Tell me about adoption

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
One birth mother's view of open adoption with pertinent insights:

"Because I was young, I believed that where I was in life at that point would last forever. And that place was not ideal for a baby. When time and experience taught me that circumstances change and life is always moving forward, it was too late to go back. The papers were already signed. She was someone else’s now. Forever.

We did end up staying in each other’s lives. We visited at least once a year. We talked on the phone and sent letters, photos, texts, and the like. As the years progressed, I found it more and more difficult to watch someone else raise my child, not to mention watch my child call someone else “mom.” I had no voice in the choices they made for her. I was forced to sit back and observe, while my child grew without me in a home that was entirely foreign to my own.

It has been the ultimate form of psychological and emotional torture. The worst hit me when my daughter considered suicide and ended up in a hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to contact her because I wasn't a direct relative. Or was it years earlier when she wanted to run away and considered living with me, but her parents wouldn’t grant me legal guardianship to take her to the doctors in case of illness or emergency, so it didn’t happen.

Sitting back and watching your child hurt without the ability to do anything but scream in silence is indescribable. I brought my daughter into this world and made a self-sacrificing decision to do what I thought was best for her, and because of ink laid out on two square inches of paper when she was only days old, I had no right to care for her ever again.

And then, this past year, when she entered college and I expressed my joy that I could somehow be more free to be a mother to her, she became angry and insulted that I would suggest such a thing. She clarified that I am not her mother—that I gave up that right a long time ago and I don’t ever get to have it back.

Children have the ultimate power to destroy their parents, and in my mind I have never not been her mother. But she has destroyed me with the reality of where her heart lies.

In her mind, perhaps she is better off without her birthparent. In my mind, I am not her birthmother. I am her mother. She is not my “birth daughter.” She is my daughter. And to think that your own child is better off without you is excruciating. It’s only echoing the fears and insecurities I had in my own head when I made the decision of adoption: “maybe she’s better off without me.”

But nothing in my heart believes it. And it’s painful to be a part of the silenced side of adoption: a birthparent. There is a lot of focus on adopted kids and adoptive parents. But for every one of those, there is a mother out there who gave birth to that child and might be hurting so deeply on the inside for the remainder of her life."

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/the-open...ds-of-an-open-adoption/410143/


Powerful words.

This is the perspective of one party in the adoption triad. I'm sure that the adoptive parents and the child also have sides to the events as portrayed in this writing. My guess is that if the adoptive parents were unwilling to grant temporary custody to the birthmom when daughter was a rebellious teen, it was probably because they didn't have a lot of faith in birthmom's ability to manage the situation. The birthmother comes across as a little immature, selfish and overly dramatic---she doesn't seem to respect the fact that someone else did the very hard day-in and day-out of parenting. She seems to view the adoptive parents as temporary caretakers who weren't doing the job the way she would have done it---and felt entitled to step in once her daughter turned 18 so she could reclaim what she viewed as her rightful place. The birthmom's pained reflection illustrates though, is that open adoption should not automatically be the recommended form of adoption. Ultimately, the person who balances all these issues is the adopted child. As the comments to that 2015 perspective demonstrate---adult adoptees widely differ in choosing whether and how to have relationships with biological relatives. This birthmother's anguish could very well be temporary---the daughter could very well decide at an older age to have a relationship with her. But the birthmom doesn't get to demand that her daughter call her "mother" ---the daughter gets the right as an adult to decide the people to whom she wishes to give those labels. In the adoption triad, it is the child who has the least amount of say in the process. It is only fair that they have the greatest rights to self-determination as adults.

This is unrealistic. Did you read that the child was adopted at a few days old? Explain how an infant or a small child is expected to "balance all these issues"?

Further, the perspective you tout shows zero empathy and completely minimizes the life-long pain this woman has endured. "Pained reflection" and "temporary anguish" and "selfish" and "overly dramatic" because she made/was coerced to make a monumental decision at a most vulnerable point in her life? Those types of descriptors are pretty inhumane. Especially if one has not personally been in the exact same situation making the same decision.

If someone is an adoption-industry advocate then of course they would view this piece with skepticism since it is contrary to the party line.

Here is another perspective, that of an adoptive mother in an open adoption (from 2019 as if that really makes a difference to the subject matter):

"McGrady became a mother in her 40s, when she adopted a newborn baby girl from a local couple who wanted to pursue music careers instead of becoming parents. She’d always planned on having an open adoption, but never the possibility that she would later take her daughter’s biological parents, whom she identifies only as Bill and Bridgett, into her home for a few months when they found themselves homeless—or that their relationship would sour when she eventually stopped welcoming their last-minute requests to crash with her.

