by Anne Moody
Everything about the arrangement was amazing and loving . . . except in the eyes of the law, which did not recognize the child’s biological mother as its legal mother. Her husband, who was also the biological parent, could legally be named as the father on the birth certificate, but the mother could not. So, on top of all the other expenses this couple had paid for during years of infertility treatment (not covered by insurance) and the egg retrieval and implantation procedures for this pregnancy (not covered by insurance), they now had to come up with many thousands of dollars in legal and adoption fees. They also had to deal with the significant emotional insult of the legal distancing of this mother from her own baby.
This maddening legal problem existed simply because the law was written prior to the ability to implant an embryo, and updating the law seemed to be both ethically confusing for some lawmakers and low on their list of priorities. So they held on to an interpretation of the law, which hadn’t foreseen the possibility of a woman giving birth to a child who wasn’t biologically hers.
Although it has now been more than thirty years since gestational surrogacy became a realistic option for people, reproductive law still doesn’t adequately understand or address the subject with anything close to clarity and conformity. There are no federal laws governing either gestational or traditional surrogacy arrangements in the United States, with some states viewing the practice favorably, while others ban it entirely. There are complicated, sometimes even conflicting, policies between and even within states, and sometimes interpretation of the law is left up to the discretion of individual judges. Clearly, this is not a system that inspires confidence, nor is it fair and equitable.
It’s safe to assume that there will be other advances in reproductive technology in the not-too-distant future, and there are legitimate concerns about just how far science will be allowed to go. But back in 1978, there was a tremendous uproar about the first “test tube baby,” with dire predictions about her fate and the inevitable devaluing of human life that would result from this new technology. Instead, in the intervening years, we have had several generations of much-wanted and loved “test tube” children and no apparent dire consequences.
There is still some theological posturing about the evils of assisted reproduction, but even people who identify as strongly conservative in regard to this issue find that they are able to revise their thinking when it becomes personal. Most people who need high-tech help to bring children into their lives do not forgo that opportunity, or deny it to their loved ones, even when they previously held beliefs that opposed taking this sort of action to achieve a pregnancy or carry a baby to term.
Profound shifts in the geopolitical balance of wealth and power have brought about equally profound changes in international adoption. These days, my familiarity with international adoption is more personal than professional, and I can’t help but view these changes from my perspective as the parent of a child adopted from another country. But I am not blindly or willfully self-serving in this, and I accept and empathize with a perspective that questions the ethics of international adoption. It is important to carefully monitor these adoptions and to increase awareness and concern about the vast inequalities between placing and receiving countries.
There was great hope that the changes in policy put in place after The Hague Adoption Convention of 1993 would lead to better regulation of unethical international adoption practices. Tragically, along with improved regulation, the Hague convention appears to be responsible for unconscionable delays in processing adoptions. Children, even those who already have an identified adoptive family waiting for them, have languished in crowded children’s homes for years while someone somewhere works through the mountains of paperwork required to process their adoptions. The number of international adoptions from all of the placing countries has plummeted by 75 percent in the past decade, while the cost has skyrocketed. Although it was assumed that there would be a period of adjustment for a few years after the Hague regulations went onto effect, that adjustment period is now close to a decade long, and children who were infants when they first came into care have become ten-year-olds who have virtually no chance of finding an adoptive family. And they are ten-year-olds who have suffered the effects of having been raised in institutions and will face enormous hardship when they are turned out on their own in a few more years to make room for all the new babies. It is astounding and heartbreaking that this situation wasn’t foreseen and even now isn’t being addressed with the urgency it deserves.
I understand that there are legitimate reasons to oppose international adoption. I also understand and empathize with the unhappiness of some Korean adoptees about the loss of their families and culture, and I think the attention these people have drawn from the Korean government should be viewed in a positive light. It brings questions about Korea’s treatment of single mothers and their children into the open and might even help change long-held attitudes about them within the country. Ideally, this would result in a societal change allowing single women to feel confident that they can now raise their children without the hardships and stigma they faced in the past. It may also bring about increased acceptance of adoption within Korea, leading to policies that more effectively encourage Korean families to adopt. On the other hand, it is also possible that the negative attention focused on Korean adoption will encourage individuals who feel happy about their own adoptions, and believe that international adoption is a reasonable response to the plight of real children, to call attention to their very different stories and perspective. People on both sides of this issue deserve to be heard and respected.
Another significant (and quite unexpected) change I have witnessed has been in the degree of openness between adoptive families and birth parents in domestic adoptions. Openness was brought about by the recognition that secrecy was harmful to all members of the adoption triad: birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. Ongoing contact was encouraged by adoption professionals who felt that it promoted healthy relationships between all of these people and promoted healthy attitudes toward adoption.
