough to forgo the agency-endorsed words. 

But she shouldn’t have been there. I shouldn’t have been there. None of us should have been there. Not only because we were vulnerable and grieving, but because we didn’t yet know what “the birth mother experience” was, let alone what adoption really would come to mean. 

Most of us didn’t yet know that our children’s birth certificates were sealed. Most of us didn’t know open adoption agreements weren’t a part of the adoption, itself, endowed with all the attendant legalities. Not one of us had ever been privy to an adult adoptee’s perspective.

WHEN THE FOG CLEARS, THE IMPACT BECOMES REAL…

We knew the force of a new mother's love, the heartbreak of finding ourselves at our hospital's curb with empty arms, the bitter-sweetness of those early photos or visits (if it is an "open" adoption), but as epic as those sacredly or horrifically-perceived hours are, they are but page one, volume one in the veritable library that holds “the birth mother experience.” I know that they still tell pregnant mothers that, if they relinquish, the void will automatically be filled, and I want to say, “I know many loving mothers for whom it was not. I know of many adult adoptees for whom it was not.”

We had no business representing the "birth mother experience." And just as we new birth moms did not know then, agency-encouraged or relatively-new birth mother bloggers don’t know now. They don’t know, yet some assure pregnant moms who find or are directed to their blogs (at an exponentially higher volume than we reached) that they and their children will automatically, through the act of relinquishment and adoption alone, be blessed. There is no way to know that.

No new mother (and by new I mean anywhere from weeks to three, four, five years post-relinquishment) should be offering definitive advice on an experience they’ve yet to live out. We cannot begin to fathom the “birth mother experience” until our children begin to articulate their thoughts on the matter. A large part of the “birth mother experience” is directly linked to whether or not our children wind up well-served by placement/adoption. And we can’t begin to know that until they are, at the very least, able to comprehend cause and effect, their place in the world. We can’t possibly begin to know until they become able to articulate their particular thoughts and feelings regarding their adoptedness. 

It’s easy to get swept up in the innocence of babyhood, the appropriately sweet metaphor of “angels” and “gifts” and “blessings.” Indeed, the mothers I’ve known view their children in all of these ways. But inside of those angels and blessings are increasingly autonomous people who grow into totally autonomous people--autonomous people who may one day say something along the lines of, “I cannot see how loving means letting go.”--Alicia, a 

pseudonym 

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*Bethany and the agencies sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (LDFS) are the two largest member blocks of the National Association for Adoption, a staunch opponent of revoking the state laws that seal original birth certificates of adopted people. 

From FMF: 

Cultivating a Culture of Adoption

Shotgun Adoptions via Crises Pregnancy Centers 

BUYER BEWARE: Bethany 'Christian' Services scams customers and steals identities from the (adopted) infants

Former Bethany "recruiter" speaks up 

How a birth mother's No to adoption turned into a Yes