by Dan Savage
Not the reaction I'd anticipated.
Bob didn't have anything against lesbians, the commingling of gay and lesbian genetic material, or progressive or subversive notions. As a lawyer, Bob had something against legal nightmares, which he was sure this plan of mine would become. When he got it out of me that I wouldn't be the legal parent, just a donor-dad, that the lesbians would have custody but that I would get to be “involved,” Bob promised me we would all wind up in court.
“What happens if they want to move out of state or out of the country?” Bob asked. “You're all friends now, but what if you have a falling out and they decide not to let you see ‘their’ child anymore? What if they want to send your beloved offspring to a vegan anarcho-syndicalist commune in Eastern Nevada? What if they break up? How are you going to work out custody and visitation among three adults? And if the lesbians die in a car accident or a plane crash, who gets the child? You? Their families? Some other lesbians?”
I confessed that I hadn't given any of these issues much thought.
“Well, give them some thought. If you do this, be prepared to take your lesbian friends to court, and be prepared to spend a buttload of money to win the right to see your kid.”
“I don't think we'll wind up in court,” I lamely offered.
“No one ever thinks they're going to wind up in court. But when people do stupid things, that's just where they find themselves. Don't do this,” he implored me. “If you want kids, adopt.”
I promised Bob I'd think about adoption, and decided I wouldn't tell him about my recent talks with our next-door neighbor.
Bob and his wife, Kate, have three kids. When Bob and Kate had difficulty getting pregnant, their first impulse was to head to a fertility clinic. After one unsuccessful, intrusive, stressful, hightech procedure (involving Dixie cups), they figured they weren't able to make bio-kids, accepted their infertility, and didn't waste more time by extracting eggs or implanting fetuses. First they adopted Lucy, and then, just after bringing home their second child, Gus, Bob and Kate discovered they weren't infertile after all. Kate very suddenly got very pregnant with Isobel.
Months later when I finally lost patience with the lesbians and things with our neighbor fell apart, I asked Bob for more information about adoption. Where had he and Kate adopted Lucy and Gus? What agency did they go through? Was the agency any good? How much did it cost? Did he think the agency would work with a gay couple?
“I know they've placed kids with lesbians,” Bob told me, “but I don't know if they've managed to place any with gay men.” The only gay couple he knew who had attempted to adopt through the agency “had a disruption,” agency-speak for having an adoption fall apart at the last minute. This was a newish agency, founded in Oregon, and Bob had helped open a branch in Seattle. It was organized around a radical new way of doing adoptions, and Bob felt confident they'd want to work with us.
“Open adoption may not be as subversive as gay men and lesbians making babies,” Bob said, “but it's still pretty subversive.”
Open adoption? I'd never heard the word adoption qualified before. Adoptions were adoptions, I thought, and all adoptions were alike. You could adopt at home, go overseas, go through an agency, go through a lawyer, or go through the state. A woman who couldn't take care of her kid handed it over or had it taken away; then an agency or the state handed her kid over to a straight, married, middle-class couple. The records were sealed, the woman was encouraged to forget she ever had a kid, and when or whether to tell the kid it was adopted was left to the straight, married, middle-class couple to decide. That's adoption. Openness only came into play if an adult adopted child wanted her records unsealed, or if she went looking for her biological parents.
“Open adoption means the adoptive parents know their kids' birth mothers,” Bob explained. “The birth mom picks the adoptive parents from a pool of wannabe adoptive parents. We know Lucy and Gus's birth mothers. They met us before deciding to place the kids with us. They can visit us and the kids; we have an ongoing relationship.”
Open adoption sounded a lot more complicated than what I had wanted to do with lesbians. It sounded more complicated than even my deal with the next-door neighbor. The birth mom chooses? She comes to visit? What if she's a drunk or a drug addict? Won't the kid be confused? What if she wants her kid back?
Bob listened to my questions, told me I had it all wrong, and invited me and Terry over to dinner. He and Kate would explain things for us.
A week later, over pizza, Bob and Kate told us about open adoption.
In an open adoption, the birth mother selects the family her kid will be placed with out a pool of prescreened couples. Then the agency introduces the birth mom and the couple. If they hit it off, the agency helps them come to an agreement about the amount of contact they're going to have after the adoption takes place. Everything is negotiable. The agency works with the birth mom and the adoptive couple on an adoption agreement that sets out a minimum number of visits per year. If a birth mom wants more contact than the adoptive couple does, she's not the right birth mom for that couple. Before the adoption goes forward, the agency makes sure the birth mother and the adoptive couple are on the same page. Doing an open adoption ensures the birth mom an ongoing relationship with her child. She doesn't have to pretend she never had a baby or that her baby died, as birth moms who do closed adoptions are still encouraged to do. Ironically, while the subject of visits is a touchy one initially for the adoptive couple, Bob and Kate told us that it's usually the adopting couples who want more contact once the adoption is final.
Fears about birth moms using drugs or showing up trying to reclaim their kids are rooted in false assumptions about the kind of women who give up their children for adoption.
