by Anne Moody
Society’s image of a typical unwed mother is someone who is young, relatively uneducated, without sufficient financial resources, and without the support of the birth father and her parents. A charitable image casts her as an innocent victim. An uncharitable perspective sees her as hapless and irresponsible, perhaps even immoral. It would seem logical that factors such as youth and low income would correlate highly with a woman’s decision to choose adoption. In fact, people make the decision to relinquish a child for uniquely personal reasons. Their stated reason might be something as straightforward as, “I’m too young” or “I can’t afford to raise a child,” but rarely is the situation that uncomplicated. After all, most young girls who become pregnant end up raising their babies within their extended families, and most pregnant women who can’t afford a child end up relying on their families or some form of government assistance.
What makes prospective birth mothers look toward adoption rather than one of these other, far more common, courses of action? Our experiences at Adoption Connections taught us that birth mothers make the decision to relinquish out of genuine and unselfish love for their child and the conviction that adoption will provide the life for him or her that they do not feel able to provide.
The women we see at Adoption Connections have never fit a stereotype. They have ranged in age from thirteen to forty-three, with the most typical client being in her middle-to-late twenties. They almost always have at least a high school education or have attained the appropriate grade for their age. About one-third of the women have some college or have completed college, including some with graduate degrees. Their financial situations range from being homeless and destitute to having secure, well-paying jobs and an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Some women are completely on their own and have no outside source of emotional support. Others have the love, concern, and full participation of the birth father (who may even be their husband), and they have the support and understanding of family and friends.
The single quality that these birth mothers share is their belief, or perhaps recognition of the fact, that they are not able, at this time in their lives, to provide their child with the life they want him or her to have. Each birth mother’s image of what that life will be like is uniquely personal, and she is the only one who can or should decide what she feels is best for her child and for herself.
We have worked with many hundreds of women who were considering adoption for their babies. Obviously, each one of those babies also had a father, but only a small percentage of these men chose to take an active role in planning for their baby’s future. This is a sad comment on society’s still closely held assumption that an unplanned pregnancy is to be handled by the woman. Most men in these situations hope to be compassionate and responsible, but too many of them seem to cope with the stress by distancing themselves, both from the birth mother and from their own emotions. Of course, there were wonderful exceptions, but it is sadly true that men who chose to be involved in the pregnancy and adoption were the exception.
Sometimes the couples we worked with made mutual and thoughtful decisions, but other times they had different ideas about the right course of action. It was particularly difficult for women who had gotten pregnant after a short (and now ended) relationship to come to terms with the idea that the father’s legal rights to the child were equal to her own. If the woman wished to plan an adoption and the father did not, he could prevent it from happening, whether or not he intended to have a role in parenting the child.
There was also a small but distressing group of men who were some combination of immature, selfish, abusive, irresponsible, unloving, criminally involved, and so on, who, sadly, became fathers, too. It was a depressing reality of working with men like this that the less capable they were of actually being parents, the more likely they were to refuse to allow their children to be adopted. These men were not usually motivated by the desire to raise their child or to do what they thought was best for the child. They often had a specific desire to antagonize and control the birth mother (usually as punishment for leaving them), and they were not concerned about any of the legal or financial responsibilities of parenthood. These were men who didn’t hold regular jobs, so they weren’t worried about garnisheed wages. Many of them already didn’t pay child support for their other children, so they weren’t worried about being required to provide financially for this new baby. They often had abusive relationships with other women and children and were extremely likely to establish the same sorts of abusive relationships again. These guys were sad, they were dangerous, and they could compel a woman to raise the child. The alternative to parenting the child herself, which was to have the baby placed with the father, was unacceptably risky to virtually all women.
I remember how stunned I was the first time I discovered that a man who had been accused, but not yet convicted, of raping an underage girl (who became pregnant) had legal rights in regard to adoption. The girl wanted to plan an adoption, and she and her family wanted nothing to do with the man. He was not going to be given joint custody against her wishes if she chose to parent the child, but he was able to prevent her from relinquishing her parental rights by refusing to relinquish his own. She and her parents had no reasonable choice other than to raise the child.
Fortunately, situations this extreme were rare, but it was common for us to get calls that were equally distressing. These were from women who were in abusive relationships and wanted to plan an adoption in order to extricate the child from a dangerous environment. We would have to explain that, while we were extremely sympathetic, we could not help them plan an adoption without the father’s consent. If he were to find out that his child had been placed for adoption without his knowledge, he would have grounds for overturning the adoption, even years later. A great deal of time was devoted to commiserating with these women and trying to explain the reasoning behind laws that seemed counter to common sense and detrimental to the baby.
