Does one adoption spawn another? Too often for comfort.

Jane & I bought the same black stone washed jeans independentl

As many of the comments regarding the previous post about "I'm Having Their Baby" centered around whether or not adoptees are more likely to give up their babies than the non adopted, I wanted to follow up and am posting below a section of the memoir I'm working on that covers that very issue. The court case in which I first heard of any adoptee also being a mother who surrenders occurred in 1976, and that is where this section begins:

(from Hole in My Heart, copyright 2012) 

I am in court room again, this time in Superior Court in Atlantic City for four women who had been adopted as infants in New Jersey. Today is nothing like the first time I testified in court, today I am breezing in to push my agenda. I’m in a tailored black suit, all business this time, not intimidated by opposing counsel, or anything, really. My testimony is sharp, my tone determined, world, hear me Roar!  “I desperately want those records open so that when my daughter is eighteen she can find me.” This time the story is covered by The Times,^[1] and ABC-TV in New York. Good thing Mom knows. Thank god she supports me.

Adoptee Penny Partridge, who came from Pennsylvania to testify, says: “We want to be like everyone else. We didn’t come out of an agency. We came out of a human being. It meant a lot to just to have a name.”

In the ladies room during a break, I come across one of the adopted women bringing the suit, standing over the sink, weeping profusely. When I try to console her she says between sobs, “What you said—about never forgetting—it’s true—I’m a mother too. I gave up a child  too.”

Sometimes you just can’t think of the right thing to say. The look of horror on my face would have to do. Being adopted is terrible enough, who would go out and willingly wreck her life further by giving up a child? Plus, how could anybody adopted go ahead and inflict the same angst on another? A rhetorical question that adoptees and first mothers sometimes bat around is: Whose pain is worse? Is it worse to give away a child, or to be given away? The difference is this: We mothers had a time when we were not birth mothers. We had a before. Adoptees did not. But we have only ourselves to blame, we had sex, so we self-inflicted this wound, that compounds our guilt, and grief. The question is a circle, it has no answer.

This woman has both an endless hole in the space of her identity, and a void where there should be a child. She wants her original birth record so she can find her mother, but what about her baby? What about him? The depth of her grief is stacked up like planes at LAX, she is seemingly inconsolable.

That double whammy—adoptee/birth mother--is not all that unusual. Attend an adoption-reform conference, you run into the women who did this so often your head spins, your heart leaps. The one hard statistic I could find indicates that adoptees are seven times more likely than the general population to relinquish a child themselves.^[2] Seven times.

There in that ladies room, I give the woman a long hug and pull out a tissue to wipe her mascara that’s running down her cheeks. We both have to go back into the courtroom, face the others assembled there, face the world and carry on.

Several months later,^[3] the judge in New Jersey rules that adoptees have a deep-seated need to learn their origins and should have easier access to their records, but he stops short of writing that they have a constitutional right to their original records. In his 26-page opinion, Judge Philip A. Gruccio states that judges should consider the psychological needs of the adopted person to learn the truth of their origins when deciding such cases. However, each will have to go to court individually to prove real need. While those four women did not gain access to their original birth records, the wording of the decision makes it seem as if the door to the truth is at least ajar.
Not so fast. --Lorraine Dusky, from her forthcoming memoir, Hole In My Heart

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[1] Donald Janson, “Adopted Children Seeking Changes in Law on Finding Natural Parents,” New York Times, Oct. 27, 1976.  

[2] Moore, N. & Davidson, J. K., A profile of adoption placers: Perceptions of pregnant teens during the decision-making process. Adoption Quarterly, 6(2), 29-41. The sampling was small (178) and in the southwest, where religious attitudes may have skewed the statistic somewhat due to prohibitions against abortion. But clearly something besides chance is at work here.

The late Annette Baran, a leading authority on adoption and one of the authors of The Adoption Triangle, confirmed this when we spoke. Jean Strauss, whose memoir Birthright: The Guide to Search and Reunion for Adoptees, Birthparents,and Adoptive.. (right) is about her own search and reunion, discovered her natural mother was also an adoptee. Straus later found her grandmother and reunited the two of them, and made a film of the reconnecting of the three of them. In one of my favorite adoption books (by non-adoptees), Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self by David Brodzinsky, Marshall Schechter and Robin Marantz Henig, the authors write of a complicated sexual expression for adopted teenagers: “Adopted teenagers who were born to teenage mothers may feel the cycle repeating itself in their own sexual behavior. Adoptive mothers who agonized over their own infertility may feel jealous and resentful of their daughter’s developing fecundity….Some [adopted teenagers]deliberately become pregnant to undo what they feel to be their birth mother’s mistakes. And some go in the opposite direction, shying away even from healthy sexual experimentation because they are so aware of where that landed their birth mothers.”

Adoptee memoirs came out after abortion became legal often contain include the author's own abortions, and their rather quick and, all things considered, uncomplicated decisions to have an abortion rather than make a different choice. “I know my birth mother and I are alike in this,” Strauss wrote in Beneath a Tall Tree, “we return  home form a hospital, empty and childless. I believe we both wish we could have made different choices, not about adoption or abortion, but about the choice of letting ourselves become pregnant in the first place.” Sarah Saffian in Ithaka: A Daughter's Memoir of Being Found wrote: “…for me, a mistaken pregnancy myself, having an abortion had been a particular tragedy” though she gives no explanation that this affected her more than any other woman who had not been adopted. Neither Strauss nor Saffian expressed that they were unusually distraught over their decision due to their being adopted. 

[3] Donald Janson, “Jersey Eases Access to Adoption Records,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 1977. 

Also see from FMF:
Previous post: 'I'm Having Their Baby' turns into 'I'm keeping MY baby'
and on the same issue of adoptees becoming first/birth mothers themselves: 

 Does adoption run in families?

 Doubly Damned by Adoption turns Victim into a Fighter

And for more great research on the effect of adoption/abortion, see Malinda at AdoptionTalk:

Emotional/Psychological Effects of Abortion & Adoption Placement for Minors ______________________________ 

Beneath a Tall Tree: "Not only is this an incredibly moving human story, it's as exciting as any detective story..." -- Annette Baran, author of "The Adoption Triangle"  Jean is a friend and I heartily recommend both her books. 

Ithaka: A Daughter's Memoir of Being Found (left) made me a little nuts. While it is well-written, I wanted to throw it against the wall at various parts. It struck me that much of her initial and continuing distancing from her biological parents had to do with their vastly different social and economic status. Adoptive parents may like this book; when multiple adopter Rosie O'Donnell (as editor) drove McCall's magazine into the ground for good, she hired Saffian as a columnist. Nontheless, some adoptees may find the difficulties in relating to her mother and father familiar.