“They say that women who have the least to offer as parents are likelier to keep their kids,” said Kate, who is also a lawyer. “Women who see that they have a future and who have something they want to accomplish in life, they're the ones who tend to place their kids for adoption. Women with little to look forward to tend to keep their kids. What else have they got, who else to love them?”
“But what if the birth mom sees the baby and decides she wants him back?” asked Terry.
“Apart from the fact that birth moms have no legal rights to have their kids ‘back’ once the adoption is final, women who place their kids in open adoptions are much less likely to want them back,” Bob said, picking up another slice of pizza. “Women who don't know where their children went, who adopted them, or how they're doing are the women who wind up regretting doing an adoption.”
“Think about it,” Kate said. “You're a woman, you're pregnant for nine months, you feel this little person growing inside you, you go through the incredibly emotional experience of giving birth and seeing your baby emerge from your body. If you chose closed adoption, your baby disappears. All your life you're going to wonder, ‘Is my baby okay? Is my baby happy? Who are his parents?’ The only way you can ever answer these questions is by trying to get him back. In open adoption, the birth mom can come and see that her baby is okay, and go on with her life. She is empowered by her decisions and soothed by the information she has about where her baby is. She knows, she doesn't have to worry. This isn't to say that there is no grieving or even remorse. But the birth mom doesn't have to deal with her emotions in a vacuum.”
I asked if open adoption confused their kids, Lucy and Gus.
“No, it only confuses adults,” said Bob.
And a two-minute conversation with five-year-old Lucy and three-year-old Gus made it clear that they weren't confused. They knew they were adopted. They knew who their birth-parents were. They knew who their real parents were. And they knew the difference.
At the seminar in Portland, we were learning more about open adoption, but thanks to our dinner with Bob and Kate, we had a leg up on some of the other couples in the room. Still, we had some things to learn.
A lawyer who specialized in adoption spoke on
the first afternoon, and we learned that open adoption was legal in only three states: Oregon, Washington, and New Mexico. For an open-adoption agreement to be legally binding, either the birth mom or the adoptive couple had to live in one of these three states. Birth moms and adoptive couples in other states had drawn up open-adoption agreements, but these were not legally binding.
“The birth moms in these cases have no legal recourse, as their adoption agreement is just that, an agreement, and not a legally binding contract,” the lawyer said. “There have been cases of adoptive couples entering into open-adoption agreements, signing the papers, and then disappearing with the baby. These adoptive parents will, I hope, spend an awful long time in hell.”
The mood in the room was not much more relaxed than it was at the start of the day. The only couple sitting at the table that didn't seem so fragile that a loud noise could shatter them were Jack and Carol, who were sitting to our left. They were quick to laugh at the small jokes the lawyer made during his presentation and, sensing that we, too, had a sense of humor about this, they smiled at us conspiratorially.
The lawyer went on. In most states, before an adoption could be finalized, the agency had to make a good-faith effort to find the birth dad if he wasn't in the picture. Once he was found, the agency had to convince him to sign away his rights, which in most cases wasn't a problem. But some birth dads threw a wrench in the works.
“Birth fathers who deny consent aren't required to raise the baby themselves, and the child can wind up in legal limbo, not wanted by his biological parents and yet not adoptable, either. It's a real problem in most states—but not in Oregon.”
Oregon's adoption laws were radically different from those in most other states. If a birth dad wasn't around, if he wasn't providing emotional and financial support during the pregnancy, under Oregon law he had already signed away his rights. The law in Oregon recognized that guys have orgasms and women have babies. Ignorance of pregnancy was no excuse: if a birth dad wasn't aware that the woman he'd screwed was pregnant, that was an indication he didn't have much of a relationship with her. Again, he had an orgasm, she was having a baby. Being present at the moment of conception didn't entitle a guy to much in Oregon.
“The best-case scenario,” the lawyer told us, “is that the birth mom who picks you lives in Oregon—or, if she lives in Washington or another state, that the birth father is supportive of her decision to adopt.”
Unfairly, if a woman decides to keep her baby, that guy who only had an orgasm could wind up making child-support payments for eighteen or twenty years. If the law in Oregon were consistent, guys should have had the option of accepting or rejecting paternity. That would have required a change in the law, which would have opened politicians to charges of being soft on deadbeat dads, so the law wasn't likely to change. My impartial advice to guys having one-night stands in Oregon would be to have them with other men.
As a consequence of eliminating the birth-dad problem, Oregon was widely considered the best American state in which to adopt. Those high-profile adoption disruptions of the last few years (which resulted in kids being taken from the only homes they'd ever known) were the result of birth fathers surfacing after the kid had been adopted. The twin specters of Baby Richard and Baby Jessica haunt couples adopting children, which is why when you flip through adoption magazines you'll see agencies advertising themselves with this line: “We specialize in Russian, Chinese, and Oregon adoptions.”
After the lawyer's presentation, some birth mothers were going to visit the seminar. Before they arrived, one of the agency's “adoption specialists” talked with us about the kind of women who put their children up for open adoption.
“Adoptive parents tend to confuse women who have their children taken away from them by the state with women who make the choice to place their child for adoption,” said Jill.