Sometimes everything went smoothly from start to finish: a birth mother chose a family and went on to place her baby with them. More often, we would get calls from a number of potential birth mothers before a meaningful connection was made with a particular family. Patti and I also spent a great deal of time talking with girls and women who wanted information and counseling about adoption, then either decided against it or decided to work with an adoptive family we did not represent.
The workload at Adoption Connections was such that Patti and I would each take on no more than five or six families at a time (in addition to the families we saw in private practice). There was plenty of downtime when nothing urgent was happening, but even with such small numbers, there also seemed to be plenty of overlapping crises or dilemmas, such as babies being born in distant locations on the same day, with each situation requiring our presence. Most of our families were able to adopt within a year, although the range ran from immediately to just over two years. When we examined our statistics after the first two years of operation, we discovered to our surprise and amusement that the average wait for a baby was exactly nine months.
Patti and I spent many sleepless nights worrying about our clients and trying to control various aspects of a process that was largely out of our control. We agonized over couples trying to adopt but meeting with heartbreak. When one young woman, who seemed certain that she was going to place her baby, changed her mind after the birth—and after the hopeful adoptive family had joyously traveled to the Midwest at her request—I second-guessed myself for months. I asked the couple if they felt I should have advised them to wait until the baby was legally free for adoption before they traveled; incredibly, they did not. The wife explained that if they hadn’t gone when the birth mother asked them to and she had then changed her mind about the adoption, they would have always wondered if things would have been different if they had been there. As it was, they knew that they had done everything possible to reassure her that they would be good parents. Unhappily
, it took another year for them to successfully adopt, but, extremely happily, that child was everything they had been waiting and hoping for.
By far the most stressful aspect of running an adoption agency is dealing with the sheer weight of emotion from both birth and adoptive families. Almost all of our adoptive parents came to us after they had exhausted a great deal of physical, emotional, and financial resources in their effort to have a child by birth. They had been through varying degrees of heartbreak about this loss and were still grieving when they started the adoption process. Most people presented themselves as ready to move on, but their nerves were still raw, and it was a lot to ask of them to endure the frustrating and sometimes heartbreaking uncertainties of the adoption process. And of course, it was incredibly painful for the birth parents, who were facing the decision either to relinquish or to parent in less than optimal circumstances. They were often contending with other problems that made their lives difficult as well and that further contributed to their feeling that they would not be the best parents for their child. So a great deal of what Patti and I did for our clients was simply to be available to them when they wanted to talk about their frustrations or unhappiness. Sometimes that unhappiness was directed at us and at the constraints of adoption practice or adoption law; more often it was just a necessary outpouring of emotion.
Adoption is a difficult process, and almost every person we work with has gone through extreme highs and lows along the way to becoming parents—or to making the decision not to become the parent of this particular child. The payoff for adoptive parents is evident, but the process also can offer birth parents rich satisfactions and even happiness. These come from the knowledge that they have taken control of their situations and have made fully informed decisions about what is best for themselves and their babies. More concretely, this resolution comes from feeling that they have chosen just the right family for their babies—and from the ongoing reassurance that an open adoption allows.
22
Birth-Parent Counseling Etiquette
Although I supervised the pregnancy counselors in the Options for Pregnancy program at WACAP, I hadn’t really had a lot of direct interaction with birth parents during the years I held that job. My responsibilities were a step removed from actual counseling. I did, however, know people at most of the agencies in western Washington who were active in adoptions, and I was familiar with their approaches to counseling. Many of the agencies that handled infant adoption were church affiliated, and one had a particularly energetic, charismatic counselor. This woman, June, had dramatically increased the number of adoptions at her agency, and when she eventually left, its placement numbers dropped off dramatically.
The 1980s was an era when birth mothers who had relinquished their babies in the past were finally speaking out—sometimes shyly, sometimes angrily. They were often heard from at adoption conferences, which provided an excellent opportunity for them to tell their stories to the people who most needed to hear them. The women who spoke were of all ages; some of them told cautionary tales about the cruelties birth mothers had endured and the ongoing suffering inherent in closed adoptions, after which they weren’t allowed to have information about their babies or even to seek reassurance about their child’s continued well-being. Fortunately, there were also birth mothers from a newer generation at these conferences, and they served as evidence that changes had been made in the way adoptions were being handled. They talked about how the decision to relinquish their baby had been painful but completely their own, and they described various versions of openness in the relationships they had established with the adoptive family. Listening to these birth mothers was usually the highlight of any conference, and I—along with most of my fellow counselors—understood the importance of their message to us.
