Is it cliché by now to point out that these authoritarian assholes think “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a fucking ‘how-to’ book?

Please don’t leave out that it’s about the money for these groups too. To quote the article:

“500 couples who pay $14,500 to $25,500 for a domestic infant adoption”

That’s a minimum of over 7 million dollars. That’s a lot of money for these terrorists to keep murdering doctors, and frightening and chastising women. That’s why these same groups are against universal health care and increased funds for programs like WIC. Things like that might make life a little easier for a woman who freely CHOOSES to give birth. She wouldn’t ever go to one of their horrible “clinics” to be shamed & humiliated and that would deprive them of an opportunity to inflict pain on women they think are sluts, and cost them a lot of money.

Sorry, I didn’t click through. I’ve already got a stomachful of acid.

Not too long ago, there was a place in Wisconsin called “The Seven Sorrows of Our Sorrowful Mother Home for Unwed Mothers.” Must have been a really fun environment, no?

If I ever found myself unemployed and sitting on my ass, I would make it a point to sit outside of a CPC with a sign warning women not to go in and telling them where the nearest Planned Parenthood was.

Don’t forget that the money the couples pay to adopt the children doesn’t go to the mother.  That would be selling a child into slavery.  So the moms are just forced into these horrible “sheparding” situations where they get room and board and are cut off from any other source of support so that their options at birth are severely curtailed.

More and more I believe adoption is evil.  The only woman more invisible than a woman who has an abortion is a woman who gives her baby up for adoption.  How often do they regret it?  How often do they have depression?  Vs women who aborted?

I’d bet my last dollar that in general women who give up their babies suffer far more trauma than women who choose to abort.

Mighty Ponygirl, it’d be awfully easy, since PP is usually just right around the corner.  That’s part of their strategy: set up shop next to a real women’s health center and hope that they can trapped confused or lost people.

There’s a book entitled “The Girls Who Went Away” that is about the older culture of shoving pregnant women into facilities and snatching their babies away from them.  These people are trying to get back to that culture, obviously.  Amanda constantly talks about how the “pro-life” movement is all about womb control, and the story she reports on here obviously provides support for her view - basically, these people are exactly what she’s talking about.

In reading about the book, or somewhere else, I forget, there’s discussion of how after the Roe v. Wade decision, not only did women terminate pregnancies when they wanted, a whole bunch more women than previously kept their babies rather than giving them up for adoption.  Roe v. Wade wasn’t only about abortion, it was about giving control to women.

I’d bet my last dollar that in general women who give up their babies suffer far more trauma than women who choose to abort.

That’s pretty much what I’ve seen, although since women who went through adoption tend to be my mom’s age or older, I’ve heard fewer stories than about abortion & single parenthood among my peers.  Of course it’s horrible; even those of us who don’t agree that fetuses are people in any legal or societal way still understand that we’re generally hard-wired to cling to a baby we’ve just birthed, and for very good evolutionary reasons. 

As a side note, sometimes I tweak religious types by noting that in the virtually-impossible event I were to give a biological child of mine up for adoption, I’d pick a gay couple over highly-religious types any day.  After all, no one would expect anyone related to me to adapt well to a rigid, absolutist household, so more often than not they concede the point.  They may think I’d burn in hell, but they probably think that anyway, and they may not want to inflict my offspring on their fundie brethren

I read this on Friday and it confirmed everything that I already suspcted about those places.
They’re incredibly coercive already Re: birth control so how could they NOT consider these women who go into them only vessels for (preferably white) children for “more deserving” (and of course) christian couples.

It all just makes me so sick.

Today I became a quarterly sustainer of my local NARAL chapter though. Have to fight back somehow.

You know what might help a lot with this?

Create a category of legal rights that actually pertain to people who aren’t legal parents. People who have an interest in the welfare of a child, whether because they are the biological parents, the grandparents, the siblings, or whatever, deserve to have *some* rights to access the child. They don’t deserve rights that trump the legal parents’ rights, but I think we could solve a lot of people’s problems if people who relinquish legal parental rights could be granted some sort of rights to visitation and contact with the child, and that the same rights could apply to grandparents and siblings.

Right now if a large family is taken into foster care, it will be broken up. And of course this is because foster parents don’t want to necessarily take four kids when they signed up to take one. But this produces the phenomenon of older children struggling desperately to take care of younger siblings in horrific conditions where there’s no responsible adult present, because the kids know that involving an adult would result in the older children and younger children being forcibly separated and given no legal right to maintain contact with each other. When I was 12, if my parents had been killed or something and I had no guardian, I would have faked it to protect my right to stay involved with my younger brothers. Grandparents, too, may suffer when a divorce results in the custodial parent cutting off all contact with the grandparents.

All adoptions should be open unless the *birthmother* chooses otherwise. It should be the default. And the birthmother should have some legal rights vis-a-vis her baby—some rights to visitation, for instance—without trumping the legal parents’ rights. Unless this is the default, adoption is set up to be exploitative; neither birth parents nor adopted children actually *benefit* from being denied access to each other. Only the legal parents get something out of closed adoptions, unless the birth mother actually doesn’t want anyone to know she had a baby, which is less common nowadays that unwed-mother-shaming is so much less intense.

There’s one of these places in Wenatchee, WA.  A classmate of mine at the community college there (and to give you an idea of how isolated she already was, we had 1 class together and I was the only one she could talk to about this) went to it when she suspected she was pregnant.

She turned up on my doorstep that night clutching a plastic fetus doll (inaccurate, looking far more developed than her baby would have been) and a pair of booties, in tears.  I tried to talk to her about Planned Parenthood and all her options, but she kept staring at that fucking fetus doll. 

She wound up having the baby, marrying the father, then divorcing the father and moving back in with her abusively fundie parents, all in the space of a year. 

I don’t think the CPC folks tried to talk her into adoption at all, but then again, she was hispanic so I suspect they weren’t interested in her baby for that reason.

I really fucking hate the CPC people.

I think we could solve a lot of people’s problems if people who relinquish legal parental rights could be granted some sort of rights to visitation and contact with the child, and that the same rights could apply to grandparents and siblings.

I tend to agree with you.  Unless you have a family member who’s actually abusive, I don’t understand the logic of completely cutting a child off from its family if it has to go into foster care or be adopted.  Even if, say, Dad was abusive, that’s no reason to tell the child s/he can’t have any contact with his/her siblings.

Our laws still revolve around this weird idea that a man and woman will marry, have children, and never break up, but that’s not the world we live in.  (Heck, it’s not the world we ever lived in, really.)  Should a parent really have the power to completely cut a child off from a stepparent who helped raise him or her just because the parents’ relationship ended?

My best friend from college’s mother, a pretty devout Catholic—and while not a rabid anti-choicer, still pretty squeamish about abortion—flat out said, to us, more than 20 years ago, that she was totally convinced that much of the “pro-life” movement was in no small part about getting babies into the hands of Christians who wanted to adopt. Obviously, I go with womb-control and slut-shaming as the main motivations, but having read this story, and heard far too many very similar ones, I completely see where she was coming from in her opinion.

Since I’m now officially old and crabby

You are not officially old and crabby until you have kicked those goddamned kids off your motherfucking lawn. Please post a Youtube documenting you kicking said goddamned kids off your motherfucking lawn, and I will send you your official Certificate of Old and Crabby.

I should have figured it out sooner, because the one thing you can bet on is that if right-wingers are accusing liberals of doing something it must means they’re doing it right now. But basically, they accuse Planned Parenthood and abortion providers to be a lucrative industry. The reality is that THEY (the adoption cartel) are a fucking lucrative industry. And they need more ‘product’ to sell.

I’m feeling sick.

That’s exactly why CPCs pretend they’re abortion centers—They attract women who are thinking of having an abortion in order to weed out the terrible women. Then, they convince the women that they’re terrible and unfit to care for a child. Then, they convince the terrible women to give their baby to a nice White Christian family, so he or she can be indoctrinated to do the same to the next generation of terrible women.

