AdopTalk

A Plea Unity

(with excerpts and concepts from the forthcoming book, “The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry"


Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Philo of Alexandria

Those of us working to fix the mess that adoption has become in this country, share a great deal in common with other movements to create change, such as civil rights, gay rights, feminist. We share with all these movements in that are all fighting for basic human rights, for an end of oppression and exploitation.

We also have in common the fact that all of these movements have camps/schisms/factions. All have their share of extremists, radicals and middle-of-the roaders, pacifists and militants. This is largely because all of their issues, as are ours, are very personal issues that strike deep in our hearts.

The more personal an issue, the more hotly debated and the more people cling to their beliefs. And yet, all movements grow, change and evolve throughout their history. Ours is no exception.

There are currently two “factions” or “camps” of women who have lost children to adoption. I will call these “old school” and “new school” to avoid any non-objective offensive descriptors. Before I describe these camps and what makes each somewhat unique, I want us to focus, however, on our similarities.
1. we have all suffered the tremendous irrevocable loss of our children to adoption
2. we all feel to varying extents, and expressed perhaps in different language, that we were duped, robbed, coerced, pressured in some way either overtly or covertly
3. we have not forgotten those children, that’s why we are here discussing these issues
4. we all “care.” We all want to change things and make it better
5. we all HATE adoption as it is practiced in this country today. It is corrupt, and exploitive, driven by money-makers to serve those who want babies, not at all what adoption once was – or believed it was when some us of relinquished our children
6. we all want it to STOP or change drastically


I hope that we can all affirm these similarities and remind ourselves of them as we try to work TOGETHER beyond what divides us. There is strength in umbers and putting an end to the corruption is more far important than any minor differences, or trying to prove which of us is “right” and which is “wrong.” We are all right because we are all expressing our feelings and feelings are never right or wrong, they just are! We need to put our differences aside and fight this battle together, using our limited resources and our strength to fight our mutual enemies, not one another!

OK. So now let’s look at what divides us and see how we can overcome these obstacles. Until recently I, and others, have seen the major obstacles in languages, semantics and word usage. At this point in time we are like peoples from to different countries, or two different plants speaking different languages. Those words cut many of us deeply – both ways, in both “camps” – and create walls and stumbling blocks to our ability to hear one another, much less understand or appreciate where we are coming from. We need to being to listen – really listen to one another – one on one worked best for me - in order to understand how these differences came about in order to ever reach any working and workable co-existence or better still cooperation.

I believe that we are standing at a crossroads and face two challenges. One is to honor this past and the other is to not get stuck in it but to allow us to evolve as a movement. Both are tough challenges, but we are touch and have never let what is tough slow us down! In order to honor the past, we need to have a clear understanding of our history.

Honoring Our Past

We started out with Jean Paton and her brave lone stance as an adoptee to stand up against the for the rights of adoptees to know their roots. To meet this end she proposed the first registry which still exists to this day. Like many good ideas, it was co-opted by states and thus corrupted and we now stand opposed to registries. This does not make what Jean Paton did any less brave or noble. The steps we all take now are upon the roads she helped to clear for us. We honor her, as we do others who added stones and pavement to our roads: Florence Fisher, Lee Campbell, and Sandy Muser who went to jail for what she believed in – the right of adoptees and those who bore them to be reunited. All brave pioneers.

We marched to Washington, we held rallies and press conferences. We worked hard to draw attention to our cause. We got bills introduced and even passed in some states – with lost and lots of blood sweat and tears! We were always there to help each newly emerging adoptee and birthmother out of heir closet of fear and shame. Using our righteous indignation to provide role models of activism and change. And we continued on through in-fights and good days and bad, successes and failures. Never tiring

In Oregon more than 500 birthmothers found the courage to go public and make the world face them. Women who had not even told their own husbands or therapists that they had lost a child to adoption, now erasing for themselves and those that followed the shame that had been cast upon them.

Others of us worked on getting new adoptions to be practiced in a totally new (old) way: truly open. And yet, we know too that as with registries, many open adoptions are used falsely and there is little enforceability of contact agreements. And, when they fail to remain open we are still left with adoption that start off with falsified birth certificates. But these are still baby steps to be honored too.

