A Joyous New Year---Some good news in adoption reform

I'm feeling really upbeat today, the last day of 2013. It's my 45th wedding anniversary, 45 years with a wonderful patient, kind man. We may just go out for Chinese tonight as we did when our three daughters were young and we had little time or money. Last night we and a couple of friends had a great dinner and went to a fantastic concert by the Oregon Symphony. It culminated with Beethoven's Ninth and its rousing finale Ode to Joy.

I feel joyous and optimistic for 2014: my family is doing well, I've got great friends, and there's progress on adoption reform.

Whatever happened to Carlina White?

Father, daughter and mother reunited 

Remember Carlina White? The girl who was abducted in 1987 from a New York City hospital and raised by another woman as her own in Connecticut? After "Nejdra Nance"--the name she grew up with--was pregnant herself at sixteen, she needed her birth certificate to get aid for pre-natal care, but her mother was elusive about it. Netty--the name she went by--eventually found a paper she thought was her birth certificate, but it turned out to be false. She knew something was wrong but when Netty confronted Ann Pettway, the woman who raised her, Pettway told her that her mother was a crack addict who deserted her and never came back. It was a lie, a lie that would take years to unravel.

Capobiancos register at Target for new adopted baby

Lorraine

UPDATE (Nov. 28, 2017)
Apparently Matt and Melanie Capobianco did adopt another child, a daughter named Stella, as I originally surmised in this 2013 post, soon after Veronica Brown was taken from her natural father by court order. An obituary for Melanie's mother lists among her descendants (which they are actually not) the two children of Melanie as Veronica and Stella. The obit says this:

Dr. Duncan is survived by her daughter, Melanie Duncan and her husband, Matthew Capobianco of Charleston, SC; her granddaughters, Veronica and Stella Capobianco; her brother Joseph B. Fabin Jr. and his wife Lisa Fabin and her nephew Timothy Fabin all of Minerva, N.Y. 

Just a news brief today: Matt and Melanie Capobianco have apparently adopted a second child, and have registered for gifts at Target. To those who do not know, the Capobiancos of Charleston, South Carolina prevailed in their battle to remove four-year-old Veronica Brown from the home of Dusten Brown, her biological father--where she was thriving--at the end of September. Regarding the adoption of a second child--from where I do not know--I really have no words to add, and look for our reader's reaction. I am sick at heart.--lorraine

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From FMF

Dusten Brown: A Father's final words to his daughter
Baby Veronica: How Dusten Brown could prevail in battle over his daughter
Dusten Brown continues to fight for his daughter; the Capobiancos dig in deeper
Adoptive father John Roberts: Not impartial in the Baby Veronica case
Supreme Court rules against Indian father, limits Indian Child Welfare Act

OBIT

Dr. Joann Frances Fabin Duncan

The sisterhood of first mother loss at the holiday

Sent by my alternate universe daughter 

We had a Christmas lunch at our house yesterday--friends came by for Champagne punch and sustenance. Two guys my husband made sure to introduce to each other were both Vietnam vets. One was a journalist who was captured and briefly imprisoned; the other was a Naval officer who had spent two years in combat. After my husband made the introduction, they spent a long time talking. Later my husband said: It's the most intense experience of their lives--no one who hasn't been through it can quite understand. My husband was in the Army between conflicts, and after ROTC, only spent six months on active duty. But he understood immediately why these two men would bond.

Is giving up a child for adoption a 'loving' decision?

Jane

"Adoption is a courageous and loving decision" touts the Children's Home Society of Florida. We've heard this a zillion times although in my day it was often phrased as "think of your child, not yourself." Signing the papers on a rainy day a week before Christmas in San Francisco, and giving an adoption agency the power to select a family for my daughter Rebecca was not a courageous and loving decision. In many ways it was not a decision at all. I simply did what white middle-class singe mothers of (I hope) a bygone era did--acquiesced to social mores trumpeted in advice columns, soap operas, pulpits, and teen magazines.

How the adoption industry convinces women they aren't 'ready to parent'

Jane

Recent first mothers often explain they gave up their babies because "I was not ready to parent," adopting the language which the adoption industry prefers to the more homey "nurture a child." "To parent" gives child rearing a kind of mystical quality beyond the skills of single mothers-to-be..