I think we could solve a lot of people’s problems if people who relinquish legal parental rights could be granted some sort of rights to visitation and contact with the child, and that the same rights could apply to grandparents and siblings.

I also agree with this. I work with foster children and their birth families now, and it’s almost always in the child’s best interest for her or him to see the birth family regularly even after the adoption is finalized.

This just gives more credence to the impression that most long-time repro rights activists have had re CPCs as showing more interest in some clients than others (and you can guess which ones get the token Pampers and a cold shoulder - the black women).  A long while back, the local PP people tried a common ground initiative with the local RTL people, involving adoption. It foundered quickly after the RTLs realized that the PP clients offering infants for adoption had a fairly large percentage who were either darker-skinned blacks, were mentally ill or drug using and in need of self-care before getting involved in baby care, had medical issues or appeared “slow”, etc. - the trial combined agency ended up being unable to adopt out a number of infants, and the RTL people were not interested in supporting the agency financially in the absence of a state contract in hand immediately. PP wasn’t interested in continuing without the RTLs, lacking the experience with adoption procedures and the money to keep going with hard-to-place infants.

I have a former girlfriend whose mother was adopted by a family from her birth parents who were married but most likely couldn’t afford to keep and raise her, this was in the 1920s in Oklahoma City.

I find myself feeling a little sick.  One of the ads that showed up on the last page when i was reading was for one of those CPCs in Utah.  I feel as though I need to write the Nation, but the lion’s share of the shame on that one probably belongs to Google Ads.

Caren: I’ve seen studies that say exactly what you suspect.  Women who have abortions usually feel some small amount of guilt (more so when the baby was wanted but had to be terminated because of health concerns), but it is NOTHING compared to the—lifelong—depression and guilt experienced by women who give up their babies for adoption.  Closed adoptions are also more traumatic than open ones.

I don’t remember the studies addressing specifically if so much of that guilt was due to the way in which those pregnancies were carried to term (i.e. Jesus is sad for you because you’re a dirty whore and will be worthless as a parent), though I know those accounts are usually from older, pre Roe v. Wade generations.

But even without the studies, it doesn’t take much imagination to realize why this is.  Yes, abortion is less than an ideal solution.  But carrying a pregnancy to term is putting more effort in and losing more at the end of it. Add on an organization motivated by pro-life money and moral shaming and it’s not hard to see why these tactics work.

Guilting women into submission and service through accidental pregnancy (or sex in general) is nothing new.  Take the Magdalene Asylums (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Asylum) that operated throughout Ireland and Britain.

Progress on this issue is so refreshing, isn’t it?  ...Oh.

I did get him back for my boobs exploded

*HORRIBLE MENTAL IMAGE*

Please tell us you meant “before” in that sentence…

More and more I believe adoption is evil.  The only woman more invisible than a woman who has an abortion is a woman who gives her baby up for adoption.  How often do they regret it?  How often do they have depression?  Vs women who aborted?
I’d bet my last dollar that in general women who give up their babies suffer far more trauma than women who choose to abort.

As an adoptee, I have to say I’m in agreement.  There will always be cases where both parents are dead or completely incompetent but I hear about these coercion situations far too often.  Adoption should be a last resort and the default assumption should be that the biological parents are going to keep and raise the child with every effort made to assist them in that endeavor.  And closed adoptions should be illegal.  They were based on a well-intentioned but misguided concern over privacy and the mistaken belief that adopted children will fit seamlessly into their adopted families if everyone pretends they’re not really adopted.  That hasn’t been my experience.  Not a day has gone by since learning of my adoption over 30 years ago that I don’t think about it and wonder.  I’ve also never felt like I was truly a part of my family, though that may have as much to do with how fucked up it was as with me being adopted. 

I think we could solve a lot of people’s problems if people who relinquish legal parental rights could be granted some sort of rights to visitation and contact with the child, and that the same rights could apply to grandparents and siblings.

Absolutely, and what adoptive parent would oppose a child having access to a large number of loving relatives, unless that person thought of the child as a possession?  I know a family who has what I consider to be one of the happiest and healthiest adoption situations I’ve seen.  The couple has a biological daughter and a younger adopted daughter.  They have a close relationship with the girl’s birth mother and she visits often.

Slightly OT from adoption, but I’d just like to point out that Crisis Pregnancy Centers of Greater Phoenix gave a $100K contribution to “Yes on Prop 102”, which was Arizona’s anti-gay marriage amendment.  What do Teh Gheyz have to do with saving unborn babies?  ‘Tis a lucrative industry indeed.

“d that the same rights could apply to grandparents and siblings.”

I actually have to disagree with this. I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of extended family having a legal right to access to the child. My parents are/were abusive and it was all I could do to get myself out of that situation. Even reporting it to teachers didn’t get me any assistance, so no, it’s not like the system would help me in any way. I now haven’t had any contact whatsoever with my father in 6 years and my mother in 1. Since then I’ve gone and had a baby and not a thing on the planet scares me more than my parents somehow getting rights to her and fucking her up the way they fucked me up. And knowing my mother, she would try to fight for it just to hurt me; to my knowledge she has no idea my daughter exists. The last thing I ever want to explain to hear from my daughter’s mouth is “why doesn’t grandma love me?” or “why did Auntie R hit me?” or “why is grandpa looking at me like that?”

That said, I do believe that birthparents should have a legal right to access to their children, that closed adoption should be illegal, and that CPCs should be banned.

As Godwin’s Law has pretty much been rendered pointless in the face of today’s Reichwing, here is another “solution” to the unwed mother problem some other society tried.

I’m sure Serena Joy would approve…

Those are good points Ashley.  Maybe those things could be worked out on an individual basis with each adoption. While I think that most adopted children would benefit from having access to biological relatives, I certainly wouldn’t want to see abusive, meddling relatives having rights to the child.

The story quoted above actually turned my stomach, but I have to say this gets an honorable mention:

And in a recent online debate, Slate columnist William Saletan and Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman proposed that unmarried women be offered a nominal cash payment to choose adoption over abortion as a compromise between prochoice and prolife convictions.

I’m having trouble thinking of a more insulting and misogynist assumption than that my body, autonomy, mental health, and, uh, children are for sale (and for a “nominal cash payment”).  But unfortunately I’m sure you good people can think of one I’ve missed.

It’s probably naive of me to ask, but why exactly aren’t open adoptions legal in so many states?  I can imagine why they might once have been less common (or less commonly sought-after, since they’re still very often illegal), and how coercive adoption practices keep women who might have used them from doing so.  But that they’re actually illegal seems too backwards, somehow.

The wierd thing is, there are adoption posts in the blogosphere where people are all gung-ho for reducing “the excess regulations” for adoptions.  When we already have legal kidnapping going on…

Shah8, my mom got all up in the face of some anti-choice nutters outside the PPH near her house once (I was with her), and one of the women whined on and on about how haaaard adoption is.  How there are sooo maaaany laws, it makes it so haaaard.  /whine
To which my mom asked why she wasn’t up in Albany, lobbying to make adoption laws more lenient, rather than standing about where she was.  There, surprise, wasn’t really and answer.

“The wierd thing is, there are adoption posts in the blogosphere where people are all gung-ho for reducing “the excess regulations” for adoptions.  When we already have legal kidnapping going on…”

That’s because the “excess regulations” have to do with agencies refusing adoptions for neglible reasons, ie the kid is not the same race as the adoptive parents (really, when there are more CoC than same-ethnicity couples seeking to adopt, is it so damn bad to reject a white couple that is agreeable to giving it the old college try*), or one adoptive parent has some disease that may shorten lifespan, like diabetes (welcome to my friend’s personal hell when trying to adopt a kid).  Psycho fruit-jobs yanking cherry-picked white babies after mental torture is not comparable to people being denied children that are being basically warehoused because a parent might die at 60 instead of 75.  Try adopting a non-white, non-uber-perfectly-healthy, non-infant sometime - you have to be Jesus Christ and the Florence Nightengale with the bank account of Bill Gates.  There should be psychological testing of prospective adoptive parents to weed out the nutjobs, but at some point requiring some sort of ethno-religious-wellness perfect parents when “sort-kinda-okay-with-no-screaming-freakazoid-tendencies” is what most kids get anyway is just punishing kids in adoptive limbo.