McGrady entered into the open-adoption arrangement without much of a plan for what lay ahead, and the consequences bear out as McGrady’s relationship with her daughter’s birth parents metamorphoses repeatedly. At first, Bill and Bridgett are like random but tentatively friendly strangers on the opposite side of an important transaction; soon they become something like extended family members, then something like dependents, and ultimately something like bitterly estranged relatives."


https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/rock-needs-river-open-adoption/581851/

Bottom line, to get back to OP's original question: OP, do your research. Look at all sides of the adoption issues, consider the choices and life-long ramifications, discuss it with those who will be your support group (family, friends) and most importantly, consider the child. Always consider the child first.

I agree with all of this, and PP said it better than I could. I was accused earlier in this thread of being "anti-adoption" because I said that adoption is inherently traumatic. I'm not anti-adoption exactly (but I am anti- coercion-of-poor-women, and anti-stick-your-head-in-the-sand). I know some great adoptive families. I just want people to go into it knowing all the perspectives and challenges, and to go about it in a way that they are not perpetuating trauma.

What is your real agenda? Your rants are pointless. Dont tell OP not to adopt.

I'm not telling OP not to adopt. I'm telling OP to look at all sides, to be educated about it, which is what I said. WTAF. What is your agenda? You haven't made any good point, you've just been here throwing out defensive postures. Are you an insecure adoptive parent who can't hear anything negative about it?

This poster is probably part of the adoption industry. Resort to insults and defensiveness if presented with facts that may not meet your agenda and bottom line.

[Anonymous]

I am a single mom by choice. I adopted internationally 15 years ago but my much younger sister is now adopting too and she is going the private domestic route. I think this has become more common as there are fewer countries open to international. My sister says the single moms she knows are either going private if they have the money, or via foster care adoption if not. Either way, single women adopting is as popular as ever by the looks of things, and I couldn't happier for my sister.

I am helping her financially as are my parents, who are thrilled their future grandchild will soon be home. I know PLENTY of couples / singles doing IVF whose parents are helping with the expenses, so it seems birthing and adopting babies is something very much treasured by grandparents who do not want expenses to get in the way.

OP i hope you can do it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am a single mom by choice. I adopted internationally 15 years ago but my much younger sister is now adopting too and she is going the private domestic route. I think this has become more common as there are fewer countries open to international. My sister says the single moms she knows are either going private if they have the money, or via foster care adoption if not. Either way, single women adopting is as popular as ever by the looks of things, and I couldn't happier for my sister.

I am helping her financially as are my parents, who are thrilled their future grandchild will soon be home. I know PLENTY of couples / singles doing IVF whose parents are helping with the expenses, so it seems birthing and adopting babies is something very much treasured by grandparents who do not want expenses to get in the way.

OP i hope you can do it.

How much is your sister paying?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
One birth mother's view of open adoption with pertinent insights:

"Because I was young, I believed that where I was in life at that point would last forever. And that place was not ideal for a baby. When time and experience taught me that circumstances change and life is always moving forward, it was too late to go back. The papers were already signed. She was someone else’s now. Forever.

We did end up staying in each other’s lives. We visited at least once a year. We talked on the phone and sent letters, photos, texts, and the like. As the years progressed, I found it more and more difficult to watch someone else raise my child, not to mention watch my child call someone else “mom.” I had no voice in the choices they made for her. I was forced to sit back and observe, while my child grew without me in a home that was entirely foreign to my own.

It has been the ultimate form of psychological and emotional torture. The worst hit me when my daughter considered suicide and ended up in a hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to contact her because I wasn't a direct relative. Or was it years earlier when she wanted to run away and considered living with me, but her parents wouldn’t grant me legal guardianship to take her to the doctors in case of illness or emergency, so it didn’t happen.

Sitting back and watching your child hurt without the ability to do anything but scream in silence is indescribable. I brought my daughter into this world and made a self-sacrificing decision to do what I thought was best for her, and because of ink laid out on two square inches of paper when she was only days old, I had no right to care for her ever again.

And then, this past year, when she entered college and I expressed my joy that I could somehow be more free to be a mother to her, she became angry and insulted that I would suggest such a thing. She clarified that I am not her mother—that I gave up that right a long time ago and I don’t ever get to have it back.

Children have the ultimate power to destroy their parents, and in my mind I have never not been her mother. But she has destroyed me with the reality of where her heart lies.

In her mind, perhaps she is better off without her birthparent. In my mind, I am not her birthmother. I am her mother. She is not my “birth daughter.” She is my daughter. And to think that your own child is better off without you is excruciating. It’s only echoing the fears and insecurities I had in my own head when I made the decision of adoption: “maybe she’s better off without me.”

But nothing in my heart believes it. And it’s painful to be a part of the silenced side of adoption: a birthparent. There is a lot of focus on adopted kids and adoptive parents. But for every one of those, there is a mother out there who gave birth to that child and might be hurting so deeply on the inside for the remainder of her life."

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/the-open...ds-of-an-open-adoption/410143/


Powerful words.