Adoption practitioners typically use close-ended questions--the kind answered "yes" or "no" on their websites and in their literature to create doubt and nudge mothers-to-be into thinking they are not ready to be mothers. American Adoptions, for example, encourages pregnant women to ask themselves: "Am I ready to be a parent? This the most important question of all....If you have aspirations to attend college, pursue a career, or simply just want to maintain your current lifestyle, you may find that you aren't ready to raise a child, when another family out there is ready to adopt and give a child the greatest life imaginable."

Good news on bills in Ohio and Pennsylvania; Tina talks of the 'blood' connection on Survivor

Tina on left, daughter Katie on right 

UPDATED ON 12/16/13

"Jeff, there is something about my relationship to Katie, my daughter because I'm adopted. And I don't have those connections in my life, not until I had her had I felt a real connection in my life. It's a pure, unadulterated, pure love I have for her." --Tina Wesson, last night on Survivor.

When these pronouncements come out of the blue in places you don't expect them, they are great teaching moments for the public, a public that increasingly believes that adoption is simple and good and doesn't leave a great many adoptees with a hole in their hearts.

The adoptee dilemma: Navigating between opposing parents

Lorraine

Secrets and lies, as well as the push-and-pull between natural and adoptive parents--with the child caught in the middle--are joined-at-the-script themes being explored weekly on Nashville, the TV nighttime drama about the music scene in that city. Maddie, the young teen at the heart of this story line, is having a difficult time negotiating between two fathers: the man who raised her, Teddy, the outwardly upstanding individual; and the man who is her biological parent, Deacon, the recovering addict, former love and lead guitar player to her famous country-singer mother, Rayna. Problem Number One.

The character Maddie is an adolescent when her parents divorce and she learns her life is not what it seems--and both her mother and the man she married when she was pregnant with Deacon's baby conspired to keep her true parentage a secret--forever. From her. Problem Number Two.

Philomena: A forced adoption, a lifetime quest, a longing that never waned

The book, the true story

Most of you already know the bare bones of the story of the film Philomena: Irish teen becomes pregnant, ends up in one of the horrid Magdalene laundries, her son is forcibly adopted when he is three by rich Americans, and a half century later his mother--Philomena Lee in real life--wants to find him and comes to Washington with a journalist who is writing her story, his newspaper paying the bills.

I made sure I had plenty of tissues with me but in fact, only needed one. True there is sadness aplenty, but served up with levity and even a few comedic moments to relax the tension. Judi Dench, as Philomena, gives a masterful, believable performance as she talks about what happened to her, seen in flashbacks, and in how she portrays the woman dealing with reality today. She says she wonders if her son ever thought about her, because she thought about him every single day. You got that right, I was thinking. Every adoptee who doesn't already know the answer to that should see this film.

How money rules infant adoption

Jane

Lorraine and I gave up our newborn daughters because we believed we would be our child's disgrace and they would be ours. Today, though, with 40 percent of children born to single mothers, politicians and celebrities having love children a-plenty, adoption as prime time TV entertainment, shame is not part of the equation. Adoption practitioners have new ammunition in their arsenals. We'll be writing about these over the next several weeks. 

First up is the influence of money although that term is never used. Rather, Catelynn and Tyler of 16 and Pregnant fame and thousands of other parents give up their children in order to give their children and themselves "the life they deserve."

Surviving Thanksgiving as a first mother

Lorraine

Thanksgiving will always be a day of some family, friends, and food and while we generally look forward to this day, we know there will be some glitches along the way--the kinds of unkind comments that we have been talking about in this last two posts. We hope for many here that having vented them will take the sting out of them--and the ones yet to come, or at least remind yourself that some--not all--of the comments come out of total ignorance, many are not meant to hurt, even if they stab open the wound. Yet other comments were just cruel. In the end, we mothers and adoptees ultimately have to accept our lives as they are, and find a way to live at peace in this world, and with others.

Because society wants our grief to be suppressed, many people do not in the least fathom that our pain feels on occasion unbearable. They think: well, she survived, she's getting on with her life, she has moved on. Of course, that is partly true. Unless we end up on the floor somewhere writhing in pain, we have moved on. We have survived. But there is more to it than that simple thought.