Personally, I never suffered for being adopted (thank God I was white, male, and healthy).  And that was probably because my parents never hid it from me.  My baby album had pictures of me being brought home with my adoption date clearly listed as such and an entire section on the benchmarks for the approval process (that it went through the state and not private psychos also probably helped).  And I’ve never had any desire to seek out my biological parents, mainly because I never considred it a big deal. Interstingly, I had about 5 adopted friends in school, and none of us considered it (a) odd, or (b) were interested in contact the biologicals - “I’m fine, life doesn’t suck too bad, and at least my parents don’t beat me like Billy’s do” does wonders for complacency wrt to finding allele-mates

* And I personally would be leery of white people actively going after non-white children because of the possibility of “our own little slave”, but if they past muster in every other way, parents are preferable to not-parents

I’m never going to have a partner in my life, it’s something I’ve decided I just do not want.

I also don’t want to reproduce.

However I do think that someday I would like to have a child to raise and was considering adopting, but learning about CPC centers and learning how women are exploited by adoption agencies and how womens’ economic situations and bodies are exploited surrogacy, I don’t see any ethical way a person can be matched with a non-biological child to raise.

But I think it can be done. I would imagine that many lgbtia people who adopt would be more aware than your average person of privilege about the forms of exploitations surrounding the issue of adoption and have found ways around it.

Does anyone here know of ethical ways of adopting?

Looking at the google ads that are coming up on this page it’s a wonder anyone makes any money with those ads.

Looking at the google ads that are coming up on this page it’s a wonder anyone makes any money with those ads.

I know what you mean. I don’t mean to break anyone’s chops—we all have to pay bills—but I could happily live out my life without ever again seeing that PETA tile ad with a deformed-looking Pamela Anderson.

Oops, that comment from grolby up there is actually from rowmyboat, as is this one.  I’m on grolby’s computer and forgot to log him out.  And it makes him grumpy if I log him out of everything, so I’m not doing it now either.

What a sickening story- I am an adoptee who would definitely be enraged were I to ever find out that my birth mother was treated in such a manner by the Christian adoption agency that facilitated (read: sold) my adoption to my very nice, white-bread conservative parents who were obviously sooo much more deserving.

I love my adoptive parents with all my heart, and perhaps they have given me many more opportunities than my birth parents could have, but I always wonder how my birth mother felt that day they took me from her without even letting her touch me. Did she make the decision of her own will, or was she coerced?

Whoever mentioned above that birth mothers are invisible in the whole process-right on. I was never told her name or how old she was. Nobody seemed to care (my parents would merely shrug when I asked as a child, then later they told me they “forgot” her name). I care about her though, even if I have no idea what she looks like, what she does, or if she’s even still alive.

I’m still shaking with anger from reading about a woman who was told not to grieve for her child because she couldn’t keep her legs shut. How dare they?! Scared pregnant women are not baby factories for “more deserving” people! How dare they?!

Does anyone here know of ethical ways of adopting?

My brother and sister-in-law are in the process of getting approved as foster parents by their county with an eye towards adoption.  Obviously, you never know for sure since there are always DCFS horror stories about people’s kids being taken away on flimsy excuses, but that seems like a somewhat more ethical way to go about it since the children available are going to be the ones who were taken away from their birth parents by the authorities for abuse, neglect, drug addiction, etc. and not ones who were blackmailed into doing it “voluntarily.”

They had to think about it long and hard, though, and it sounds like the county social workers have been pretty up-front with them.  Basically, they’re going to agree to take on a child who has significant physical and/or mental health issues so that child can have a stable and loving home.  They’re also unlikely to get an infant, much less a white infant.

I actually just finished reading ‘The Girls Who Went Away’. When discussing it with some folks I know (who admittedly are not all aboard the feminism train), the subject of a woman changing her mind about an adoption came up (specifically, she has the baby, and then says she won’t relinquish it). Now, these particular folks aren’t religious in the slightest, and don’t tend toward moralizing. And still thought that it might be a reasonable policy to forcibly take the baby from its mother in those cases, because not doing so was unfair to the prospective adoptive parents.
It really underscored for me how much a total lack of empathy/not considering women to be people underlies a lot of these policies. None of these people claimed that the woman was undeserving, unfit, or anything that would indicate slut-shaming was behind the decision. It was that the baby was going from a mother to parents (incl. a father), combined with the idea that mother was somehow contractually obligated to give up the child (even though she wasn’t).

R.T. - Another result of this sort of coercive birth-and-adoption set-up is that, if you want to adopt a baby and you’re not a Bible-banger, you’re pretty much SOL—at least for those healthy white newborns with the disappearing birth mothers that Bethany is selling.  (And what does that say about the families who sign up with these organizations? What are they planning to do if they get a kid who doesn’t match the pictures in Parents magazine?)

If you’re okay with a kid who’s a little older, less robust or less blonde, or who comes with sibs or a mother who isn’t willing to feign utter indifference to her baby’s fate—i.e., the kinds of kids who end up in the foster system—you have a wide selection.

(And you want to remember these flesh-peddling dirtbags next time some anti-choicer starts blathering about how lucrative it is to perform abortions.)

Maybe those things could be worked out on an individual basis with each adoption.

It’s not like things always work out when it’s biological parents grappling for the custody of a child.  It takes a long pattern of abuse to deny a biological parent his or her parental “rights.”  If other family members (grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles) are given inherent rights to their minor relatives, the burden* will be on the adoptive parents (or in Ashley’s case, the biological parents) to prove that the extended family is abusive and should not have access to the child.  The mind reels thinking about how that would work out where abusive grandparents fight a biological parent for visitation and there’s no documented history of the biological parent’s abuse (which is often the case because victims of abuse often don’t speak up or aren’t taken seriously by authority figures).  No.  Just no.

*This is how our legal system works.  The accuser has the burden of proof.  There’s no way around it.

I guess this touches a nerve for me, because I wasn’t on the best of terms with my father.  If I had decided, quite reasonably, to cut off contact with him, I would blow a gasket if the state intervened and forced me to share custody of my (hypothetical) child with him.  He was a terrible parent who blew 99 percent of the visitation he had when my parents divorced.  Why should I be forced to put another child through that?

Additionally, his wife was psychologically abusive of me.  That’s an accusation that would be laughed out of any family court, but it would/should be good enough to deny a grandparent, step-grandparent, aunt, uncle, sibling the right to have contact with a distant relative’s child.

I’m an adoptee and my birthmother was treated pretty badly when she gave birth to me - slut-shamed, refused any kind of pain relief and basically left to suffer alone in a room where she almost died. I found this out only when I tracked her down, of course, because I got fed the same white-washed adoption fairy tale every other adoptee hears.

Adoption can be one toxic clusterfuck of classism, sexism and racism. The stories I heard in my search group were chilling. Ethnicities changed, pregnant women treated like sinful baby machines, threats of mental institutions, lifelong shaming. Even as a young child, I couldn’t understand why the grief of people who wanted a baby and couldn’t have one was worse than the grief of people who actually had a real baby and were forced to give it away. Now I get it completely - those slutty girls, especially the ones without any money or education, aren’t entitled to the same rights and emotions as more privileged people. When I was searching for my birthmother (a Herculean task due to sealed records) almost everyone assumed there would be something terribly wrong with her - homeless, drug addict, crazy, in prison - instead of realizing she was just a person who had sex in a time it was tough to be a young single mom. Or tougher, should I say, since it’s not that easy now.

No.  Just no.

I know where Alara’s coming from, though, because I’ve seen her post about her family situation before (though it sounds like a lot has been resolved, thankfully).  Right now, we’re in a legal climate where an abusive biological parent has more rights than a non-abusive stepparent if that couple breaks up.  Is that really in the best interests of the child?

