Day # 280: Some of what I've learned about adoption this year.

#280

I have been thinking about this all week.  Last week I introduced the fifth section of my birth story by saying that I had written it a year ago and that I had learned a lot in the past year.  I'm  not sure everyone read my intro because people responded to my concluding paragraphs without taking it into consideration.  So I've decided I should write what I have learned. First of all, I have listened to a lot of people, adoptees, original parents and adoptive parents and I have tried to wrestle with deep complex issues.  I have read a lot of the research that has been put out there and I have watched some exceptionally good videos on the topic.  It has been a complex process for me as an original mother and very deep wounds have been scratched and poked at.   I respect adoption professional who do this daily.  Really, I do, especially those of you who are original parents and adoptees.  It is difficult work.  

So what have I learned:

the most important thing I have learned is that the adoption industry needs to be disbanded and how we go about helping orphans needs to be readdressed and created to help raise trauma victims and their families.   By ignoring the trauma and just passing on the victim we are not helping anyone.    And by maintaining the industry we create a market for selling children both internationally and domestically.  There is way too much abuse;  it dominates the industry.  

One of the worst parts for me is the misuses by the states of the right to remove children from their homes and how many of those children are not taken better care of, they are just separated from their roots, and no one is supported to be better parents.  But now the state has taken over and feels free to remove children of poor mothers under the Adoption and Safe families Act.  This act  " stresses permanency planning for children and represented a policy shift away from family reunification and towards adoption."  Again this was done after research was indicating that adoptees found themselves in psychological clinics 100x more often than non-adoptees and that an adoptee teen is four times more likely to commit suicide than a non-adoptee.  There is an economic component to the decision and assumptions about poor mothers  that are racist and classist.  And those policies developed in the 60s and 70s for adoption are not at all relative to present day mothers.  But an economic reality was created and many agencies were founded to "bring unwanted babies into better homes."

Adoption abuse is a symptom of our inability as a society to address addiction, mental health, and violence towards women.  It is an important women's health issue.  With the change of policy came a shift of who was placed into adoption.  This became a band aid, and a bad one at that, instead of a cure for many of those ailments. 

So this is just a beginning.   Along the way I had to decide to only interview women involved in domestic adoptions because the complexity of the international adoption world was way too large to add to this book.  Even so, one of the women I interviewed is both an original mother and an international adoptive mom and she has much to say about both aspects of adoption. 

It was assumed that the original mother would "just move on."  This was the biggest lie told to those of us who did relinquish.  None of us just moved on and those of us who thought we were couldn't understand the anxiety of the mood swings, the desire to just lie down and die, we didn't see at first they were the symptoms of PTSD that we suffered by walking away from babies. 

Most of us work in the helping professions,  many of us are over achievers at work, looking to make up for something we can't name.  Many of us never had another child and others had children immediately after.  Our attempts to feed ourselves both literally and figuratively are fierce and until we recognize that we are suffering with deep grief we beat ourselves up, usually in silence. 

For the most part reunions are positive but difficult experiences.  Even the women who are in bad places in their reunion journeys feel that it was important to have the contact.  For all involved the recognition of the genetic attachment is an important variable for healing.  It is not the only step towards healing, and the majority of those steps need to be done within ones' own self, but there is an obvious positive impact. 

This is a short synopsis of what I've learned and what I feel is important to the field.  I would love to be a part of a think tank that helps turn adoption on its head and creates family resource centers that support original mothers' needs and keeps the needs of the baby in the forefront.  It would be so exciting to develop such a center, develop a pilot study that looks at family retention.  Maybe someday I'll win an award that allows me to do it.