People say the rudest things to first mothers

Lorraine

What to say when someone says something inappropriate or downright offensive? As Thanksgiving weekend, the occasion of many a difficult moment, Jane and I thought we would open the blog up in the next few days to all of you who have ever heard a disturbing word that triggers anxiety around adoption. I'm going to start off with a few of the humdingers that I've heard and add here what I wish I had said:

Upon hearing that my daughter lived with me and my husband long enough to have a summer job and later, go to school looked up and said: “You are our worst nightmare,”—an adoptive grandfather at a dinner party, while the hostess was getting dessert. 

I should have said: You are mine.

As with same-sex marriage, difference of opinion on adoption is way beyond 'disagreement'

Lorraine

The Cheney sister squabble over gay marriage in the family broke out full throated this week, and it was clear from the beginning this blood feud was about way more than a difference of opinion, as Liz Cheney tried to make it. Asked about same-sex marriage on Fox News, Liz, running for the Senate in uber-conservative Wyoming, said that she opposed it, and when asked about her lesbian sister's marriage to her partner, Liz added that it was “just an area where we disagree.” But it was way more than that--it was a repudiation of her sister's life. 

Politics and recipes for the stuffing for the turkey are areas of disgruntlement and disagreement. But when someone in your own family criticizes the very core of your being, it's a way more than "an area where we disagree." Adoption falls in this same category. For first mothers like Jane and I, who are out and involved first mothers, who speak and write about the longterm--

Let's put to rest the myth that mothers were promised confidentiality

Prof. Elizabeth Samuels

Legal scholar Elizabeth J. Samuels, who has written about the laws surrounding sealed birth certificates before, has published a new report in the Michigan Journal of Law and Gender that counters the "promised confidentiality" myth. In "Surrender and Subordination: Birth Mothers and Adoption Law Reform,"* she writes that an analysis of 75 surrender documents, dated between 1936 to 1985, from 26 states "definitively supports birth mother advocates' reports that women were neither offered a choice of nor guaranteed lifelong anonymity." And, since all state laws allow records to be unsealed under some circumstances without notice to first mothers, they could not have been intended to protect mothers.

Sealed records also seal a medical history

Lorraine 

We hear so many sad stories in adoption, and my last couple of posts have focused on broken--call them interrupted--reunions.  To write or not write. To phone or not. To stay receptive to a distant child or mother, but to stop actively hoping that the next time you open you email there will be one from the estranged party. 

Before I found my daughter Jane I had written three letters to Hillside Terrace, the innocuous name of the adoption agency in Rochester, New York, and received three letters back telling me she was all right. The last one said she was "happy in her family." How do they know that, I wondered. They are making this up, I was certain. In fact, my daughter had a rather violent form of epilepsy.

When your reunion goes dark, it's best to not chase an illusion

Lorraine

UPDATE: ON TUESDAY, 11/12/13; SEE BELOW.

I lose things. Right now I am looking a pair of black leather gloves that I know for certain I had yesterday--a trip to the dentist, a stop at the thrift shop to peruse the books, a bakery to buy dog treats for the pooch of the host of last night's dinner party, No luck. Where are the gloves? I searched for them last night leaving the dinner party, but they could not be found--did I even have them when I left home?  I looked this morning in the car and on the street, but still they are not making their presence known. I have lost objects so often that I do this thing with numbers that might give me a clue as to their location; today it says that "much effort will have to be exerted" if the lost object is to be found. It also hinted they might yet be found at the host's home but so far the phone has not rung telling me so.

Adoption on the Today Show--Upbeat and glorious! But it could be worse

Jane

"Choosing Adoption" segments running on Today this week in conjunction with National Adoption Month are what you'd expect: happy vignettes designed to reassure those seeking to adopt that, yes, you can get a baby and that openness and reunions can be positive. The segments ignore as much as possible those who make adoption possible--first mothers. 

"Choosing Adoption" does not provide new insights and, so far, ignores the purpose of National Adoption Month, which is finding permanent families for children in foster care. I was not disappointed in the superficiality of the show, just relieved that it was not worse.

If woman hasn't given birth, how can she be a birth mother?

Jane

Adoption reformers argue what the woman who lost her child to adoption should be called. Birth mother or birthmother? First mother? Natural mother? Biological mother? Real mother?  What we all do agree on is that before a woman gives birth or loses her child to adoption, she should not be called any of the above. Yet the adoption industry persists in referring to pregnant women considering adoption as birth mothers or birthmothers.