Once the adoption was accomplished and the professionals were out of the way, birth and adoptive parents were free to carry on with whatever sort of contact they wanted—which, for many of the people we worked with, turned out to be surprisingly infrequent. This wasn’t due to broken promises or to problems in the relationship; it seemed, for most people, to reflect the fact that these people were simply busy with their day-to-day lives. Most birth and adoptive families continued to be extremely interested in one another, and they definitely appreciated the reassurance that openness provided, but they didn’t actually end up choosing to spend a lot of time together. Even more surprising, the birth parents were almost always the ones who made the decision not to pursue more contact.
The majority of the birth parents we worked with at Adoption Connections, which encouraged open adoptions, decided not to have a significant degree of in-person contact after the first few years of the child’s life. While this was not what we thought would happen, the lack of visits did not indicate that something had gone wrong or that someone was unhappy. Instead, it appeared to just be the way people wanted it to be, with a few exceptions. I periodically get calls from one birth grandmother, for example, who wishes the relinquished grandchild, who is now a teenager, would give her a call. She had heard somewhere that when a child reaches age fourteen, she can make the decision on her own to contact the birth family, and the grandmother expected the girl to be getting in touch. But the girl is not interested in contact right now and wants to wait until she is older before exploring relationships with her birth family.
This degree of remove may not be possible to maintain, however. As in so many other aspects of life, privacy and control have often been rendered obsolete by the Internet. In this particular case, the girl’s birth mother has already found her daughter on Facebook and could choose to contact her at any point. But the bi
rth mother is cautious and is focused on her own marriage and two young children, so she is waiting, at least for now. She is also being respectful of her daughter’s feelings and wishes, and that bodes extremely well for their future relationship.
We have been fortunate, for the most part, at Adoption Connections, but not all situations in which one party unexpectedly makes contact are handled amicably. If there hasn’t been some type of ongoing communication between the birth and adoptive families prior to the child’s teenage years, the stage is set for some complicated and possibly upsetting interactions. People who adopt a child these days have to assume that their family’s online presence will make them visible not only to the child’s birth parents but also to the extended birth family. They should also realize that some member of that extended family, not necessarily a birth parent, may take it upon themselves to contact the child by early adolescence. It’s probably not realistic for adoptive parents to feel that they can continue to exert sufficient control over their child’s use of computers to avoid this sort of contact, which can be extremely upsetting if it is unexpected or unwanted.
Although I am a proponent of openness and honesty with children, beginning at a very early age, I am not a proponent of anyone contacting children without the permission of their parents. I expect that we will soon be hearing more stories about unfortunate encounters that take place in this way, and as a result, there will be a backlash against openness in adoption.
Adoptive parents will understandably view instances in which they and/or their children have been upset or harmed by this type of contact as a reason to fear the concept of openness in general. It is distressing to think that the gains that have been made in the last twenty-five years regarding attitudes toward birth parents and openness could be jeopardized because we find ourselves unable to regulate the actions of those few people who, for one reason or another, do not act with the child’s best interest in mind.
There will continue to be some adoptions, such as those where parental rights have been terminated rather than voluntarily relinquished, in which openness is not advisable or even safe, usually due to the birth parents’ criminal involvement, substance abuse, or mental-health issues. In these situations, adoptive parents likely will have to restrict contact with the birth family. There are other situations in which the problems are less extreme, but contact is emotionally difficult for the child. This might happen, for example, with birth parents who tell the child that the adoption had been done against their wishes, or who expect the child to feel bonded with and loyal to the birth family in a way that doesn’t come naturally to him or her. It is especially difficult for a child when this sort of contact/expectation from the birth family is made during adolescence, as it often is, when they are already trying to assert independence from parental control.
For the past three years, I have gotten calls every six months or so from a birth father I worked with seventeen years ago, when he was just finishing high school. He is eagerly waiting to tell his daughter that he was always opposed to the adoption but was forced to comply by the birth mother. He thinks this will make the girl feel that he really loves her and will also absolve him of the guilt he seems to harbor about the adoption. I know, of course, that birth fathers can’t be forced to agree to adoptions. I also know that, in this particular case, the paternal grandmother was the one who was opposed to the adoption and would happily have raised her son’s child if he had allowed her to do so. The birth mother could have done nothing to compel him to go along with her wishes to have the baby be adopted. I remember being surprised at the time by the maturity of this young couple’s decision not to let the baby be raised by either grandmother, one of whom had mental-health issues and the other who was in poor physical health and actually died a few years after the baby was born.