We need to honor this past. Not re-write it and not discard it. It is our collective heritage and it got us where we are now.

A rich part of our history is that we developed a cross-country underground network of search groups and connection without the assistance of an Internet! A pretty amazing feat. We practiced civil disobedience in searching – breaking laws that are unjust. Sandy Musser, birthmother, even went to jail for this strongly held belief! Yes, we called ourselves birthmothers. It was a name we gave ourselves. The facts are there in print. Beggars and Chooser by Rickie Solinger, Page 205 tells how Lee Campell coined the phrase and why.

We need to honor this too.


A Different Path

As in all movements, a more militant, “newer” faction has been added to the mix. They seem to be telling us “old schoolers” that we’ve been doing it all wrong. That our very name that we claimed for ourselves is wrong and hurts our cause. And like a kick in the shin it creates a knee-jerk reaction. I myself have written COPIOUS emails and articles DEFENDING our reasons for maintaining our birthmother name. I could go and on doing the same forever…there are lots of perfectly good, rational, reasonable arguments in favor of keeping the status quo. But if we get really honest, it is mostly because we are comfortable with it and change is hard. So unless someone presents a REALLY. REALLY good reason to change, why should we. And to be honest, no one has done that.

The “Birthmothers Means Breeder” article falls far short of that goal and simply added fuel to the fire by dishonoring our past and trying to make point that was not based on fact. One of the many things we have learned is that our enemies fight us with lies. We try to remain above that and use only the truth in making our arguments.

So, if we BOTH – all of us look at the truth, here it is:

Social workers or the adoption industry did not directly create the term birthmother to exploit us, Lee Campbell did. This is a historical fact that needs to be preserved and honored. Campbell “chose” the name birthmother, but she chose it because “natural” and ‘real” offended adoptive mothers. That’s a fact, too. And so it was, from the inset, a concession. I honor Lee Campbell for not accepting their choice of the term “biological mother” which immediately got shortened to bio-mother and we all HATED as it made us feel like incubators.

To be really honest, I was there at the time, and my first reaction was, “what’s the difference between birth an biological?” It was also chosen by Lee, as we choose our political leaders in this country. It was the lesser of two evils. It was better than biological mother. These are facts, just like Lee Campbell is a fact. Right out of the pages of Beggers and Choosers. It’s all there to read. And, if you look in the dictionary today, the word birthmother which she coined is there, but the first definition of birthmother is biological mother.

It’s not an easy truth to admit, because it has become such a part of each our personal identity. Thirty years, or all of my adult life for me. We accepted it, al of us, as the lesser of two evils, and then it became comfortable. And now it is OURS and we don’t want to give it up, or have anyone tell us it is wrong, because that is telling us that we are wrong, or have been foolish. The reaction is automatic: Knee jerk, defense, hurt, anger, more defensive arguments and comebacks.

What IS wrong with it?

What is not wrong with it is that it is not the major cause of what is wrong in adoption today or that it is he primary cause of our exploitation – the simple proof of that is that we were being exploited long before the term was used. The vast majority of us –simply because of demographics (the post-war baby boom) and other social factors (access to he pill and abortion) - lost our kids in the 60’s when they called us natural mothers! And women are exploited all over the world regardless of that they are called. So that too is a fact.
It is a gross exaggeration to believe that it is the cause of the problem. But is it part of the problem, I believe so.

Think about Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale which many of us have read, and began to think about language and words and how they shape things. Can you not equate being a birthmother with being a Handmaid? The “birther” of a child for another? Does not the word add to that mental picture of a woman who births a child for another, like a surrogate?

Am I asking each of us to stop and change what we call ourselves? No. Certainly not in any immediate or sudden way. Am I suggesting CUB to change its name. Never!

All I am suggesting is that we begin to see one another’s point of view and neither is all right or all wrong. That we begin to dialogue and not let words get in the way. That those of us using the word, start to be more conscious of it. And those who never have used it be a bit more tolerant, as it is in all the literature and that is not going to change, not overnight and not retrospectively.

Other Differences?

Are the “new schoolers” anti-adoption? You bet your bootie, although they quite smartly – being very aware of how powerful words are – prefer to be known as Family Preservationists, just as pro-lifers dislike being identified in the negative as anti-abortionists.