Using this nomenclature dehumanizes them by leading the public--and the women themselves--to believe that they are carrying a baby for another and have no vested interest in said baby. "Birth mother" reinforces in the pregnant woman's mind that she is on track to relinquish her child and keeping her baby would be some sort of chicanery on her part.

Contacting your (adopted-out) adult child when they have gone away

Around the time of her birthday one year

Dear First Mother Forum: I reunited with my son a while ago, and he even lived with me and my husband (not his father) for a couple of months. But it seemed that he was only interested in how much money we had and what we could give him. He left six months ago and I have not heard from him since, even though I have tried to contact him, left messages, emailed, etc. No response.

His birthday is in a couple of weeks and I do have an address for him. Should I send him a card with some money?--Confused First Mother

Illinois cracks down on sleazy adoption practitioner

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has filed an action against one of the sleaziest for-profit operators in the country, Adoption Network Law Center (ANLC) based in California. In spite of an Illinois law banning for-profit practitioners, clicking on ANLC's website brought Illinois residents directly to a screen offering "Help with an Unplanned Pregnancy in Illinois...or "Adopt a Newborn Baby in Illinois."

ANLC's website creates the impression that their service--offering "Free Confidential Assistance...24/7" is local. However. When I clicked on from my home in Portland, Oregon, I got "Help with an Unplanned Pregnancy...in Washington or Adopt a Newborn Baby in Washington." Is it because direct marketing by unlicensed practitioners is illegal in Oregon? Or are these folks are geographically challenged? I don't know.

Infertility may be Earth's way of slowing population growth

Lorraine

                                                               Added to on Wednesday, 10/30
To adopt or not adopt (except from foster care) has become the subject of lively discussion in the commentary fostered by the previous blog, about a couple who advertised themselves and their healthy lifestyle on Facebook as they attempt to find someone willing to give them her newborn.

Advertising for a first mother--or as someone said, "identify a birth mother"--is so scary and futuristic I feel as if I have stepped into a Ray Bradbury movie like Farenheit 451, only this one would be called Baby Hunger, 2013. The couple we wrote about aren't alone in their audacious advertising for a baby; recently a couple from Maryland put up a similar kind of ad on the New Jersey Turnpike at the cost of $2,000 a month. They are looking for a second child. Why advertise in New Jersey rather than their home state of Maryland? Because in New Jersey the first/birth mother only has 72 hours to nullify the proposed adoption; in

Advertising for a baby to adopt on Facebook

Jane

"We have lovely friends who are hoping to adopt a baby, and I'd like to help get their message out" posted an attorney on the Oregon Women Lawyers (OWLS) list. "They need to identify a birth mother who wants to give up her baby for adoption." She included the link to Erin and Dan's Facebook Page who tell us "We are seeking a domestic adoption, open or closed, preferably a newborn."

This was a first for the OWLS list which typically includes job openings, requests for referrals to other lawyers, and recommendations for nannies, plumbers, and other services, but it shouldn't be a surprise. Many more couples are in the baby hunt than there are babies, particularly with foreign countries curtailing intercountry adoptions.

Why Ellen Page and the movie Juno bugs me--even years later

Lorraine

At dinner with friends--one of them a Movie Buff--the other night, I mentioned that whenever I see Ellen Page, the star of Juno, anywhere doing anything I have an immediate negative reaction because of the role she played in that movie. She was the wise-cracking, smart-ass, but ever-so-appealing teenager in a jam (she is preggers) and she's about 15 or so in Juno, which is also her name in the film. Her very dorky and underwhelming-but-overwhelmed teenager father of the child is in no way prepared to be a father, or do anything but look lost.

Why that kind of girl wouldn't just have an abortion boggles the mind--as well as reality. Her family is not particularly religious, or evangelical; yet an unpleasant but frivolous encounter at the abortion clinic turns her off and sends her packing straight into the arms of a couple she finds in a penny-saver. "I could have this baby and give it to someone who totally needs one," she says enthusiastically. (No, I do not have perfect recall, I just watched the trailer at IMDB.)

Why I'm not bullish on celebrity adoptions

Sandra Bullock and adopted son, Louis

Now that actress Sandra Bullock's new flick Gravity has hit the big screen, she's looking to adopt again, according to the Hollywood gossip machine. Three years ago, Bullock, then 46, joined many other entertainers who took another woman's baby as their own when she adopted Louis named after the jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong because, like Armstrong, he was born in New Orleans. And frankly reading about the likelihood of another Hollywood adoption makes me a little ill.

