by Anne Moody
Monica went home from the hospital feeling “like damaged goods.” She couldn’t imagine going back home to live with her disappointed parents. She also couldn’t quite envision what other options were available to her, so she married the father of the baby. They went on to have three more children over the next twelve years. There was no talk about the baby they had relinquished. It was an unhappy and verbally abusive marriage—and not a day went by that Monica didn’t think about her first child.
Every year on the child’s birthday, she would find herself depressed and consumed with worry about his or her (she didn’t even know the sex of the child) well-being. Monica remembers being particularly depressed on the sixteenth of those birthdays. Her husband, normally inattentive to her emotional needs, finally felt compelled to ask, in an impatient and accusatory manner, “What’s wrong with you today?”
“Well, there are two things,” Monica replied. “First, this marriage is a disaster. And second, it’s the baby’s birthday and I was just wondering how that child is. Is it happy or healthy or even alive?”
After a long silence, her husband said, “I forgot that ever even happened.”
His comment brought all the more to mind how lonely and isolated Monica had been in her grief. She separated from her husband shortly thereafter, and they subsequently divorced.
“The baby” (a daughter named Jane), meanwhile, had been on a years-long quest to find her birth mother. As a teenager, she had seen her original birth certificate, which included the city where she was born and her birth mother’s surname. At age twenty-one, Jane married a man who was in the military and moved with him to his next posting, which was, coincidentally, in the town where Jane was born. She decided to do some research at the local library where she found a high school annual with a picture of a girl with Monica’s surname who looked just like Jane. She also discovered that Monica’s graduating class was about to have its twentieth reunion and was able to find out Monica’s married name from an extremely forthcoming woman on the planning committee.
Now that she knew her birth mother’s married name and phone number, all Jane needed to do was work up the courage to call. Monica remembers a very stressed and timid sounding voice on the line saying, “I don’t know where to begin.” Monica, who assumed the girl was a friend of one of her other daughters and was upset about something, urged her to just go ahead and tell her what was on her mind. Jane then asked Monica if she had given up a baby twenty-one years earlier. When Monica replied that she had, Jane said, “I am that baby.” And the happy tears flowed.
Monica and Jane made plans to meet that afternoon. They spent hours together at a local restaurant getting acquainted and filling one another in on the events of their respective lives. Monica told Jane that she had three full siblings and Jane was excited to meet them and grateful that Monica was willing to share her family. The following day, Jane was introduced to her stunned siblings. Although they had previously known nothing about their oldest sister’s birth and subsequent adoption, they were excited and very welcoming. Everyone was delighted and amazed to see that Jane not only looked just like Monica and one of Monica’s other daughters, but also shared many personality traits, interests, and talents, and even had the same voice and distinctive bend in her little fingers.
This happened at a time when women were taught to be cooperative and passive above all else. When a young woman violated societal taboos by becoming pregnant, she was expected to accept the consequences as much-deserved punishment. Tragically, many a young woman in those days did not feel she had either the right or the power to object when others told her to relinquish her baby. She believed along with them that they knew and wanted what was best for her and for the baby. Inevitably, in the emotional aftermath, these people who were so sure they knew what was best became the focus of the birth mother’s anger. They—most often the woman’s parents or the birth father or various adoption professionals—were the people she held responsible for the loss of her child. Their insistence on telling her what to do forced her into the role of passive victim—an ultimately unsatisfying way for birth mothers to absolve themselves of responsibility for the decision to relinquish. Factor in the overriding secrecy and denial, and you have a perfect recipe for an eventual backlash.
By the late 1970s, many women like Monica were speaking out against this mistreatment, refusing to be silent and ashamed any longer. It was an exciting era of rapid change that resulted in an overhaul of adoption practices, with Helen Magee and the Options for Pregnancy program out on the leading edge.
An Options counselor’s mandate was to provide unbiased counseling and support for whatever choice the woman made—whether adoption or parenthood. (Under terms of a Reagan-administration federal grant, Option’s counselors were not allowed to talk with their clients about abortion as an option.)