We weren't supposed to say “put their kids up for adoption,” we learned. This expression was frowned upon in adoption circles, as it comes from the practice of loading orphaned urban children onto “orphan trains” and sending them out of cities and into rural areas to be “adopted.” When an orphan train arrived at a station, the children would be placed up on a platform for farmers to look over. Children who looked like they'd make good farmhands were “adopted,” and the rest got back on the train and headed for the next station.
“Culturally, there's a great deal of prejudice against women who place their children for adoption,” Jill continued. “Anyone who's doing an adoption should rid themselves of these prejudices, but it's especially important for people doing open adoptions to root them out, since you will be in contact with your birth mothers.”
The couples in the room asked the same questions of Jill that Terry and I asked of Bob and Kate months ago. What if the birth mom is a drug addict? What if she wants her kid back? Won't the children be confused?
Jill explained that women who place their children for adoption usually have a lot going for them:
“They've imagined futures for themselves, and a child doesn't fit into their plans at the moment. Playing a role in selecting a family for their child is powerful. The woman doesn't feel that she abandoned her child, or acted irresponsibly. Open adoption is about honesty, and about what's best for birth moms and their children.
“Open adoption means ongoing contact between birth mom and child, and between birth and adoptive families. Openness means no lies, and an adopted child who doesn't grow up wondering who his ‘real’ mom or dad is, or why they gave him up. If the child has a question about why his birthparents couldn't raise him, he can ask his birth mom.”
The agency believed open adoption was the best option for adoptive couples, too, though not everyone in Lloyd Center's conference room seemed convinced.
Adoptive couples were the only people who lost something, and what they lost was a measure of control and autonomy. “ Traditional” closed adoption only came into being about fifty years ago, when adoption laws were rewritten all over the country. What had been open (and in many cases informal) arrangements were regulated and “closed,” with records being sealed to protect adopted children from the stigma of illegitimacy and single pregnant women from the stigma of premarital sex. Even now, when an adoption was finalized, the court permanently sealed the child's original birth certificate and issued a new one, with the adoptive parents' names listed on it as “father and mother.” This was how it was done everywhere, even in progressive Oregon.
(“I want to be listed as the father,” Terry whispered. “You're the one with birthin' hips.” If we'd been alone somewhere and Terry had taken my hips in vain, I'd have punched him in the shoulder. I wasn't sure how hitting would play in a room crawling with social workers who'd be assessing our fitness to parent, so I had to kick Terry under the table instead.)
Closed adoption also provided adoptive parents with something not every adoptive couple wanted though some did. Closed adoption made it possible for adoptive parents to pretend the child they'd adopted was their own biological child, and for many years adoptions were arranged to match the looks of adoptive parents and their adopted children to facilitate this pretense. Closed adoption made allowances for lies.
Needless to say, this was not something Terry and I could have taken advantage of even in a closed adoption. If we got our families and friends to play along, we could fool the kid for a few years, or longer if we home-schooled, but even the kid would catch on sooner or later. Two men can't make a baby.
But I could take comfort in knowing there was one fundamentalist Christian out there who thought Terry and I should be able to raise our children believing they popped out of our butts. I was interviewing a woman in Seattle who was trying to get books about gays and lesbians out of the schools. She felt homosexuality was something that only parents should discuss with their children, and that it was up to parents whether a child ever even learned that such things as homosexuals even existed. I pointed out that she was arguing for the right of
parents to keep their children ignorant; she responded brightly, “That's right, I am. That's my right as a parent. My children shouldn't know things I don't want them to know.”
I told her I was about to become a parent. Should I have the right to raise my child in complete and total ignorance of “such things” as heterosexuals?
“Oh, yes. You see, this isn't a gay or straight issue, or a Christian issue,” she said, reaching for common ground. “This is about parents' rights. If you have children, you should raise them how you see fit. If you don't want your children to know about heterosexuality, you shouldn't have to teach them about it.”
To make the telling of lies possible, the birth mother naturally had to disappear. Terry and I couldn't hide heterosexuality from our child if this woman was coming around asking to see her baby. Some women who placed their children for adoption through the agency did want to disappear, and were only doing an open adoption because they wanted a hand in selecting the family that adopted their baby.
“They care about their kids, and want them to be happy and well taken care of, which is why letting them play a real role in shaping their kid's future is just so right. Most of the women who come to this agency tell the counselors that if they couldn't do it this way—pick the family, have ongoing contact—they wouldn't place their kids for adoption. Some would raise them themselves, but most indicate they would have an abortion before doing a closed adoption.”
When abortion was declared a woman's constitutional right in 1973, the number of children available for adoption plummeted. Abortion is a tough choice for some women, but so is carrying a baby to term, giving birth, and then being told to pretend your baby died or didn't happen. Perhaps there are women who can walk away from a baby, and not wonder all their lives where that baby is or how it's doing. At least if she has an abortion, a woman doesn't have to wonder. She knows. Why pretend your baby “didn't happen” when you have the option of actually making your baby “not happen”?