How can one be against adoption, you ask? Does that mean they favor kids languishing in foster care for life? What is being proposed is really nothing new or shocking. It has been proposed by our beloved friends Annette Baran and Reuben Panor for years and years at adoption conference: legal Guardianship.

To understand this we must begin at the beginning again. We, ALLL of us – in both “camps” – agree in Family Preservation and that adoption is about finding homes for children who need them because their parents truly cannot or will not raise them, despite being offered every opportunity and support to do so…and who also have no other relatives to take them. It is NOT about finding kids for those who want them and infertility has nothing to do with it. OK, so far, so good, we’re al on the same page: finding child-centered care options that are in the best interest of the child when in this situation. Such children need a stable, loving home. But do they need a falsified birth certificate? Does that in any way improve his life or does it add complications for him down the line? (And bear in mind that even the most open adoption today still starts with a falsified birth certificate.)

So we need to provide long term, stable care but not falsify a birth record or sever the relationship with his original kin, no matter what their failings that caused them to not be able to parent him. All agree? How can this best be accomplished? Many have long thought that legal guardianship best fits this definition. It provides that addition of care without taking away the child’s birthright or heritage. Seems like a win-win for the child! And the mother and father remain their child’s mother and father, just as when people divorce and loose custody and/or another becomes their child’s step-mother or step-father.

Is it an idealistic, pie-in-the-sky, pipedream. Yes. But does that it make not worth even trying? How many other great ideas were once thought to be just as crazy? Finding parents to accept being guardians is no easy task … unless they have no other option, and even then there is no guarantee against guardians moving away and braking all ties as so-called “open” adoptive parents do. And, I maintain mixed feelings, at best, about whether a child’s name being different than his family’s is in the child’s best interest and hold that there may other solutions such as leaving the original certificate and attaching an certificate of adoption or guardianship to it, with both being accessible, or allowing a child at say age 12 to decide if he want to take on the last name of his day-to-day family.

But I am quite willing to entertain the possibilities. Because I begin with knowing one truth more than anything else: that what adoption has become today is do far a field of what it was when some of us thought we were doing a loving thing by allowing our children to be adopted. At the root is the corruption and exploitation, driven by opportunistic money-makers feeding of a lopsided supply ad demand for infants. And, our legal practices support this corruption every step of the way…beginning with the falsified birth certificate that confirms that adopting a child is “the same as” giving birth to one. It says so right there in black and white with an official seal on it! Until we get rid of that nothing we do – open adoption, open records, changing what we re called…they are all Band-Aids, fingers in a dam. Like trying to repair a house built on a crumbling foundation. The foundation of adoption is built on corruption. It once as a social institution to find homes for children. It has gotten so fare from that model all that is left of that is a fading myth…Today adoption is the last route in the booming multi-billion dollar reproductive technology business. Resolve, the infertility support group has considered it the last stop on that fast moving train for decades! And our lawmakers continue to make it easier and easier to fill their demands by turning their back on baby mills, by shortening the amount of time mothers have to decide or to revoke a consent t adoption, with ‘safe havens: and putative father registries. All to obtain more ”product” to sell! Our governments – state and federal - not only does nothing to stop it, they encourage it with subsidies and tax incentives which give more to those who adopt infants than those who find homes for the older children in foster care who really need it!

As Burton Z. Sokoloff concludes in his history of adoption entitled Antecedents of American Adoption “History shows adoption as a unique and ever-changing phenomenon.” We need to see it for what it really is today and ask ourselves is it fixable? If so, how? If not, does it need ot be abolished and started over?

These are huge issues and so it will take ALL of us working together to accomplish these monumental goals. There is no one, easy or right way…it will take dialogue and debate and consensus and then action! Lots ad lots of hard work to fight the money in this country that fights us back. We cannot afford to ]waste another minute in-fighting. We need instead to focus on the fact that we are all fighting – in the end – for the same thing. If we keep our focus on those distant goals we may even begin to join forces toward reaching them.

Mirah Riben, April 24, 2006

We are ALL Mothers (and fathers) and we can all become MUTHAS!