Potential birth mothers were attracted to Options by the possibility of having a semi-open relationship with the adoptive family at a time when most agencies did not offer this type of adoption. Openness through the Options program generally meant that a pregnant woman would select the adoptive family herself and could meet with them prior to and/or at delivery, depending on the timing and logistics unique to each situation. After the baby was placed with the adoptive parents, openness generally took the form of having them send letters and pictures (usually through the agency) to the birth mother on an agreed-upon schedule, and sometimes included a visit or two after the adoption. Most prospective birth mothers believed that a couple’s willingness to have this type of open relationship reflected their level of understanding and respect for her and for her decision.
Working as an Options counselor was a highly rewarding way to work with birth parents because in most cases the counselor was able to act as an advocate. Counselors were able to help women reach fully informed decisions and—if they opted for adoption—help them create an adoption that would leave them at peace. Of course, relinquishing a child was still going to be a heartbreaking loss, but the counselor could at least help turn it into a conscious decision made by the birth mother herself rather than a decision she was manipulated or coerced into making. It was also growing increasingly common for women with unplanned pregnancies to decide to raise their babies on their own—an option that Options’ counseling encouraged women to fully explore as well.
These changes in adoption made my job as a counselor less difficult ethically but much more difficult logistically. It was easier ethically because I felt that birth parents were making their decision to relinquish out of selfless love for their babies and the realization that they wanted something for their children that they felt unable to provide. Rarely was the decision to relinquish made for practical reasons, such as age or income or single-parent status alone, as had seemed to often be the case in the past. Now it was more likely to be made because the birth parents didn’t feel emotionally ready for parenthood and because the life they felt they wanted for their child was different from the life they felt they could give him or her.
The counselor’s job was more difficult logistically because it now included a more complicated, open process that necessarily involved a greater number of people—all of them extremely invested in the outcome.
Helen Magee’s inspired insight into the ethics of open adoption aside, there was also a simple law of supply and demand that influenced Options’ popularity with birth parents. Because there weren’t enough babies available for adoption to meet the demand from hopeful adoptive parents, birth mothers could start setting conditions for how they were to be treated and what sort of people they would consider as parents for their children. It should come as no surprise that they tended to prefer working with adoptive parents who weren’t afraid or suspicious of them—people they could get to know during their pregnancy who would understand how much they loved their babies and who could be counted on to pass that message on to their children as they grew up.
One of the first birth mothers I encountered was an adorable seventeen-year-old. This girl, Ali, was extremely articulate, artistically stylish, and funny. Her boyfriend was the son of a prominent Seattle family and was definitely on his way to college rather than teenage fatherhood. Although this all happened a few years before the 1986 movie Pretty in Pink was made, the situation was as if the character Molly Ringwald played had gotten pregnant by the rich kid. Ali took part in a few birth-mom panels that were set up to educate counselors and adoptive parents about openness, and she did a fabulous job. She was smart and self-confident and knew what she wanted, but she was in largely uncharted territory in those days in regard to encouraging ongoing contact between birth and adoptive parents. Essentially, her goal was to help adoptive parents understand that they had nothing to fear from most birth parents, and she was one of best people I can imagine to relay that message. Ali was tremendously appealing, and she was also the essence of unthreatening. She would explain to the audience that she knew she wasn’t ready to be a parent and that she and her boyfriend wanted their baby to have the wonderful, mature parents that they weren’t yet able to be. But she added that she wished that she could be a fly on the wall in the nursery sometimes and just share in the joy that she knew her baby would bring to his parents. Ali’s words were simple and her sentiment beautiful and clear: birth parents want to share in the joy that their children create, and openness in adoption makes that possible.
