Adoption Myths Debunked
 Adoption
Today - Have Things Changed?
Many in the adoption industry insist that "things have changed".
"Open" adoption - with promises to the natural family of
pictures, letters or even contact with their child - is being promoted
heavily. Some websites even offer college scholarships - that's right,
a possible college scholarship offered to lure a mother to legally
abandon her baby so someone else can adopt.
Moms with recent adoptions are made to feel like "saints"
for giving up their child and then used to promote adoption. Most
"open" adoptions close within the first year. Many more
close when the child figures out who her real mom is at age 6 or 7.
Frequently adopters close the adoption and sometimes moms close them
as well - after all, how many mothers could stand to watch their
own child being raised by someone else and calling someone else "mom"?
Even when an adoption stays open, getting letters, pictures or even
having some contact with their child does not make up for losing the
opportunity to raise your own child.
Why don't we hear more from mothers and adoptees themselves? Mothers
from open adoptions are reluctant to tell their truths because of
the fear that their own child may be harmed if they do. Some simply
cannot "go there" in their minds to how they have been used.
Some are unaware of how social policy and other social forces - more
than individual choice - contributed to the loss of their child.
The status of women in a society may be partially
determined by the number of mothers who have had their babies adopted-out.
What were adoptions like in the era of closed adoption?
Why did so many millions of mothers just "give" their babies
away? In many English-speaking countries, moms didn't really have
much choice!
From the Law Reform Commission NSW website in
Report 69 (1992) - Review
of the Adoption Information Act 1990
http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lrc.nsf/pages/R69CHP5
5.32 The final factor was a combination of hospital practices
relating to the delivery and birth. The Commission heard of birth
parents who were drugged immediately after giving birth and were
then transported without their consent to another hospital or
convalescent centre where they were completely separated from their
child, who had remained at the hospital. Some practices involved a
deception of the birth mother: examples included concealing the
words on the document of consent or misrepresenting the document,
and telling the birth mother, contrary to the fact, the child had
died shortly after birth. Another practice, which was employed in
at
least one major Sydney hospital, was to hold a pillow or sheet over
the mother's body during the delivery so that the child could be
removed without ever having been seen or held by the mother. Many
of
these practices were illegal. They all appear to have been directed
to ensuring that the mother did not exercise her right to withdraw
her consent, and, in the case of the practices preventing contact
between the mother and child, were no doubt designed to prevent
any `bonding' between the birth mother and the child. The evidence
to the Commission indicated that these practices may well have been
successful in preventing the mother from withdrawing consent, but
were manifestly unsuccessful in creating an emotional `clean break'
between mother and child: their main effect seems to have been to
engender in many birth mothers a deep resentment about the
experience.
Read More: Adoption
Ethics - An Oxymoron.
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