Hoping for tough questions

Daughter Jane and Lorraine in the 90s

Okay, I am focusing 24/7 on Hole In My Heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption and so the poor ole' blog is taking a back seat. I'm being interviewed on Monday, July 20, on Bonnie in the Morning, on Long Island's NPR station, WPPB, 88.3 FM sometime after 9:30 a.m.  Hoping that I get the tough questions that make for an interesting interview that leads to more, etc., I wrote up a few questions and answers for Bonnie Grice, who is a great interviewer and host. I'm sharing them here;

We think of the Sixties as a wild and crazy time, when sex came out of the closet and birth control was readily available.

That is the late Sixties, and the Seventies. I
relinquished my daughter in 1966. Not until1965 did the U.S. Supreme Court rule in Griswold v. Connecticut that it was unconstitutional for the government to prohibit married couples from using birth control. Activist Bill Baird was arrested in 1967 for distributing contraceptive foam and a condom to a student during a lecture at Boston University. Baird's arrest led to the U.S. Supreme Court case, Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which finally made it legal to allow unmarried couples to have access to birth control. How different it was back then is hard to convey today. So while the Pill was around since 1960, it was not universally available to unmarried woman until 1972.

While you had a need to find your daughter, what about other women who relinquished  children?

Of course there are women who have sadly never revealed their secret child to even their husbands or the children that came later, and we don’t  really have a good idea of how many there are. However, we do have numbers of women in those states with unsealed birth certificates who ask for “no contact” from their children when they request their original birth certificates. Few women choose this option. According to statistics compiled by the American Adoption Congress, fewer than 600 women have requested no contact in the six states that have opened their records since 2000, out of nearly 800,000 sealed birth certificates there. That is .0007, or seven-one-hundredths of one percent. That means that only 1 of out of every1,429 mothers who relinquished children have requested their children stay away. In those six states approximately 30,000 people to date have asked for their original birth certificates, and that number continues to grow, while the other generally stays pretty static after the new law goes into effect. How many adoptees received a no-contact request is unknown because that data is not collected.

You in essence broke the law when you found your daughter in 1981 because you had agreed to a closed adoption when you surrendered her.

Agreed is a quite a misnomer. I had no choice. If my daughter was going to be adopted through the only way I could see possible, it meant that her birth certificate would be amended and my identity forever erased from her consciousness. I argued with my social worker to no avail, I didn’t feel I had any choices, and I had to agree to a state-imposed anonymity for the two of us—from each other—in perpetuity. I had to agree to something I didn’t want, and she was supposed to live with the state taking away her right to know her true identity. There are bad laws. This is one of them.

What are the laws today? There is so much on television and in the media about people reconnected, it gives the impression that anyone at say, 18, can find out who their parents were.

Not true. The laws are being changed, but it seems to be coming as fast as say, the impact of dripping water on a rock. While Kansas has never sealed its records—without any impact on abortion or adoption rates—today there are only seven states* in which anyone can get their original birth certificates without some kind of restriction. It’s crazy. When do adoptees get to grow up and make their own decisions about something like this?

What’s the situation in NEW YORK?

Adoptee birth records—over the strong objections of the nun who ran the New York Foundling Home, were sealed in the mid-Thirties, under Gov. Herbert Lehman, an adoptive father. It was largely done to insure that mothers wouldn’t come around and to protect the sanctity of the adoptive family. Those same laws are in place today, but now the opposition is using them to “protect” mothers from their children, as if their children were going to harm them. I’ve been involved in trying to change the law in New York since the mid-Seventies. Year after year, we barely get out of the starting gate—even though we have the votes in the legislature to pass good legislation.

Why is that?

Powerful people in the state legislature block was I call “clean” bills. Bills that give adoptees the unfettered right to learn who they are. It is a crime that this is possible in this day and age. However, let me add that Suffolk County’s legislators—Assemblyman Fred Thiele in particular, as well as Sen. Ken LaValle—have co-sponsored legislation that does gives adoptees the right to know who they are when they reach adulthood.  

Well, what about those women in the closet? 

Several states have inserted provisions that allow a natural mother to veto the release of her name. While very few use those vetoes, they give the mother—who presumably was not adopted and has always known who she is—undue preference and rights in this situation.  The vetoes allow one person the right to deprive another knowledge about one’s being that the rest of us enjoy without asking and have always taken for granted. For those of us who know who we are—who have known since the age of reason—the enormity of this blank wall in the mental makeup of another individual is impossible to fully grasp. You were raised Jewish but maybe you were supposed to be Episcopalian. You were raised in a hot-blooded Italian family but you’re cool and less excitable. You are something else. Your mother is in politics but all you care about is poetry.  Et cetera.

What about open adoption? Hasn’t that changed everything today?

NO. From the scant information that we can interpret, about 80 percent of adoptions that started out as open or semi-closed—they are called semi-open by agencies—end up closed. That’s because the agency often play middleman and all correspondence goes it, and it continues only as long as the both parties agree to continue it. Adoptive parents usually have the right to opt-out at any time. Often the natural mother doesn’t really know who the adoptive parents are—even if she may have picked them from their picture. The situation is changing, however, but a lot of people would rather go overseas to adopt in order to never have to worry about the natural mother. Of course, this doesn’t take into consideration what the child might prefer, and ignores the cultural dislocation of the children. Open adoption brings with it a new set of problems. So does international adoption.

Are you against all adoption?

NO.  There will always be a need for some adoptions, but for the health and well-being of two of the individuals involved—natural mothers and their children—the adoption system needs to be massively overhauled. Whenever possible—and we should be working to this ideal—children should be kept with their mothers, or at least, raised in the framework of the larger biological family. No one should have to grow up not knowing anyone who looks and acts like them. The rest of us forget how important this is to an individual’s sense of inclusiveness in the larger family of life.--lorraine

*Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon, Rhode Island. Other states allow most adoptees access to their original birth certificates, but still have legal provisions permitting natural mothers to remain unknown. Fathers are by law usually not named if the mother was not married at the time of the birth. 
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