The list of Hollywood adoptive parents goes back to the beginning of the silver screen and includes Bob Hope, Joan Crawford, Joan Fontaine, Constance Bennett, Al Jolson and Ruby Keller, Dick Powell and June Allison, Bette Davis, Cecil B. DeMille, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman,

The Declassified Adoptee Tells All

Amanda Transue-Woolston

Adoption, to the adopted, is rife with hard questions: Aren’t you glad you were adopted? How do your adoptive parents feel about you searching for your other family? What do you want from them? What if you find out your father raped your mother? What if you search and she doesn’t want to know you? Aren’t your [adoptive] parents enough? You never said anything about adoption, so I figured it didn’t mean much to you…? What do you say when someone says their friend’s sister is adopted and she “loves it?” And the biggest question of all, that most people never asks: “Why is it that lying in adoption isn’t seen as wrong?”

Why not choose adoption? The longterm effects of relinquishing on first mothers

Lorraine

In the last post,* we dealt with the corrosive effect of secrecy in adoption, and some wrote about the secrecy that many first mothers cling to even years later. Some are so far in the closet they cannot tell their families about a reunited son or daughter, thus denying them knowing their siblings, grandparents, the family to which they were born. Unquestionably, that is sad and continues the trauma of the initial separation from the natural mother. Today I write about the trauma that makes birth mothers who have been in the closet so long stay there.
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Adoption is trumpeted today as a universal good thing. For infertile couples who wish to have a family, it is a solution. For religious organizations and fellow-travelers, agencies that use the mantle of religion, it is a business. For liberals who want to do good and keep the sense of family about them, it is a way to keep population growth down. Celebrities adopt and get on the cover of magazines, thus

Secrets in adoption: Dealing with betrayal of lies by omission

Lorraine, not quite incognito

Sunday's New York Times had an essay called "Great Betrayals," about the victims of long held lies in their families. The psychiatrist who wrote the essay, Anna Fels, tells of a friend whose husband had hid a huge credit card debt, and even after divulging the secret, he continued to lie about the amount and refuse to divulge how the money was spent. The wife was left to puzzle it out for herself. "The disclosure wreaked financial and emotional havoc on their family," writes Fels.

She then discusses how clients of hers dealing with the revelation of "new, pivotal information" were often left to deal with the emotional jolt on their own. Society is likely to forgive the miscreant who kept the secret, but the victim gets little support. Writers have the option of making sense of the secret they were not in on through writing, but others don't. As Fels notes:

Review: Indian-born writer reveals the dark side of international adoption

Award-winning author Indian-born writer Mridula Koshy's new book, Not Only the Things That Have Happened, reveals the dark side of international adoption.

However, the story, set in the author's native India, is frustrating to read--beautiful passages are set in a confusing story line. The story begins with Anna, a poor Indian woman, on her death bed still grieving over the son she lost to adoption 34 years earlier. The author then takes us back to Anna's childhood, telling the story through snippets of events, cursing back and forth through Anna's life and ancillary characters.

Senate bill encourages more international adoption

Sen. Mary Landrieu

Foreign adoptions have plummeted from just over 23,000 in 2004 to just under 9,000 in 2012, as foreign countries and the U. S. State Department have responded to wide-spread corruption. Gathering its forces, the adoption industry has turned to its long-time champion, adoptive mom and wife of an adoptee Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. She introduced the deceptively-named Children in Families First Act of 2013 (CHIFF) "to strengthen intercountry adoption...and ensure it becomes a viable and fully developed option for providing families for children in need."* Among other provisions, the bill (S. 1530) would condition child welfare assistance to foreign countries on whether they allowed Americans to adopt children from these countries.

Mamalita: An adoption book I can't love, a story that isn't for everyone

Three generations, three blondes

How thoroughly adoptive parents are quick to push aside the thoughts that the children they adopt have other families was brought home last week when an adoptive mother sent me her memoir. At her blog, she wrote that she thought the primary opinion of the general public towards adoption was turning negative, based partly on the article in which First Mother Forum is mentioned as part of the new "anti-adoption" movement. I left a comment; she emailed and sent me her book about adopting from Guatemala, a country with one of the most troubled histories regarding the trafficking of children. I was interested, but immediately on edge because no adoption story coming out of Guatemala is going to be easy for me to stomach. I know too much.

