The longterm impact of giving up a child

Lorraine

Does relinquishing a child have long-term negative effects on a birth mother's life? In the previous blog we began exploring that question. Here is a run down of several studies that indicate the way to a healthy, happy life is not having a child and giving it up for adoption. Yet everywhere today we see adoption as only a good thing. Celebrities adopt and the media thrives on the stories: See Sandra Bullock on the cover of People! 

Anti-abortion groups and all sorts of churches--evangelical, Latter-Day Saints, Unitarian, Catholics, you name it--promote adoption not only to prevent abortion, but as a way to control population. Instead of further burdening the world with more children, adopt a needy baby! 

Even a liberal think-tank, the Center for American Progress,[1] got into the act with a white paper a year ago that shows how single women who surrender their babies have a better life than those who do not. What is not talked about in these pro-adoption times are the mental and physical effects on the mother  of surrendering a baby to others for adoption. One expects short-term grief in the aftermath of signing away one’s rights a child one has borne, but what of the long-term lasting impact, four, five—twenty—years later?

MORE LIKELY TO BE DIAGNOSED WITH DEPRESSION
We are not doing so well. While there are millions of us out there, we are hard to study and pin down—we do go on and have lives and get swallowed up by a code of silence that many families and friends adopt. But the toxic impact of the decision to relinquish shows up in all the research. A British study of 93 birth mothers found that while only an insignificant proportion of them had been diagnosed with a mental health problem before adoption (3 percent), in the time between the parting and contact, 24 percent had a psychiatric diagnosis mainly for depression, with half of them having had inpatient treatment. [2] Not surprisingly, mothers who felt compelled to search for their children were those who fared the worst.

An Australian study of over two hundred first mothers found that more than a quarter of them (28 percent) reported below-average adjustment at the time they were questioned, many up to twenty years later, and half reported an increasing sense of loss since placing their children. A comparison group of women who had not given up children were found to be in sounder mental health than the women who had. Authors of the study identified three risk factors that exacerbated the difficulty of “adjustment,” for want of a better word: lack of opportunities to talk about their feelings related to surrender; no social support; and ongoing sense of loss. Yes, support groups and friends who allow first mothers to talk about their sorrow may help, but they do not alleviate the overall sadness that permeates their lives. 

EFFECT ON MARRIAGE, FERTILITY AND PARENTING
A survey of more than 300 birth parents, most of them members of Concerned United Birthparents, found that surrendering a child was perceived by them as having a profound negative effect on their later lives, particularly in the area of marriage, fertility and parenting.[3] One could argue that they were self-selected to be skewed towards pathology, as they were largely members of an organization devoted to the issues surrounding surrender and its impact on the surrendering parent, but nonetheless, the results are the same as other studies.

In one of the earliest books to investigate the effect of adoption on birth mothers, The Adoption Triangle, the authors (a psychiatrist and two social workers) found that in numerous letters from first mothers collected years after surrender, “there was still the intensity of feeling and the need to describe the pain, still carried within…. Even if the birth parents had become comfortable with the decision [to relinquish] because there were no viable alternatives, they nevertheless felt loss, pain, mourning and a continuing sense of caring for that long vanished child.”[4] 

Another study, the Birthmother Research Project,[5] found that on average that women who surrender children are more likely to have hysterectomies than women who do not. Researcher J. Kelly, M.A. writes: "The survey results supported other research findings…that birthmothers experience difficulties with unresolved grief, traumatic stress symptoms, self-punishment, low self-esteem, arrested emotional development, living at extremes, difficulty forgiving oneself/others, being out of touch with feelings, difficulty giving/receiving love, relationship problems, self-hatred and dysfunctional sexual problems. Unresolved grief, self-punishment, and low self-esteem ranked highest among the difficulties identified as extreme, often or severe."

WHO IS BETTER OFF?
One often quoted study[6] that is used to promote adoption suggests that women who give up their babies are better off than similarly situated women who kept their babies. However, read farther into the study and you learn that a full third of the women who had relinquished were not at peace with their decision—but a third of the original original participants--nearly 600--could not be located to complete the survey four years after relinquishment. Many were young women (21 and under) who had been residents in a home for pregnant teens, or recruited for the study because they were considering adoption for their unborn babies.