I also wonder if people who are having a hard time keeping it together would be more likely to let their child live in a more stable home if they knew they wouldn’t be irrevocably cut off from that child for the rest of its life.  My father-in-law is in an extremely tricky situation with our nephew right now because C. lives with him full-time, but he doesn’t have legal guardianship because his mother isn’t willing to sever her parental rights, so he’s in a position where he’s making decisions about C’s care that could be overridden at any point by C’s mother.  You know, the same mother whose boyfriend (who is also C’s father) ended up back in jail because he was stealing from the neighbors and my mother-in-law.  We’re talking about deciding if the 16-year-old needs to go back to the mental hospital kind of decisions, not what he’s going to wear to school today.

This is the kind of story I’m thinking of when I say siblings and other relatives should retain some rights rather than being legally cut off.

Right now, we’re in a legal climate where an abusive biological parent has more rights than a non-abusive stepparent if that couple breaks up.  Is that really in the best interests of the child?

I’d say it’s in the best interest of the majority of children.  Giving step-parents rights to their non-biological children would result in a clusterfuck of immense proportions.  Children can already be used by one biological parent to get even with the other.  How does that work with a vindictive step-parent?  How does that work when the other biological parent is still in the picture?  Does custody and visitation have to be split three ways or (in the event of multiple marriages on both sides) four ways, five ways, six, seven, eight?

When one biological parent is not in the picture, adoption by the step-parent is a possibility.

There are some states where adoptions are open by default, and there appear to be agencies that are not crazy slut-shaming motherfsckers, or at least put on reasonably convincing shows of sanity. (I say this from having superficially looked into both domestic and international adoption and attending a grand total of one weekend seminar given by a crunchy-acting adoption agency, with talks from various adoptive parents, adopted parents, one birthmother blah blah blah.) Even with the best of intentions it seems to be a deeply screwed-up process, because decisions get made at absolutely the wrong time, everyone involved is desperate for different things, and the costs of dotting all the i’s are substantial (for example the incredibly intrusive home visits and assessments, which you think wouldn’t be so necessary until you remember what kinds of people would just love to adopt kids nobody else wants).

Where the christianist agencies make their money is bringing all the functions (assessment, legal representation etc) under one roof. They can do boilerplate contracts, and everyone “knows” that white christians provide perfect homes…

Giving step-parents rights to their non-biological children would result in a clusterfuck of immense proportions.

That’s the argument right now against gay couples in states that don’t allow them to adopt their partner’s child, and a lot of people have discovered too late that they have absolutely no legal right to see the children they raised.  Should biology always trump actual care?  The courts seem to think so but, again, is being in the care of biological parents rather than adoptive ones always in the best interest of the child?

When one biological parent is not in the picture, adoption by the step-parent is a possibility.

If by “not in the picture” you mean “dead” then, yes, that’s a possibility.  However, in most states a parent has to legally give up their parental rights to clear the way for an adoption, and if the parent who’s not in the picture refuses to do that, then the stepparent is SOL.

My understanding is that a stepparent can petition for visitation rights if they can prove they were a caregiver to the child.  Very often, children are legally adopted by stepparents so that’s something to consider if you are very close to the child and the other parent has died or abandoned them.

As an adoptive parent I don’t think adoption is evil.  I do however think it should be a lot more regulated.  Yes there is a lot of paperwork (mostly because we were adopting from a foreign country) and yes I think the government should streamline things a bit more (for example you have to get your fingerprints renewed every year like they go bad).  I do know that when we adopted our daughter that she was abandoned and lived in an orphanage for a year and a half.  I grieve for the woman who had to give her up.  I don’t however feel guilty that we adopted she as her life in the Orphanage was pretty bad (she had Rickets and had to be hospitalized with other illnesses) and she has filled our life with joy.  The country we went through does very few adoptions and they are very picky and very involved in the process.  We’ll be sending reports and pictures until she’s 16 years old.  I would have loved to have some sort of contact with the birth mother for my daughter’s sake (and my own as I hope she’s safe and well).  Unfortunately as my daughter was abandoned there is no info (the agency even advertised for someone to come forward in the major paper and we have an actual copy of it).

This is so distressing. When I was a teenager my aunt gave up a baby through Bethany services, and it seemed relatively rosy (though my aunt’s recovery from the C-section was NOT. She stayed with us, so I remember. Maybe she was miserable for other reasons as well). I am not sure if I was naive and unaware at the time (I was) or that it’s not always that bad (perhaps we were lucky). I get so angry when I hear of alleged christians being so un-compassionate.

phalamir, the sort of streamlining that people ever get truly vocal about is typically about enabling de jure or de facto closed adoption.

Most of the relaxations aren’t in and of themselves bad.  The issue is that a heavy element of closed adoption processes will build an infrastructure for laundering illegal adoptions.

People can be real sickos about pretending that children are an extension of themselves, and such people do not ever want their beautiful little minds disrupted by the birth mother coming around one day.  Hence baby-stealing as a preference to straight and legal adoptions, like that situation in Miss where it’s apparent that a judge deprived a light-skinned mexican mother of her baby and deposited it in the custody of her rich lawyer friends.  And you *know* there are 20 somethings out there who were the children of imprisoned women in SA during the 80s, and were sold here as infants…

That’s the argument right now against gay couples in states that don’t allow them to adopt their partner’s child, and a lot of people have discovered too late that they have absolutely no legal right to see the children they raised.

But that has less to do with the fact that the child is not their biological child than with the fact that the state discriminates against gay people.

Whenever I hear the argument that the government should allow anyone other than the biological parent the legal right to raise the child, I think about Sharon Bottoms - and others like her - and how the court decided that because she was gay, she had no right to her child, and so awarded custody to her mother.  If the right of the biological parent to raise their child is weakened, more of that will happen: the decision on who should raise the child will be determined based on who society has deemed a superior person, not a better parent.  In which case, the story that Amanda pointed out - where a poor woman lost her child to a rich family - would happen more often, and with stronger support by the state.

As such, I tend to be skeptical of the argument that society should consider non-biological parents and others over biological parents.  It seems like a recipe for more situations like the story, where the powerful parent, or powerful wannabe-parent, wins because they have the lawyer, the judge, and the society on their side.

This ties in to so many different issues for me; a lot of feminists are now including issues around pregnancy, labor, and birth into “choice”, which is all for the good. The advocacy work I’m involved in involves women’s rights to choose their caregivers, place of birth, and to refuse procedures/interventions they don’t want in labor. The cruelty done to many of these adoptive moms is another facet of the culture that has pushed the c/section rate sky-high and denied women access to midwives, the opportunity to have decent maternal leave, and the opportunity to have children while not sacrificing their bodily autonomy, careers and personhood, in general.

The irony of course (but maybe also the opportunity) is that many of the women fighting for say, homebirths and midwives are conservative Christians, usually anti-abortion.  However, I can talk to them about autonomy, choice, and the non-violation of self in birth, and hope that at least some of them come to understand that abortion and contraception are all part of the same thing. Lot of cognitive dissonance going on, though.

Purpleshoes, thank you for the resource.

I also want to thank you Mnemosyne and Molly, NYC for your responses.

Create a category of legal rights that actually pertain to people who aren’t legal parents. People who have an interest in the welfare of a child, whether because they are the biological parents, the grandparents, the siblings, or whatever, deserve to have *some* rights to access the child. They don’t deserve rights that trump the legal parents’ rights, but I think we could solve a lot of people’s problems if people who relinquish legal parental rights could be granted some sort of rights to visitation and contact with the child, and that the same rights could apply to grandparents and siblings.

This sounds like a good idea but it makes me nervous. In some states grandparents do have some rights and can sue for visitation if they the parents are withholding the visitation. The state is supposed to decide using the basic tenant “what’s in the best interest of the child.”
But the reason this makes me nervous is what happens in that gray area where grandparents aren’t abusive but definitely have their own agenda, access to resources and a lot of pull i.e. Sarah Palin.  Can you imagine if Bristol decided to take her baby and live in a non-GOP approved “lifestyle?” She’d be declared incompetent faster than you can get a permit to shoot a wolf with a high powered rifle out of a helicopter in Alaska.