Mamalita, the book, by Jessica O' Dwyer arrives: Cute native girl on the cover with native dress. Okay.

Has the LDS church changed its policies on adoption?

LDS Temple, Salt Lake City

First Mother Forum was heartened to learn from a reliable source that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is shuttering its adoption placement services now conducted through LDS Family Services (LDSFS). The Church's policies towards single mothers have been nothing short of punitive:* Marry the father or give up the baby. The Church used theological arguments bolstered with pop sociology to press its case. In many instances help was denied these women and, in fact, their parents were discouraged from helping them raise the children. We've met mothers who succumbed to Church pressure and we read their comments on FMF; years later, they still grieve over their lost children.

Dusten Brown: A Father's final words to his daughter

Veronica with her father, Dusten Brown

Veronica Rose Brown (who will soon be called Capobianco, one assumes) is now back in South Carolina with Matt and Melanie Capobianco. This transfer of four-year-old Veronica from her natural father and family to genetic strangers has angered and hurt a great many adoptees and birth parents. The taking of the child to be raised by parents not her own has opened up the old wounds we had that stem from our own situations. Eventually, our anger and turmoil will recede again, for a while, until there is another case that so captures our imagination. Following is his statement on the transfer of his daughter, Veronica.--lorraine

Dusten Brown: A father's parting words to his daughter

Veronica with her father, Dusten Brown

Please see this post

Dusten Brown: A Father's final words to his daughter

Baby Veronica: Now the media bias for the Capobiancos begins

Lorraine

I thought there was nothing more to say about the Baby Veronica case but then I happened to come upon Susan Estrich today on Yahoo that totally makes me sick--written as it is from the Capobianco playbook. I'll have to quote a bit here to give you the tenor of this:

"Why should the rights of the tribe trump the rights of the adoptive parents?
"What gives the tribe ownership of a child whose father has given up his parental rights and whose mother has decided that adoption is in her best interests?
"Why should the rights of the tribe force a woman to raise a child she may not be capable of raising — in which case, no one in the tribe could complain — rather than allowing the child to be placed with a loving family?

Reflections on Veronica Brown and being raised in a family different from your own

Veronica Brown yesterday

It was not on television, it was dignified, it was as private as possible, but it happened last night: Dusten Brown gave his daughter Veronica to the adoptive parents who treated her no more than a piece of property they had paid for. Now she was signed, sealed and delivered into the hands of Matt and Melanie Copabianco, and from reports, whisked immediately out of the county. It is likely they will be back home today in South Carolina, a thousand miles away from her father--her real father--in Oklahoma. 

From new reports we learned that Dusten Brown said goodbye to Veronica at Jack Brown House, the tribal headquarters where they have been living in Tahlequah. As Brown and his wife, Robin, watched from a window, a Cherokee County sheriff's deputy and a Cherokee Nation marshal led Veronica to the nearby marshal's building, where the handover occurred about 7:30 p.m.

Is LDS Family Services getting out of the adoption business?

Lorraine

According to a source that seems to have the juice, LDS Family Services will be getting out of the adoption business ENTIRELY at the end of 2013. My source says that the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints will no longer be doing adoptions, and they are letting go all of their adoption-related staff prior to Christmas. They also say they will continue to offer their "free lifelong counseling" to the women who have already lost a child to their system.

The source, who says that this was confirmed by a friend who is a social worker for LDS Family Services, says this had been rumored to be in the works for about two years. While there is likely to be no official reason given by the LDS church as to why it is getting out of the adoption business, "but within the rank and file workers, it is thought to be because of the pending lawsuits against LDSFS in relation to father's rights, as well as the "gay adoption issue."

Get them while you can: Adoption files in Syracuse

Robert Lahm and the adoption files in his basement

Anyone who relinquished or was adopted from central New York in the last twenty years, needs to read this and grab this opportunity while you can: Your records! New Life adoption agency in Syracuse, New York shut down two years ago and the attorney who owned the building inadvertently inherited all the files from the wonderful people who ran the agency left behind. The files are in his basement and AVAILABLE to the people to whom they concern: THE ADOPTED.