Ten percent of the women who surrendered their babies reported a great deal of regret, while 90 percent of the women who kept their babies reported no regret. Yet this study has been used to show that giving up a child can have a good impact on the birth mothers because they are more likely to finish their education and less likely to be receiving public assistance. (We note they were less likely to be receiving public assistance because they did not have a child to provide for.) Furthermore, the mothers in this study were surveyed four years after relinquishment, and for many surrendering mothers the full extent of their grief is not realized until years later. They write of the emotional devastation that the surrender of their children has wrought throughout their lives in memoirs and various social networks, and comments left at blogs such as this one.

This study was done in the Nineties when open adoptions began to be more available, and two-thirds of the participants did help choose the adoptive parents, and more than half of the respondents had received follow up pictures and letters. But four years later, only 12 percent said they had phoned or visited since the child had been placed with a new family...."so fully disclosed adoptions were not typical," according to a white paper of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.[7] Yet those who did choose the parents, and were not coerced into surrender, reported less grief and worry, and more relief and peace, then mothers who did not have this opportunity. The cohort that had the least regret and sadness were those who had continuing contact with the adoptive family. How great or small this number actually is remains a large mystery.

OPEN ADOPTIONS OFTEN CLOSE
Many so-called “open” adoptions are a sham; they consist of letters that pass through the agency to the adoptive parents without revealing the true identities of the parents, who may—and do—close them in apparently alarming numbers. One social worker at a Bethany Christian Services agency once revealed to a colleague that approximately 80 percent of the “open” adoptions that they facilitate close within a couple of years; while we do not know how "open" the adoptions were supposed to be in the above study, the above 12 percent figure of continuing contact indicates, at the very least, that only a small percentage truly remain open and involve the birth mother over the years. According the Donaldson Institute, mothers who believe their adoptions will be open, but find them later closed, suffer the greatest.

While writing about this, I am reminded what a well-known psychologist, someone frequently quoted in the media, once said to a close friend of mine: “You don’t want to end up like Lorraine, do you?” The comment stung—what kind of vibe did I give off? I wondered, I’d only met the man briefly, I was an editor at Town & Country magazine, I was in a relationship—but I think that whatever I emanated was not important: he knew my background and innately understood that giving up a child would always be a minus. It would always be an issue I would have to deal with. 

The surrender of my child would be a lifelong cross.--lorraine

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[1] The Adoption Option: Adoption Won’t Reduce Abortion but It Will Expand Women’s Choices (October, 2010. See also our response in one of the pages listed on the home page of the blog. 

[2] John Triseliotis, Julia Feast and Fiona Kyle, The Adoption Triangle Revisited: A study of adoption, search and reunion experiences, 2005; The British Association for Adoption & Fostering.

[3] Eva Y. Deykin, Dr. P .H., Lee Campbell, M.Ed., Patricia Patti, B.S.N., The Post Adoption Experience of Surrendering Parents, American Orthopsychiatric Association, 1984, pps. 271-280.

[4] Sorosky,A. D., Annette Baran, & Ruben Pannor The Adoption Triangle: Sealed or Opened Records: How They Affect Adoptees, Birth Parents, and Adoptive Parents (1989) p. 72.

[5] J. Kelly, M.A., Birthmother Research Project. 
[6] Pearila Brickner Namerow, Debra Kalmus, and Linda Cushman,“The Consequences of Placing versus Parenting Among Unmarried Women,  Families and Adoption (The Haworth Press) pps. 175-197.

[7] Safeguarding the Rights and Well-Being of Birthparents in the Adoption Process, Evan. B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, 2006, revised 2007, pps. 46-50.

From FMF: Response to The Adoption Option

Birthmark was the first memoir from a birth mother by blogger Lorraine. Extremely controversial at the time of its release in 1979, it remains a seminal and moving document in the history of the adoption reform movement. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade, 2006, is a collection of stories of many birth mothers, written by adoptee Ann Fessler. If you are interested, please order by clicking on the above icons or links.