But that has less to do with the fact that the child is not their biological child than with the fact that the state discriminates against gay people.

Except that the argument is that, since the person is not biologically related to the child, they have no business in its life.  Gay people have at least been able to have a few court fights to win a few rights.  If you’re a straight stepparent, you’re pretty well SOL.

As such, I tend to be skeptical of the argument that society should consider non-biological parents and others over biological parents.

So, just to be clear, you think that the non-biological parent—whether gay or straight—should have no rights, even if they’ve raised the child from birth?  That’s an, um, interesting point of view if you’re worried about gay rights since you’re arguing that Janet Miller-Jenkins should have lost all parental rights to her daughter because she was not the biological mother.  You’re to the right of Antonin Scalia on parental rights since the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and Miller-Jenkins retained her rights despite not being biologically related to her ex-partner’s child.

I’m gonna turn the rights suggestion on its head and say that I think it would be more workable if we had a recognised human right to have access to information about our biological relatives and any other individuals involved in our care during our childhoods. Adoptees should have the right to know they were adopted and who their birth parents were. People who were in foster care should have the right to know who their foster parents were. People who were parented for a time by step parents should have the right to know who those people were. If you have the information about who they were you also have the means to track them down.

I work in archives. I work with a lot of people who are trying to trace their families. Many people become interested in genealogy as they get older (new hobby for you Amanda ) but for some people it is a necessary part of their mental wellbeing. These people were often removed from their families at a young age. They may have been adopted, placed in an institution or fostered. All of them are looking for connection. For many indigenous people who were often removed because of racist government policy it’s not just about connection to family, it may also be about connection to land and culture. People should have the right to know. It should be a human right.

That would be what my fundie Baptist parents did to me. Since they never got caught abusing me (I called child welfare repeatedly and they decided abuse didn’t happen in good Christian homes like the one I lived in) and they are rolling in the bucks, they got away with it. They kicked me out, kept my daughter and told me if I had ever loved her, I wouldn’t make her homeless, too. I ended up signing the papers because I didn’t want her to be homeless and because they promised me they had only abused me because I made them do it.

I was very young, at the time. And unforgivably naive.

They keep getting away with it, because, you see, they’re good, upstanding, members of the community. They’ve been married for thirty years; he’s a deacon and she was a choir singer, both members of the local megachurch. And don’t think it hasn’t come up in court. My father actually told the court I had ‘always needed a revolving door on my bedroom’ and that they didn’t think she ‘needed to be exposed to my lifestyle.’ Ironically, I was freshly divorced at the time, and I had had two partners in over five years. But, after all, I was divorced.

Sometimes, it happens in families. Which just goes to show you what’s actually important to fundies.

I keep trying to sue to get her back. I’m going to go see a lawyer, again, tomorrow.

Gay people have at least been able to have a few court fights to win a few rights.

Then I suppose I should be content with those few rights and endorse policies that would jeopardize them in order to help over-privileged straight people.

So, just to be clear, you think that the non-biological parent—whether gay or straight—should have no rights, even if they’ve raised the child from birth?

I’d say it depends.

Again, I think the case of IMJ obscures more than it illuminates: were it not for Virginia’s homophobic public policy, the court would never have entertained the notion that Janet Miller-Jenkins was not the child’s mother.  If she had been a man and the husband of Lisa Miller-Jenkins, their child would have been a child of the marriage, the legal child of both parents, and that would be that - as Vermont had determined.  But because she was a woman and the wife of Lisa Miller-Jenkins, Lisa Miller-Jenkins was able to exploit the state’s homophobia to her benefit and the detriment of her ex and their child.  The issue was the state’s anti-gay bias, not it’s anti-non-biological-parent bias.

Which is to say, yes, I agree with the common law notion that the child of the marriage (or civil union, or domestic partnership) is (or should be) the legal child of the partners to the marriage.  So yes, in that situation, a non-biological parent should have the same right to parent as the biological parent.

But I don’t think that’s the situation I understood you to describe in #14 and elsewhere.

The case you described in #14 - that of a step-parent who wishes to claim a right to parent a child of two biological (or legal, as in the case of Janet Miller-Jenkins above) parents - is substantially different, and no, I don’t think that a step-parent should have the same legal right to a child as the parents, even if they claim to have “raised the child from birth.”  I think that enters into the situation faced by Sharon Bottoms, where a third party insinuated herself between a mother and her son, and I don’t think the state should support those claims.  It will inevitably enable the state to deprive the powerless of their children, as it did in that case.

Adoptees should have the right to know they were adopted and who their birth parents were.

Against that, this:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20090623_Distraught_womansues__alleging_N_J__helped_child_of_rape_find_her.html

While it’s evident that the right of the birth parents to privacy can be abused by others, there are cases where the birth parents right to privacy should trump the child’s right to know.

Best of luck to you mouthyb, and I’m so sorry for what happened. 

Reading these various accounts, and considering my own situation, makes me wonder if there is a universal solution.  Probably not.  I mean, if it’s “do what’s best for the child”, which would seem to be the best possible idea you still open the door to fundie relatives convincing fundie judges that the gay/atheist/unmarried mom or dad is a threat to the child.  Considering the best interests of the parents paves the way for MRA shenanigans, among other things.

While it’s evident that the right of the birth parents to privacy can be abused by others, there are cases where the birth parents right to privacy should trump the child’s right to know.

Could an exception be carved out for rape victims?

But even then, adoptees have a right to know basic information about their biological parents.  Certainly their health history would be relevant.  All I know about my biological parents is that my mother had hay fever.  Thank goodness I decided not to have children, because who knows what heritable conditions I carry?

I read that some states distinguish between a child’s right to know their parents’ identities and their right to know their parents’ medical histories; that seems appropriate, because it maintains the parents’ privacy without compromising the child’s health.

But I don’t think the exception for rape would work any better here than it would with abortion: the birth parents’ desire for privacy shouldn’t have to be validated by a third party - your reason is acceptable, but your reason isn’t, etc.  I think the law has to trust the parents’ with that decision.

/Delurking

I am a birthmother.  I went through The Gladney Center for Adoption when I was a seriously fucked up 21 year old in 1991.  I don’t know about any other women, but my experience made me even more adamant about the right to have an abortion and the right to practice birth control.  First, they wouldn’t have taken me in were I not white.  There wasn’t a single brown person there while I was living there.  Sometimes they were really nice, and I see sometimes how their rules facilitate giving your baby up, but they are still asking for your child…..you’d think a little more sympathy would be in order.  Oh, and they make sure to tell you that if you choose to KEEP your baby that you will owe them for the hospitalization and the birth and they can charge what they want.  Giving a baby up for adoption in a closed adoption is like tearing out your own heart and offering it to strangers.  The worst part for me is all the things I know now that I didn’t know then, like the fact that I WAS lied to and coerced, just not in a completely obvious and bludgeoning manner.  I WAS told that they weren’t doing open adoptions at the time and that closed ones were best.  (tho the whole “baby M” thing was going on at the time”)  I had an emergency c-section but instead of the bikkini cut, I got the old fashioned straight down the belly cut that made it difficult when I finally felt ready to be a Mom about 16 years later, cause us whores don’t matter, just the baby…  Oh and I “got” to stay a few extra weeks after having the baby due to complications from the c-section….  Sometimes I get so mad thinking about how stupid I was.  I hate feeling like I was taken advantage of.  The worst part is when folks tell me I “did the right thing”.  I went with an adoption because I was effing stupid.  I should have gotten an abortion, but I didn’t want to admit I was pregnant.  I didn’t want to admit I hadn’t been as careful as I should have with the BC to my mostly liberal feminist Mom.  I didn’t want to admit that I had been in a “Nice Girl"tm relationship with a guy that only existed in my imagination.  Mostly I didn’t want a baby, but was too far along to do anything else.  Only thing I DID do right was realize that as stupid and jacked up I was, maybe folks with a little money and a real want for a baby might do better.  But I don’t really know for sure, and won’t unless the boy comes looking for me, and then what am I gonna tell him when he meets his half-sister who is now 3 years old.  How do I explain to HER?  Really my only hope for the boy is that he is happy and isn’t an entitled asshole…. blarg….  Sorry, I have some complicated feelings here….. 
/Relurk

Drew, it isn’t all about medical histories for me. It’s about my identity, my history, and my rights to the same documentation every other citizen has: my own true birth certificate.