'Re-Homing': Dumping unwanted adopted kids

Nicole Eason "Big Momma" 

Nicole Eason took six children from adoptive parents, anxious to rid themselves of the children they had "rescued." Eason, who calls herself "Big Momma," told adoptive parents she was "awesome with kids" and presented them with a letter of recommendation she claimed came from a social worker. In truth, she wrote it herself using a form she found on the Internet. Yet it was enough for desperate adoptive parents unable to cope with the children they adopted to give Eason custody of the children. Unknowingly, the parents placed the children in a house of horrors.

The Vietnam legacy of 'fatherless' children

Lorraine

Today I found a close kinship with the fathers of the children conceived in the years we were in Vietnam, as I read a long take-out about the search and reunion of those children with their American fathers in the New York Times. "It's like the mother who give up their kid for adoption," said George Pettitt of Wales Center, N. Y. "You just never stop thinking about it."

Whoa! This guy gets it, I thought. The piece--on the front page no less--tells us that Mr. Pettitt, 63, had a relationship with a woman when he was 19 and in Vietnam.Though he had not "meant" for her to get pregnant, she did. He returned home to New York, got a job as a truck driver, and raised a family. But when he retired in 2000, he "found himself haunted by memories of the child he left behind--a boy, he believes." Mr. Pettitt paid a man to find the boy in Vietnam but the trail went cold. A woman in Virginia called to say she thought her husband might be his son, but a DNA test proved negative.

Argument to give up your baby is the same old one heard before

Sept.1, 2013 cover of New Republic

First Mother Forum is included as a place where you can "Meet the New Anti-Adoption Movement" in the current issue of The New Republic, to wit:

"Some women, like Corrigan D’Arcy, blog their stories. They run message boards with names like “First Mother Forum” and “Pound Pup Legacy,” full of tales of bitterly regretted adoptions. They hold retreats for birth mothers* and adoptees. They’ve formed several grassroots activist organizations, including Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform, Origins-USA, and Concerned United Birthparents. Some call themselves adoption reformers. Others prefer terms such as 'adoption truth advocate.' A few will come straight out and say they’re anti-adoption."

The piece, by Emily Matchar, is good and straight-forward reportage about the growing sense of dissolution about adoption in America, and makes reference to the Baby Scoop Era before Roe v. Wade, as well as the pressure that we, mothers of that time, were under to relinquish our children.

Adoptees more likely to commit suicide

Lorraine

A new study has found that adopted teens were almost four times more likely to attempt suicide than those who lived with their natural parents, even after adjustment for factors associated with suicidal behavior such as psychiatric disorder symptoms, personality traits, family environment, and academic disengagement. Girls were more likely than boys to attempt suicide. About 75 percent of the adopted teens (more than 1,200 all living in Minnesota) in the study were adopted before the age of two and were foreign born—mostly from South Korea. [1]

All of the adopted kids, who were between 11 and 21 years old during the study period, had been taken in by their families before age two, and had a biologically unrelated teenage sibling in the same home. Although this study could not determine why the adopted teens were more likely to attempt suicide,

Baby Veronica: How Dusten Brown could prevail in battle over his daughter

Veronica smiles in a bathroom of the Cherokee Nation Jack Brown Center

 MIKE SIMONS / Tulsa World file

Perhaps there is a light at the end of this long tunnel for Dusten Brown and his daughter "Baby Veronica" (who will be four next Sunday) that would allow them to stay together as father and daughter. The legal trial has been so convoluted and involved so many courts that after the Supreme Court ruling in June against Brown, and the swift action of the South Carolina court in favor of the adoptive parents, it was hard to see how he could prevail, but as this case drags on, I'm having a change of heart.

Three factors give me hope:

Baby Veronica: Brown released on bail for second time

Lorraine

Baby Veronica's biological father was released on bail today after appearing in an Oklahoma court room to answer an extradition warrant signed by Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin. Sequoyah County Judge Jeff Payton ordered Dusten Brown released until an extradition hearing on Oct. 3. Brown was released on bail after he was arrested for a second time. 

The ultimate question is, will Dusten Brown go to jail rather than turn over his daughter to people who are now, and will always be, genetic strangers?

Those of us involved in adoption--on either side--are totally caught up in this modern-day tale of a child whom two families are fighting over. The two sides are

Grief and doubt after an international adoptee's death: Max Shatto in Texas

Max Shatto on the equipment that may have killed him.