One especially memorable conference included a birth-parent panel made up of three young women who had been June’s clients. The roomful of professionals and adoptive parents listened in rapt and respectful silence as these women told their stories. All of them expressed extreme gratitude to the counselor and to God for steering them in the right direction. All of them declared that babies needed two parents and that it would have been selfish for them to have kept their babies. All of them received hearty approval from the many people in the room who benefit in one way or another when birth parents make the decision to relinquish.
But I grew increasingly uncomfortable as one sad young woman told us about how the counselor had helped her to “stay strong” after her baby was born and as she was considering changing her mind about the planned adoption. She explained that even her own mother hadn’t been “able to be there for me” and had tried to talk to her about keeping her newborn baby. The young woman told us about how her mother had been “weak” and that she had fortunately been able to rely on June, her counselor, who was there to help reaffirm her belief that God wanted her baby to be adopted.
There were few dry eyes in the house at that point except for my own, which were narrowing in anger.
It got worse when a couple in the audience, who appeared to be in their mid-twenties, stood up at the end of the panel discussion and introduced themselves as former clients of June. As they fervently praised her for giving them the strength to relinquish their baby a number of years earlier, they both were in tears and clearly actively grieving the loss of their child. I suspected that this couple, still together and still in such pain, had received the same sort of affirmation from June that adoption had been the only acceptable choice.
I came away from that conference feeling profoundly troubled, and dubious about the motives behind June’s “counseling.”
Later, I shared my concerns with the Options counselor I supervised, who worked in the same county as June. She told me she had had a similarly unsettling experience at a support-group meeting sponsored by June’s agency. Birth parents had started off lavishly praising June, but the meeting had veered off script when several of them started to express regret about their decisions. It deteriorated to the point where people were saying that they felt they had been led to believe that they would be hurting their child if they decided against adoption. The Options counselor said that the depth of pain and anger in these birth parents was so extreme that she actually felt concerned about June and how she would respond. Never fear, though; the charismatic counselor simply chose not to respond. She just sat there, seemingly untroubled—because, clearly, she believed that she was doing God’s work and that He heartily approved.
It is, of course, normal for birth parents to grieve after they have relinquished a child. Even birth parents who are rock solid in their adoption decisions and completely at peace in their belief that they have done what is best for their baby still suffer from the loss. As with any type of grief, birth parents vary in how they express themselves and receive comfort, and there is a wide range of normal with respect to how long and how intensely people grieve.
But birth parents who feel pressured into their decision to relinquish have an extremely difficult time recovering. Having been denied the opportunity to make such an important decision for themselves, they have tremendous difficulty accepting responsibility for it and moving on with their lives. They have been robbed of a vital source of comfort—that of knowing that they made the decision to relinquish of their own free will and in the best interests of their child.
When other people intervene in a directive way, they strip the birth mother of the power to make her own decision. Rather than being able to gain emotional maturity from this experience, a birth mother pressured to relinquish is often left with ongoing feelings of confusion, anger, regret, sadness, and disbelief. Even more insidiously, birth mothers sometimes cope with these feelings by clinging to denial, insisting that they are fine and don’t need help from anyone—an approach that can lead to long-term depression, psychosomatic ailments, substance abuse, and other coping mechanisms that continue to affect their quality o
f life.
A birth mother once showed me the literature she had been given by June’s agency when she sought information about their services, replete with heavy-handed messages such as, “For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son.” The implication in that statement—that a birth parent could be God-like in his or her sacrifice—was obviously much closer to coercion than counseling. Several years later, I happened to meet the woman who had been hired to replace June when she left her agency. This woman hadn’t lasted long in her job, and when she told me her story, it was obvious why. “One of my first assignments,” she said, “was to drive out to some little town to meet with a pregnant teenager.” June had already met with the girl several times, and an adoption was under way. “I’ll never forget walking into the restaurant where we were supposed to meet. I saw her sitting in a booth with her boyfriend; they were holding hands. I sat down with them, and the more we talked, the less sense it made to me that they would consider adoption. They were a close couple, both of their families were willing—anxious, even—to provide support for them, and they were extremely distraught at the idea of relinquishing their baby. They seemed to be not only a loving young couple but a really capable one as well. I thought they’d probably do well with a year or two of assistance from their families, as quite a few young couples in this situation do. I felt like saying, ‘You know what? Don’t do this!’”