No parents have a legal right to hide from their offspring. Nobody has any right to privacy beyond that stated in the law, period—and the law hasn’t written in special provisions for people who relinquish. If a child were to hunt down a first mother and stalk her, or pursue an unwanted relationship, which is the picture they always paint to scare people, well, we already have laws for that. As for me, I’ve already found and contacted my first mother. I still want my birth certificate. (I still wish she were willing to tell me who my father is, too, but she isn’t. 44 years later, the shame is still fresh and hurtful.)

Most first mothers say they want to be found—want to know what became of their flesh and blood. But whenever an open records law is proposed, some agency shill somewhere digs up the few who insist their lives would be ruined if it were known they gave birth. They don’t want to be confused with reality, they just don’t want change, even as change forces itself on an industry that no longer has as much societal shame to wield against women who get pregnant out of wedlock.

Ordinary people also resist change in adoption because the old way makes such a pretty story to the ignorant. The “unwanted” baby slotted neatly into a family where it is wanted is supposed to make everybody happy. What sealed records do is allow adoptive parents to legally but fictionally be both adoptive and birth parents. Their feelings of security should not trump the child’s true identity.

There’s nothing wrong with admitting you didn’t give birth to your child, that s/he came from somewhere else. My adoptive parents love me very much, and I them, but I am, on an emotional level, deeply ashamed of having been adopted. And why shouldn’t I be? If it were nothing to be ashamed of, the government wouldn’t lie to me about it. There was nothing my adoptive parents could do or give me to make up for that—not just my loss, but the shame surrounding it. My brain knows better, but my heart believes I must have done something—must be something—terrible, to have been given away.

/delurk
Oh and I would like to mention, that I wasn’t poor, uneducated or have any of the other disadvantages of many women contemplating abortion or adoption.  I was semi-intelligent, well-educated, middle class, no addictions besides smoking and I was raised a progressive in a feminist home.  If I could still be hosed/hose myself in such a way, what were the girls WITHOUT my advantages supposed to do.
/relurk

In 2007 the FRC and NCFA went beyond overlapping mandates to collaborate on the publication of another pamphlet, written by Kenny, “Birthmother, Goodmother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption,” which targets “potential birthmothers” before pregnancy: a seeming contradiction of abstinence promotion, unless, as DelBalzo wryly notes, the abstinence movement intends to create “more babies available for adoption.”

Birthmothers before pregnancy is not a contradiction of the abstinence movement.  The money wouldn’t be rolling in from coerced adoptions if slut shaming weren’t a big part of this.  You start the girls off young, slowly building the idea that having sex outside of marriage is dirty, dirty, and if you do, you will deserve whatever you get.  You convince girls that their only worth resides in having an intact hymen on their wedding night.  You make them understand that they are only God’s wombs.  That way, when they get pregnant, as they inevitably will (people will have sex, and sending kids out with no or bad information is going to always lead to pregnancy), you can quite easily get the baby out of the girl’s hands and into the hands of your chosen Christofascist family. 

All for a nominal fee, of course.

Treatment of Jordan—assholish, and the complete opposite of my brother and his gf’s experience in Vancouver a few years back.  My brother is closer to 30 but his accidentally pregnant gf was at the time barely 20 and felt she had life to live before being a mom.  She simply wasn’t ready, and the couple have little money.  They decided to have the baby and put it up for adoption—had selected a gay couple of their choosing via open adoption ahead of time.

When my nephew’s mom gave birth, despite the waiting couple and supposed decision to give him up, the hospital/social services insisted that my brother and his gf actually bring the baby home for 24 hours, THEN decide.  As it turns out, my nephew’s mom changed her mind (my brother was ready to be a dad, so he was thrilled, as were all the relatives) and they have zero regrets.  They are also the best, most attentive and successful parents I have ever seen in my life—that kid is a joy to be around.  I have an awesome nephew I adore thanks to the circumspection of the Vancouver system (but I still feel a twinge for the adoptive couple who got bad news in the eleventh hour—hope they’re parents by now).

So where is the money at?  I’d love to know how much cash is flowing through this system.  Selling babies to rich people seems like a very lucrative industry.

“How often do we hear pro-choicers tell mandatory-birthers that if they feel that strongly they should prove it by adopting so that there’s a place for unwanted babies?”

A lot of the time, that’s to highlight the hollowness of the “we just love babies so, so much” line anti-choicers use to try to whitewash their misogyny.  It does not seem inappropriate to point out, when someone’s maundering on about how abortion kills babies and babies are a gift and there are people out there who’d be thrilled to take care of the resulting child if the pregnant woman can’t, that there are already more kids in foster care who need a stable, loving home than the state knows what to do with and in whom all of these hypothetical adopters mysteriously seem to have no interest.  It’s kind of like the exchange detailed upthread with the clinic protester whining about laws governing adoption procedures and yet—again, mysteriously—being disinclined to address the problem she’s supposedly upset about.

Of course a mother who has her newborn taken from her arms, knowing she’ll never see him again, is going to suffer serious post-traumatic stress!  But you never hear about this from the Christian Right.  You only hear the standard Evil Women Who Abort Their Babies Suffer With Mental Illness Forever canard.  Um, not.

If I were to look at this through the lens of science, I’d say the human body and brain are geared for early pregnancy terminations, since nature brings that about approximately forty percent of the time anyway.  Nature would “want” women who’ve miscarried—one way or another—to be able to remain whole in order to reproduce again and keep the species going.  On the other hand, the body and brain of a mother who’s successfully carried a baby to full term are chemically, hormonally, emotionally, and physically geared to bond with that newborn and never let it out of her sight, a profound and all-encompassing mind-body state I remember all too well from the time when they tried to get me to leave Son One in the hospital for jaundice treatments while I was supposed to go home—never mind all the freaking MILK that he needed and that I had exploding everywhere—because the insurance company would not cover my staying there more than two nights.  Bastards.  But I digress.

When I was 18 and pregnant, I was planning to give the baby up for adoption. Since I still considered myself nominally Catholic, I went to Catholic Charities to set it up.

After I gave birth, I changed my mind and decided I wanted to keep the baby. I spoke to the adoption counselor to tell her, and she RAGED at me: “You are going to ruin this baby’s life!” She continued on in that vein for some time, as I was on the other end of the phone sobbing. I was incompetent, I had no business raising a child, she would be poor and uneducated forever, etc. etc.

If nothing else, she convinced me that changing my mind about the adoption was definitely the right choice.

That baby, btw, is currently a junior in college on full scholarship.

Scythian8 - Thanks for your story.  You did the best you could at a very difficult time at a very young age.  I’m curious - how do you feel about your son finding you?

Which is to say, yes, I agree with the common law notion that the child of the marriage (or civil union, or domestic partnership) is (or should be) the legal child of the partners to the marriage.  So yes, in that situation, a non-biological parent should have the same right to parent as the biological parent.

In other words, you think that gay couples should be given rights that straight couples are not.

There’s a word for people like you, you know.

Scythian8- The hospital I was at did my surgery that way, too. The scar is between a third of an inch and a half inch wide, and I was told I’d never regain full control of and strength in my abdominal muscles.

