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
encouraging ever more people to raise other people’s children. A liberal think-tank, the Center for American Progress, in a white paper called The Adoption Option [1] encourages women to surrender their babies in order for the mothers to have a better life. What is rarely talked about is the long-term mental and physical effect of surrendering a baby to others for adoption. One expects short-term grief in the aftermath of signing away one’s rights to a child one has borne, but what of the long-term lasting impact, four, five—twenty—years later?

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 aftermath of the decision to relinquish shows up in all the research that does exist:

LINGERING MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS
A British study of 93 birth mothers[2] found that while only an insignificant proportion of these women 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. 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[3]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.

A survey of the available dozen studies of the aftermath of relinquishing a child found a grief reaction “unique” to the mother  that left her “at risk for long-term physical, psychologic, [as is] and social repercussions.”[4] The authors concluded that while the mothers’ reactions were similar to normal grief, in birth mothers these reactions persist and “often lead to chronic, unresolved grief.” The authors eliminated any study which included adolescents. “Although interventions have been proposed,” they wrote, “little is known about their effectiveness in preventing or alleviating these repercussions.”

A survey of more than 300 birth parents, most of them members of Concerned United Birthparents ( a group formed of mostly mothers who have relinquished children), 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.[5] Critics might 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 mirror the studies done by impartial and uninvolved researchers.

A CONTINUING SENSE OF CARING FOR THE VANISHED CHILD
In one of the earliest books to investigate the effect of adoption on birth mothers, The Adoption Triangle,[6] 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.”

Another study available on line, the Birthmother Research Project,[7] found that on average 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."

One often quoted study[8] 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. Furthermore the results were highly skewed because a full third of the original participants—nearly 600—could not be located to complete the survey four years after relinquishment. What this suggests at the very least is that a large percentage of first mothers as they recover from the loss of their child, uproot themselves and disappear into different lives. From personal knowledge, I propose that they do so because for a great many of them, their old lives are no longer tenable, no matter the underpinnings that might make them seem so to an outsider. The loss of self-esteem is too great to endure once back in their earlier circumstances. I, for one, could never have gone back to The Democrat & Chronicle, the Rochester, New York newspaper where I was working when I became pregnant. I was ready to move to Puerto Rico or Canada. I eventually found a job in Albany and moved there, across the state.

Many of the women in this study were 21 and under and residents of a home for pregnant teens. 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. Now it is true that mothers are not likely to say they regret keeping their children, but still, the findings show a marked negative impact on the mothers who surrendered.

HOW OPEN DO MOST 'OPEN' ADOPTIONS STAY?
Yet this study has been used to show that giving up a child can have a positive effect on the birth mothers because they are more likely to finish their education and less likely to be receiving public assistance, which is self-evident; to receive public assistance they would have to have a child! 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, when it comes out in a heated rush. 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 numerous adoptee and first mother blogs.

This supposedly  “pro-adoption” 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. More than half of the respondents received follow up pictures and letters. But four years later, a mere twelve percent said they had phoned or visited since the child had been placed with a new family. Fully open adoptions were not typical. The one positive note is that those who helped choose the parents, and were not coerced into surrender, reported less grief and worry, and more relief and peace, than mothers who did not have this opportunity. Those who had the least regret and sadness had continuing contact with the adoptive family and their shared child. How great or small this number actually is remains unknown. According the Donaldson Adoption Institute, an adoption think-tank, mothers who enter into adoptions believing they will be open but find them later closed are, not surprisingly, the most stricken.

I did not have the security of knowing that I might know her one day. No one had broken any promises to me. Eventually, I did reunite with my daughter, and we had a sometimes calm and wonderful, sometimes rocky and turbulent, relationship for more than a quarter of a century. She committed suicide in 2007. My life today is full and good, but I will always be a woman about whom a well-known psychiatrist once said to his girlfriend (a friend of mine) during a pregnancy scare: You don't want to end up like Lorraine. I understood exactly what he meant, and I knew he understood everything.--lorraine 

(May not be copied or reprinted in any medium. Copyright, Lorraine Dusky, 2013)

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* Secrets in adoption: Dealing with betrayal of lies by omission 

[1] The Adoption Option: Adoption Won’t Reduce Abortion but It Will Expand Women’s Choices (October, 2010). For a fuller response from us is available at a permanent page that may be clicked to in the listing under the title of the blog.

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

[3] Safeguarding the Rights and Well-Being of Birthparents in the Adoption Process, Donaldson Adoption Institute, 2006, revised 2007, pps. 46-50. The Australian study is one of several included in the Donaldson report.

[4] Askren, H. A. and Bloom, K. C. (1999), Postadoptive Reactions of the Relinquishing Mother: A Review. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing, 28: 395–400. doi: 10.1111/j.1552-6909.1999.tb02008.x

[5] 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.

[6] Arthur D. Sorosky, Annette Baran, Ruben Pannor The Adoption Triangle: Sealed or Opened Records: How They Affect Adoptees, Birth Parents, and Adoptive Parents (Garden City, 1989), Doubleday, Anchor Press, p. 72.

[7] J. Kelly, M.A., Birthmother Research Project. 

[8] Pearila Brickner Namerow, Debra Kalmus, and Linda Cushman,“The Consequences of Placing versus Parenting Among Unmarried Women, Families and Adoption (The Haworth Press) Vol.25, No. 3/5, 1997, pps. 175-197.

RECOMMENDED READING
Waiting to Forget: A Motherhood Lost and Found by Margaret Moorman. A mother's story of coming to terms with the child she gave up for adoption over thirty years ago. In 1965 Margaret Moorman was unmarried, pregnant, and still in high school. Forced by societal pressures to give her baby up, she suffered emotional trauma both before and for years after the birth. At forty, she gave birth to a daughter and found herself terrified by the possibility of losing her younger child, a fear she can now trace back to her uncertain decision to give up her son. This is a wonderful read, enlightening, illuminating, evocative. If you haven't read it, you should.  

Birthmothers: Women Who Have Relinquished Babies for Adoption Tell Their Stories This is an older book (1993) written by someone who is not part of the triad, making it especially poignant to read for Merry Bloch Jones really "got it." and tells the first mother story through intimate and stirring accounts of more than seventy women who surrendered babies. It follows their lives long-term, from discovery of their pregnancies through the present, and identifies the Birthmother Syndrome a pattern of behavior and emotions resulting from surrender. With heartwarming candor, it reveals the stories of the invisible side of the adoption triangle, and touches everyone involved in adoption, as well as anyone interested in motherhood, family and women in our society. In many ways, I prefer this book to The Girls Who Went Away.

The Adoption Triangle "A classic and the first to deal with how sealed and open records affect adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents. Originally published in 1978 and revised in 2008," ... it is as true and open as the changes advocated ... comprehensive, factual, forward looking, totally honest, readable and thoughtful..." Los Angeles Times

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