Earlier his year the death of a Russian child who died only months after being adopted by Laura and Alan Shatto of Texas was news, as it appeared to be yet another death-by-American-adoption story. The biological mother of the boy was found in Russia and she was pleading for the return of the dead boy's brother, then two, also adopted by the same couple. Thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Moscow is support of a ban on adoptions by Americans, a ban that took place shortly before Max died. It was unclear at the time whether the boy had been harmed by the couple or died of accidental causes, as he was found to have bruises and scratches on his body, a possible sign of abuse that the Shattos vehemently denied.

According to The New York Times today, a lengthy investigation by police, prosecutors and medical examiners have concluded that the boy, Max, who came to the Shattos with a known heart defect--died of an accidental injuries,

Why should a child grow up with her natural, first, birth parent? Because.

Lorraine

The other day a first mother who hopes to get back her child before the adoption is finalized asked me to write a letter for her to be sent to several government officials. In doing so, I could not but help think of the case that so many of us can't get off our minds--that of Dusten Brown and his daughter Veronica. We wait now for some kind of word from the Cherokee court where the case is now. 

I am not sure how the Cherokee court now is able to get involved after the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the South Carolina courts, but nonetheless, that is where the fate of Veronica Brown now sits. Everything in the letter below is true not only in the case of the Canadian mother and child I am writing this for, but also for Veronica.

Spence-Chapin out of the infant adoption business

Is that Grandpa or Dad on the right?

One of the best known and biggest adoption agencies in New York City, Spence-Chapin, is stopping infant adoptions which it has been doing for over a century. This change, not yet reported on S-C's website, is explained in an August, 2013 letter to the "Spence-Chapin Community," which a reader shared with First Mother Forum. Maud Welles, the Board Chair and Emily Forhman, the Executive Director, explained that the declining number of infants and young children available for adoption due to the "reduced stigma of single parent households, increased access to birth control, family unification programs, in-country adoption programs, and difficult bureaucratic or political policies" necessitated this change.

Why passions run hot in the Veronica Brown story

Veronica, happy with daddy Dusten Brown

Why does the Veronica Brown case affect us so much? Why does the story of a father trying to keep his daughter--and not let her go to people who want to adopt her--rivet our attention so deeply? Even adoptive parents have turned their attention more than casually to this story.

For first mothers, the answer is: Because we are reminded of how it felt to relinquish our own children. 

For adoptees: Because at some level we understand what is lost when we were removed from our own families and given to another.

For adoptive parents, the answer must be as personal: those who feel that the girl belongs with

'Love' hormone's dark side may explain secondary infertility

Lorraine

You know that "love hormone" we've talked about many times here? Women get a rush of oxytocin when we give birth, and so it is the physiological underpinning for the love and connection we feel towards our babies right after they are born. Some of us get more, some of us get less, but it is likely the reason that many of us end up grieving so long and so deeply for our children after we relinquish them to others. It's why some of us search for our children. It's the reason some of us are praying that our children find us one day. We remember the feeling of the love we felt for them at the time they were born. Supposedly, it makes us feel good--men and women get a release of it after sex. The hormone has such a good reputation that it has been tested as an anti-anxiety drug.

Okay, that's one side of it.

When a birth parent writes a will....

"I want to include my lost daughter Susan in my will equally with my other three children," said my good friend over lunch. "But my husband is against it. He's not her father and thinks it would be unfair to our children. Susan may inherit something from her adoptive parents. They are divorced, though, and she has little to do with them, and they have less money than we have."

The Baby Sellers portrays the dark side of international adoption

Kirstie Alley in The Baby Seller

Prospective adoptive parents who look to other countries to adopt because of a "shortage" of "adoptable infants" here in America, or who do so to avoid those pesky birth mothers who want "open adoptions," will find Lifetime's new movie, The Baby Sellers, unsettling. Premiered last night, the film is an absorbing depiction of the trafficking of infants from around the globe, specifically India and Brazil, to unknowing people who want nothing more than a baby to take home, no questions asked.

The story centers around a government agent (played by Jennifer Finnegan) who sinks her teeth into the trafficking of babies after a bust of one such ring ends with disappointment. She centers her attention on one agency called "Road to Love," run by Carla Huxley, played