I did (thank you, belly dancing), but after going on much later to have my other children and getting a bikini cut which healed faster, I look down at the almost foot long scar and wonder how anyone gets medical degree who is so unbalanced they are willing to permanently deface an underage girl for being pregnant. The public health was even worse than the doctor who did this surgery (when I went in for my first pre-natal exam, the woman doing it forced a speculum into me without lube and cut me up. When I complained, she told me, “You’d have to have opened up more to get a dick in you anyways.”) I nearly died during the pregnancy (pre-eclampsia which became the real deal), because the care I was getting was decidedly sub-par. It was in small town Louisiana, and the hospital had some opinions about my age and state.

Of course, so did total strangers. This was small town Louisiana.

Because I tried to keep my daughter for a time, my family refused to help. She was ‘my sin’, and therefore taking care of her (with that kind of abdominal wound and no pain meds) was all my problem. What they did do is hang around and threaten to beat me (my uncle), ignore me and/or tell me I was doing a terrible job (everyone else). And then my grandmother, who I was living with at the time, kicked me out because “there was nothing she could do with me,” my parents took me in, insisted I get a job and kept me awake for a month. The job was at night and they refused to watch her during the day. If I passed out, my mother would start screaming, incoherently, and kick whatever I was on.

And then they kicked me out, all within six months of her birth.

On, and what recovery time? I was hauling loads and on my feet twelve hours a day within a few weeks of birth because I had to ‘pay for’ her care and we were not going to take welfare, no sir, we were not that kind of family.

((((Scythian8)))) If you’d like them. From someone who knows what it’s like to have to live with that knowledge that to some people, all you are is a uterus attached to a bad person.

Oh, and Drew, I’m assuming you’re perfectly fine with this lesbian couple cutting the (gay) father of their child out of the child’s life since legally it’s only their child.  It’s not like the guy would be attached to this child in any way, right?  He should just shut up and walk away.

I wish all four of my parents were on my birth certificate, even if they couldn’t all be in my life. Adoptees are constantly under pressure to declare our loyalty, to trumpet that our adoptive parents are “the real parents.” And yet when people find out I’m adopted, they immediately ask if I’ve ever looked for my “real parents.” They’re ALL my real parents.

“Ohana means nobody gets left behind, or forgotten.”

Laurel, thanks for such an eloquent defense of adoptee rights. Much of the idea of the birthparent right to privacy is shrouded in outdated ideas of sex shame, womanly virtue and family honor, and it’s still legally trumping the more factual reality of an adoptee’s medical and psychological needs. While most birthmothers I’ve met want reunion, I did meet one who did not want to meet her daughter, and it was clearly a painful subject. I respect that. And you’re right, we already have laws to protect against any kind of stalker situation. But the idea that someone else’s possible embarrassment is good enough reason to divorce another person from all of their history - from genetic diseases to siblings who live around the corner - is just ridiculous. I’ve done plenty of things in my youth I’d like to erase but you know, tough shit for me. I wouldn’t amputate another adult’s rights or put them at risk medically to do so, even if I could. That’s what people don’t get, that we’re talking about the truncated rights of adults who are being held to contracts signed before they were born. The idea of “protection,” besides being paternalistic, was just as grounded in protecting the adoptive parents from the birthparents, as it was to protect the birthmother from shame. (or more often, her parents who were calling the shots.)

And thank you, Veronica! Amputation is such a great metaphor—that’s exactly how it feels. Something’s always been missing, but I am expected to pretend it is not. To do otherwise is, supposedly, to be ungrateful to the loving people who raised me. Bullshit. I know of no other loss we’re supposed to celebrate like this.

And yes, sealed records are about the adoptive parents. They were never really intended to protect me from the “stigma of illegitimacy” or to protect my mother from her monstrous offspring. Those were just the excuses given.

I think someone has already mentioned The Girls Who Went Away, but for a real eye-opener about how sealed records infant adoption came to be, nothing beats Barbara Raymond’s The Baby Thief.

when someone’s maundering on about how abortion kills babies and babies are a gift and there are people out there who’d be thrilled to take care of the resulting child if the pregnant woman can’t, that there are already more kids in foster care who need a stable, loving home than the state knows what to do with and in whom all of these hypothetical adopters mysteriously seem to have no interest.

One of the things that happens when people are paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for a child—oops, to all the people who happen to facilitate the completely no-money-changing hands relinquishment of a child by that evil incompetent birthmother—is that they sometimes think they have a right to one that isn’t somehow defective, and/or that they deserve praise for “rescuing” an infant from a life of squalor so that it can be Brought Up Right. So duh, why would they want kids in foster care who have physical problems, or whose emotional development has already been screwed up, or who “just wouldn’t fit in” in a monochromatic neighborhood?

(And for every entitled, arrogant christianist pair of assholes thinking this way, there is some germ of truth in the arguments. Not everyone is capable of dealing well with kids who have special needs—and of course the more entitled you are, the more likely that is to be the case.)

In other words, you think that gay couples should be given rights that straight couples are not.

There’s a word for people like you, you know.

Whatever.

Oh, and Drew, I’m assuming you’re perfectly fine with this lesbian couple cutting the (gay) father of their child out of the child’s life since legally it’s only their child.

Why are you being so hostile, Mnemosyne?  First you compare me to Scalia, then you accuse me of bigotry, now this?  If you want to discuss the issue, do, but if you want to get off treating me like shit, fuck off.

Laurel, sorry, but I don’t think an adoptee’s desire to know trumps a birth parent’s right to privacy.  No one has a right to know anything about anyone that that person doesn’t wish to tell them, and I’d say that’s as true in this case as any other. 

The argument that a parent has no right to hide from a child is compelling, but in this case, the biological parent is no longer the legal parent, so the argument doesn’t hold: the parent has no legal claim to the child, and the child has no legal claim to the parent, so there is no reason from the to be anything other than strangers if either one so chooses.

I do think that the state should support those adoptees and birth parents who wish to reconnect, and I think that an adoptee should have reasonable access to medical information that they need to protect their life and health, but beyond that, I simply don’t see why an adoptee or a birth parent should have any right to contact a person who has made it clear that they do not wish to be contacted.

I don’t doubt that such a rule is painful to the person who wishes to reconnect but is denied that wish by the person who doesn’t, but the fact that rejection is painful doesn’t necessarily entitled the rejected party to anything.

Paul—They’re entitled to a perfect infant not only because they paid for it but because, naturally, any kid they gave birth to themselves would have been perfect….

Ever wonder what happens to the less than perfect? They get returned like the merchandise they are to these very entitled people. It’s called adoption disruption and it happens more often the older the kid is.

Drew, what right to privacy? I need to know where in any law it is written that a relinquishing parent has a special right to privacy beyond those other citizens have. They don’t. I’m not asking anyone to tell me a damned thing. I’m asking for my original birth certificate. You have yours, but mine is doctored to say that a woman who was never in that hospital gave birth to me and a sterile man contributed half the genetic material.

“Sorry”? Nobody’s sorry. They’re too busy elevating everyone else’s rights, real or imagined, over those of the only party who had zero choice in the matter:  ME.

Correct me if I’m wrong, Laurel, but you’re asking for your birth parents’ identities.  If your birth parents don’t wish to share that information, I don’t think you should be able to take it from them against their will.

With respect to privacy, society generally respects people’s medical privacy; I don’t have a right to know who received the organ I donated and they don’t have the right to know who donated the organ they received.  That is true even of sperm and egg donors.  So I don’t see why it shouldn’t be true of biological parents as well.

Like I said, I can see that it can be painful to be deprived of information that others have by convention - but not by right - but the fact that others have that information by convention and the fact that it is painful not to have that information does not necessarily confer a right to the information.

I am going to add this to list of bookmarks I have of posts to share whenever people blast those of us who conceived through fertility science for not “just adopting.”

Note: I am an adoptee who has never had the slightest angst about it, although I do recognize that this is in part because I uncritically accepted the story I was given.  I do still support adoption as a practice, albeit one that should be entered into mindfully.  However, I have left more than one feminist blog comment thread in tears of rage and frustration after being told how selfish I was for using science to have a child instead of adopting, never mind that one was financially feasible for us and the other was not.