Like all parents, birth parents worry about their children and want the ongoing reassurance about their well-being that openness can provide. They worry about the child’s basic health and happiness, and they also have worries that are related specifically to the adoption. The most complicated of these surrounds the fear that children will not understand why their parents chose adoption and will either be angry at having been “given up” or will believe that if they had been more worthy and lovable, their birth parents would have kept them. Birth parents want their children to be raised by people who will help them understand that their birth parents loved them and were motivated by the selfless desire to do what they felt was in their child’s best interests.
Despite the fact that birth parents had eagerly embraced the idea of open adoption, the majority of families who wanted to adopt an infant in the 1980s and into the 1990s weren’t as enthusiastic. Part of the problem was that some of the books and other sources of information about the benefits of open adoption were fairly terrifying to the average prospective adoptive parent. These books included supposedly reassuring examples of co-parenting arrangements that encouraged a high degree of interaction between the birth and adoptive families—examples that could seem anything but reassuring to uninitiated adoptive parents. Early advocates of openness, who could be overzealous in their enthusiasm, ignored the fact that many adoptive parents were already worried about not feeling 100 percent legitimate as parents. Expecting them to suddenly and eagerly embrace the idea that there would always be a second set of parents around, who would keep their fears fresh in their minds, was unrealistic. After decades in which vigilant secrecy was the accepted practice, people needed time to adjust to the idea of open adoption.
Of course, even when secrecy was the norm, confidentiality could be breached at some point in an infant adoption: names were sometimes not completely concealed on medical and legal paperwork; lawyers, nurses, and social workers made slips of the tongue despite strict prohibitions against sharing any identifying information; simple coincidences led people to conclusions about the identity of the birth or adoptive parents; or someone intentionally provided identifying information. In the era when Options for Pregnancy was most active, and ongoing contact (through the agency) was embraced, adoptive parents still usually planned not to share their full identities with birth parents. This created plenty of awkward situations and wreaked havoc with the notion that everyone was completely comfortable with everyone else. Occasionally, adoptive parents, at some point in the process, would just go ahead and reveal their last name. This might happen when, for example, everyone was sitting around in the hospital room after the baby’s birth. In those intimate, emotionally charged moments, when the last thing the adopting parents want to do is upset or insult the birth mother, something would happen that would force them to decide in a split second whether to make a point of concealing their full identity from her.
More than a few times, I witnessed the following scene unfold: the birth parents, the new baby, and the adoptive parents are in the hospital room together, awash in joy and uncertainty as they ooh and aah over the new baby, the adoptive parents trying to conceal their anxiety over whether the birth parents will change their minds and decide to raise their child themselves. The birth parents are holding and exclaiming over the baby, and a nurse comes in with a form to be filled out. She asks the adoptive parents for their full names, and with barely perceptible hesitation, the adoptive mom says it out loud, spelling it for her. The birth parents, absorbed in their baby, say nothing—but I see the name register with them, and know they are filing it away, never to be forgotten.
Openness, while a simple, reasonable idea in the abstract, was (and often still is) tremendously complicated to put into practice. A counselor working with adoptive parents is asked to summarize and verify their “attitudes about birth parents and openness” in the home study. In order to do this, the counselor first must educate them about the benefits of openness, in the hopes that the prospective adoptive family will then decide that they are, after all, comfortable with openness and would welcome an open relationship with their child’s birth parents. Obviously, adoptive parents who are working with an agency that encourages open adoptions can do the math: they understand that if they don’t at least claim to embrace openness, they will dramatically reduce their chances of being selected by a birth mother. So, many of them grit their teeth, espouse beliefs they don’t really share, and promise to do all sorts of things they hope never to have to actually do.
I have never been comfortable with a “one size fits all” approach to openness, with its assumption that everyone will act appropriately forever. I find it particularly troubling when birth and adoptive parents, with the help of attorneys and counselors, make decisions about ongoing contact on behalf of the child, expecting him or her to abide by whatever agreement they have reached. Obviously, it isn’t possible to involve an infant in these decisions, but as soon as the child is old enough to have opinions on the matter, his or her wishes become significant. It is also true that no matter what adoptive parents say to me during their home study about their embracing openness, if they encounter real difficulties in later years, they will throw those ideals out the window and do whatever they feel is right for their child—exactly what I would expect them to do. Adoptive parents, like all parents, have the right to make decisions about their children. They also have the right, as do their children, not to be forced into making legally and/or ethically binding agreements about the relationships they will have in the future.