For the past seventeen years, the adoptive parents have been sending letters and pictures to both birth parents, and everyone expects that the girl herself will initiate in-person contact when she decides the time is right. I can only hope the birth father will have given up his revisionist history by then. Each time he calls, we rehash his feelings about the adoption, and he, once again, comes to the conclusion that he did what he felt was best at the time. I assure him that that is the message his daughter will want to hear. It is also the truth. But, sadly, he seems to forget everything between conversations, and when he calls again he is right back to square one, insisting that the adoption was done against his will. I don’t know what else to do for him, and I worry that when he does finally meet his daughter, his neediness will cause her to feel concern and doubt rather than the connection and understanding that he is seeking.
I expect to hear a lot more in the coming years from both birth and adoptive parents who worked with Adoption Connections. I also expect to be hearing from the babies who are now young adults—a wonderfully exciting prospect. This generation of adoptees is the first of Adoption Connections’ “children” and they have almost all grown up with some degree of openness in their relationships with their birth parents. They won’t need to undergo lengthy searches to locate their birth families, nor will they face the unknown as to how they will be received. They may not have had much contact with their birth families over the years, but they always have had access to whatever information their birth parents provided; they’ve known that they could choose to pursue in-person contact whenever they felt ready. I am eager to see how they handle their relationships with their birth families as adults, and it is going to be a pleasure and a privilege to learn what they have to teach us all about this next stage of open adoption.
This rapid change and the lessons I am constantly learning have made for a career that is in equal parts fascinating and rewarding. Most of the pleasure I take in my work comes from the individuals I meet and from their willingness to allow me to participate in such an important part of their lives. I am humbled by the birth mothers who trust me to be fair and helpful at a time when they are struggling, and life must seem especially cruel. I am amazed by the families who stay strong and loving while coping with infertility and an arduous adoption process, then share their happiness with me when their child finally arrives.
Recently, I was honored to be present at Lily’s adoption finalization and was deeply touched at being included by her and her new parents in the group they wanted at this event. There have been countless such moments of connection with individuals that I will always remember and treasure. I am privileged to be able to feel that my work is important and meaningful, sometimes very much so, and I am honored to be in a position to help with such a profound event as an adoption. Even when things go wrong, I can at least listen and try to provide some understanding and comfort.
The psychological rewards of my career have been abundant, and the large collection of photographs I have amassed over the years serves as a powerful reminder. It includes forty-year-old pictures of the children I knew in foster care, pictures of children from all around the world with their new American families, and lots of pictures of newborns with both birth and adoptive parents. I cling to the tradition of sending holiday cards because every December I get updates from families I worked with years ago and add these new pictures to my collection. Seeing the children grow and thrive is a source of great happiness. I feel that my job has allowed me to be the fly on the wall that that teenaged birth mother I knew so long ago said she wished she could be in order to share in the joy that her baby brought to his adoptive parents. I have been able to share in so much joy, and I am so grateful.
Acknowledgments
There are many people who have been instrumental in helping me throughout my career. I am grateful to my fellow child welfare workers, most specifically Connie Mendenhall, Louann Edwards, Joyce Weigel Sweeney, Mike Dorenkamp, James Johnson, Rocky Gonet, and Mel Kaufman, for sharing that life and those stories with me. I also want to thank the World Association of Children and Parents for ten years of experience in
working with their dedicated staff and the wonderful families they created through adoption. I owe a special dept of gratitude to Helen Magee and the Options for Pregnancy program for introducing me to the concept of truly ethical birth-parent counseling and open adoption. I want to thank Nita Burks and Dee Talarico for having the courage to start their own adoption agency and then to turn it over to me and Patti Beasley when the time seemed right. I also want to thank attorneys Mark Demaray, Albert Lirhus, Rita Bender, Raegan Rasnic, and Dave Anderson for decades of wise and compassionate legal expertise. I especially want to thank my fellow adoption specialists Ann Lawrence, Dru Martin Groves, and Patti Beasley for their counsel, support, and friendship. And, of course, I want to thank Patti for all the years of partnership at Adoption Connections.
There are others who were helpful to me specifically in the creation of this book. First among them is Nancy Beardsley, whose early gift of enthusiasm and appreciation came at just the right time. Karen Toler, Ann Lawrence, Nancy Johnson, Kathy Seeley, Shari Levine, Victoria Scott, Carolyn Scott, and Mary Stowell all provided encouragement at crucial points along the way. Writers Kathryn Joyce, Rebecca Wells, Claire Dederer, and David Guterson generously gave their support and friendship. David was especially valuable and appreciated as a fellow adoptive parent who shares many of my sensibilities about the complicated ethics of adoption.
I want to thank Suzanne Staszak-Silva and Elaine McGarraugh, my editors at Rowman and Littlefield, for seeing value in this book and supporting a first-time writer. And I want to thank Jamie and Erin Quick at Stoke Strategy for their considerable skills and enthusiasm.
Most importantly, I want to thank Fred, Erin, Caitlin, and Jocelyn for every single thing. There would be no book without each of them and their abundant love, encouragement, and willingness to listen to my stories.