I’m glad someone’s finally discussing the absolute cruelty of taking a baby away from its mother at birth.

I had an acquaintance in college who gave up a baby for adoption.  She was miserable even before giving birth.  She was miserable for the rest of the time I knew her (two or three years).  No woman I know who had an abortion went through this trauma.

You’d think the Christians, who tout motherly love as both a high ideal and so natural, would “get it.”  Or maybe they do, and think it’s an appropriate punishment for sluttery.

Drew, I am asking that my birth certificate reflect reality. It seem to me this is no more taking anything from my first parents than using reverse lookup to find someone’s phone number is taking something from them. For the record, I believe children born via egg donor and/or sperm donor have a perfect right to their identities too. (Organ donors, not so much. That’s a poor analogy because the organ given up will never grow into an adult person and is therefore presumed to have no rights.) Why does anyone not in a witness protection program have the right to not have hir name known to any other human being?

This isn’t about my feelings, it’s about (what I perceive to be) my rights. But as far as feelings go, I’ve concluded it’s not possible for most people to imagine how they would feel if they were adopted. I suppose it’s a scary thought. But everyone can imagine how they’d feel if they were stuck with a baby they didn’t want, or wanted a baby they couldn’t make, or had something from their past show up to haunt them later. And that’s the reason sealed records exist: adoption is a wonderful thing that didn’t happen to you, and gracious what is all the fuss about?

But sealed records are the bizarre thing. They didn’t exist before (approximately) the 1930s, and they’re going away, state by state, now. At no other time in human history were people expected to sacrifice their identities in order to be raised as part of a family. Nobody forces foster children to change their names, and if they get adopted, nobody proposes we invent a memory-wiping machine to “protect their original parents.” 

But we’re not going to get anywhere with this. You believe one set of parents replaces the other, and the law is still on your side in most states of the U.S. I’m an adult citizen of the United States, yet you have legal rights I do not have. Enjoy them. Take them for granted. I hope to do the same one day. I hope I live to see the day when all fifty states recognize the amended birth certificate for the legal lie it is.

I am an adoptee and I don’t much care about knowing my biological parentage. If my biological mother wanted to contact me, fine, if not, fine. I have to say that I never thought about it much, because noone publicly talked about the experiences of mothers who gave up their children. I don’t consider that I have a RIGHT to know my bioparents’ identities, but do think that the bioparents have the right to determine if and when to contact me. I don’t have any puzzling diseases, however, and refuse to worry about my chances of developing common or rare hereditary diseases. But enough about me…

These trapped unwed mothers of the 1940s through 1973 and later were sinned against. It is tragic that this is still going on.

I think the organ donation is applicable, because the recipient, like the child, would not be alive if not for the donor.  Yet in spite of the connection, the recipient is not entitled to know the donor.

I don’t think that the adoptive parent should replace the birth parent, but if the birth parent wishes for their identity to remain private, that should be their choice.  I think the child should have the same right, to the extent that it is possible, because their identity is no less their own.  I simply think that the connection between the two should be made by mutual consent, not unilaterally.

I doubt any solution would satisfy every person, but I think the idea that the relationship between birth parent and child should proceed under terms acceptable to both is a good one.

Ah, the old mutual consent. I don’t know how to obtain the consent of someone whose name I have no legal right to know. Snark aside, the decision _has already been unilaterally made_ for me and everyone else involved by the state. My first mother and my adoptive parents had no more say in it than I did.

I’m turning off thread notifications now because A) I ‘ve said my piece and have nothing else to add and B) This was supposed to be about first mother coercion, not me.

“But even then, adoptees have a right to know basic information about their biological parents.  Certainly their health history would be relevant.”

I notice how no one says this about biological families.

The abuse in my family goes back 4 generations, at least, as does the estrangement. I didn’t know anything about my family’s health history until a year ago, and that’s solely because my aunt, who I met once when I was 4 years old, found me on the internet and we reconnected. Had I had a more common last name I would not know my health history whatsoever. And even then, I only know my grandfather was an alcoholic and my grandmother has Alzheimer’s.

I really don’t think health history matters as much as people claim it does, or they’d be talking about this in my situation.

Scyth, thanks for sharing.  I just wanted to hop in and express my sympathies for all you’ve gone through.  It’s so hard to know what to do sometimes when you’re as young as 21.  Or any age, sometimes.

litbrit @ #76: Seems reasonable.  Reproduction is a tenuous balance between throwing everything you’ve got towards the goal of reproduction, and cutting losses.  Anti-choicers are angry that someone would waste a pregnancy, as if they’re that hard to come by.  But nature throws hundreds of thousands of eggs and billions upon billions of sperm at reproduction—-per individual!—-and destroys the vast majority of all these sex cells.  At every stage of the process, there’s slicing away of raw materials, and that includes zygotes flushed and fetuses miscarried.  Because humans survive by donating a lot of resources to relatively few offspring.

Anti-choicers are just angry that the female brain is part of the culling process.

“I notice how no one says this about biological families.”

That occurred to me the last time I saw the debate going on.  There are some types of medical information that my maternal family shares pretty openly and a lot of stuff that is really strongly None of Your Fucking Business, and the breakdown is most definitely not according to what’s heritable and what’s not.  And it kind of is my fucking business if I’m at greater risk for something, too, but a) there isn’t any kind of explicit or even implicit right of discovery there and b) they absolutely have a right to medical privacy.  That most families don’t really exercise that right amongst themselves doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or that calling up your biological relatives for medical information won’t get you a dial-tone instead of an answer.  Personally, I’m not sure how I’d react if estranged relatives from my father’s side asked for any medical history of mine beyond “Have you been diagnosed with any genetically-linked disease that doesn’t run in your mother’s family?”.

And, of course, the value of intrafamilial medical openness is entirely dependent on the quality of medical care your family has received and/or the record-keeping done on symptoms for which there was not a contemporary diagnosis available.  If you come from a line of poor folks, it’s even odds you’ll get a list of “probably"s and “in retrospect"s rather than truly reliable information.  Genetic screening—while expensive—might be a much better bet for those worried about developing something or passing something on to their offspring.

Oh, and all the above also presumes accurate information about parentage.  If an older relative happens to be the product of infidelity or undisclosed adoption, the data-set is going to be wrong and probably unfixable.  If mom wasn’t ever able to determine paternity, that’s also something that can’t be remedied.

Thanks BadKitty@ #78, mouthyb@ #80 and Amanda for your sympathy/acknowledgement.  Mouthyb, I think if anyone had overtly treated me badly like they did you, or actually called me a slut, I would have been able to tell them to fuck off.  It was all the conditions that would “help the baby” and “make the transition easier” that I bought into….  I was so scared and ANGRY about being pregnant.  I remember feeling complately betrayed by my body and my femininity.  When I had my daughter 3 years ago, my biggest and most secret worry was that I would do something other people regarded as whacko and that someone would find a way to take her away from me.  Frankly, if something ever happens to her, I am not sure that I wouldn’t lose my mind, I can’t lose something like that again, and it was a loss, even if it was my choice.  As for meeting the boy, I would LIKE to meet him, but I am also afraid of it BadKitty.  What if his parents sucked?  What if he were molested or abused or just desperately unhappy, what if he hates me?  What if he is an entitled conservative christian asshat?  I picked the best I could, but I only had so much information to go on…..  LOL My husband says I am definitely ambivalent about the whole thing.

I agree, Preying Mantis. Various forms of mental illness run in my family. But I am NOT entitled to one shred of private medical information from any member of my family. Full Stop.

And while I am sympathetic to the desires of adoptees to know the circumstances of their conception, I do not believe those desires trump the right of people to be left alone.

If biological children have no standing to demand private information of their parents that parents do not wish to share, then I fail to see why adoptees have the prerogative.

Records were never sealed to protect the birth mother.  Records were sealed to protect the adoptive parents from having to do other than pretend.