So I never find it reasonable to ask someone how they feel about openness in adoption without first discussing a lot of qualifiers. Is it going to be openness with someone they like and trust? Is it openness with someone their child enjoys being around? Is it openness with someone they like but worry about because she is in an abusive relationship? Is it openness with someone they like but who talks openly when they meet about regretting her adoption decision? Is it openness with someone who brought her drunk and aggressive boyfriend to the last visit? Is it openness with someone whose visits make the child sad? Obviously, a parent’s level of comfort with openness changes in each of these situations, and it is completely appropriate for adoptive parents to modify their responses to questions about their comfort with openness to reflect that reality. I think the truest and most responsible answer for most prospective adoptive parents to such questions is, “It depends.”
Still, I am a strong advocate of open adoption—with a few caveat
s. Ideally, the birth and adoptive parents can establish a comfortable and mutually rewarding relationship, and they and the child will naturally benefit from ongoing contact. One of my responsibilities as an adoption counselor is to help the birth and adoptive parents develop a “post-placement contact agreement,” which specifies what type of ongoing contact they will have. Among other things, the agreement typically clarifies how many letters and pictures will be sent and how often, and in what form. It also addresses questions about visits, and it has become fairly common for birth parents to ask for (although not necessarily follow up on) a certain number of visits for a set number of years. When a child is very young, the parents make the decisions about these visits, but as the child gets older, I feel that his or her wishes become paramount. The adoptive parents might promise in the agreement to strive to create an atmosphere in which their child can develop a comfortable relationship with the birth parents (and often with other extended birth-family members), but it would be counterproductive to try to force visits when they make the child uncomfortable. I have seen this sort of discomfort develop, most often with sensitive children who find the birth parents’ intense focus on them overwhelming.
Openness has enormous benefits for everyone in the adoption triad: the birth parents, the adoptive parents, and the child. Usually, what benefits one party also benefits the others because it increases everyone’s overall comfort, feelings of security, and level of satisfaction. For example, when the birth mother is feeling respected and appreciated, the adoptive parents feel more secure and confident about her decision to place the baby with them, and the baby has a more relaxed and happy home. But there are times when the interests of the birth and adoptive families do not mesh, and there are even times when one person’s desires might seem detrimental to the others. I knew one family with a bright and sensitive seven-year-old girl who had, for reasons unknown to her parents, grown uncomfortable about visits with her birth mother. The birth and adoptive families had previously enjoyed an unusually open relationship, visiting in each other’s homes and even vacationing together. The parents sought help from a counselor who advised that they cut back on the visits for a while. The birth mother was understandably upset by this idea and by the child’s reaction to visits with her. It would have been easy for her to blame the adoptive parents and assume that they had willfully turned the child against her. A surface assessment would suggest that curtailing visits for a while would sacrifice the birth mother’s happiness to appease the child’s possibly confused or manipulated wishes. Closer examination, however, allowed the child’s intuitive discomfort with the birth mother’s seemingly emotional dependence upon her during visits to become the catalyst for getting help for everyone: the child herself, her parents, and her birth mother. If the child hadn’t been able to express her feelings or if her parents hadn’t been sensitive to them, everyone would have continued enduring an increasingly strained relationship. The birth mother wouldn’t have gotten the encouragement she needed to make some positive changes in her life, the adoptive parents would still be worried and confused about what they should be doing, the child would continue to suffer, and they all would have continued to grow apart. Fortunately, the birth and adoptive parents were perceptive enough to realize that their relationships were precious and well worth the effort it would take to preserve them.