This is the perspective of one party in the adoption triad. I'm sure that the adoptive parents and the child also have sides to the events as portrayed in this writing. My guess is that if the adoptive parents were unwilling to grant temporary custody to the birthmom when daughter was a rebellious teen, it was probably because they didn't have a lot of faith in birthmom's ability to manage the situation. The birthmother comes across as a little immature, selfish and overly dramatic---she doesn't seem to respect the fact that someone else did the very hard day-in and day-out of parenting. She seems to view the adoptive parents as temporary caretakers who weren't doing the job the way she would have done it---and felt entitled to step in once her daughter turned 18 so she could reclaim what she viewed as her rightful place. The birthmom's pained reflection illustrates though, is that open adoption should not automatically be the recommended form of adoption. Ultimately, the person who balances all these issues is the adopted child. As the comments to that 2015 perspective demonstrate---adult adoptees widely differ in choosing whether and how to have relationships with biological relatives. This birthmother's anguish could very well be temporary---the daughter could very well decide at an older age to have a relationship with her. But the birthmom doesn't get to demand that her daughter call her "mother" ---the daughter gets the right as an adult to decide the people to whom she wishes to give those labels. In the adoption triad, it is the child who has the least amount of say in the process. It is only fair that they have the greatest rights to self-determination as adults.

This is unrealistic. Did you read that the child was adopted at a few days old? Explain how an infant or a small child is expected to "balance all these issues"?

Further, the perspective you tout shows zero empathy and completely minimizes the life-long pain this woman has endured. "Pained reflection" and "temporary anguish" and "selfish" and "overly dramatic" because she made/was coerced to make a monumental decision at a most vulnerable point in her life? Those types of descriptors are pretty inhumane. Especially if one has not personally been in the exact same situation making the same decision.

If someone is an adoption-industry advocate then of course they would view this piece with skepticism since it is contrary to the party line.

Here is another perspective, that of an adoptive mother in an open adoption (from 2019 as if that really makes a difference to the subject matter):

"McGrady became a mother in her 40s, when she adopted a newborn baby girl from a local couple who wanted to pursue music careers instead of becoming parents. She’d always planned on having an open adoption, but never the possibility that she would later take her daughter’s biological parents, whom she identifies only as Bill and Bridgett, into her home for a few months when they found themselves homeless—or that their relationship would sour when she eventually stopped welcoming their last-minute requests to crash with her.

McGrady entered into the open-adoption arrangement without much of a plan for what lay ahead, and the consequences bear out as McGrady’s relationship with her daughter’s birth parents metamorphoses repeatedly. At first, Bill and Bridgett are like random but tentatively friendly strangers on the opposite side of an important transaction; soon they become something like extended family members, then something like dependents, and ultimately something like bitterly estranged relatives."


https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/rock-needs-river-open-adoption/581851/

Bottom line, to get back to OP's original question: OP, do your research. Look at all sides of the adoption issues, consider the choices and life-long ramifications, discuss it with those who will be your support group (family, friends) and most importantly, consider the child. Always consider the child first.

I agree with all of this, and PP said it better than I could. I was accused earlier in this thread of being "anti-adoption" because I said that adoption is inherently traumatic. I'm not anti-adoption exactly (but I am anti- coercion-of-poor-women, and anti-stick-your-head-in-the-sand). I know some great adoptive families. I just want people to go into it knowing all the perspectives and challenges, and to go about it in a way that they are not perpetuating trauma.

What is your real agenda? Your rants are pointless. Dont tell OP not to adopt.

I'm not telling OP not to adopt. I'm telling OP to look at all sides, to be educated about it, which is what I said. WTAF. What is your agenda? You haven't made any good point, you've just been here throwing out defensive postures. Are you an insecure adoptive parent who can't hear anything negative about it?

This poster is probably part of the adoption industry. Resort to insults and defensiveness if presented with facts that may not meet your agenda and bottom line.

What insults or defensiveness. This poster has derailed the thread in an inappropriate way.

You don’t know every situation. Your addenda is harmful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One birth mother's view of open adoption with pertinent insights:

"Because I was young, I believed that where I was in life at that point would last forever. And that place was not ideal for a baby. When time and experience taught me that circumstances change and life is always moving forward, it was too late to go back. The papers were already signed. She was someone else’s now. Forever.

We did end up staying in each other’s lives. We visited at least once a year. We talked on the phone and sent letters, photos, texts, and the like. As the years progressed, I found it more and more difficult to watch someone else raise my child, not to mention watch my child call someone else “mom.” I had no voice in the choices they made for her. I was forced to sit back and observe, while my child grew without me in a home that was entirely foreign to my own.

It has been the ultimate form of psychological and emotional torture. The worst hit me when my daughter considered suicide and ended up in a hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to contact her because I wasn't a direct relative. Or was it years earlier when she wanted to run away and considered living with me, but her parents wouldn’t grant me legal guardianship to take her to the doctors in case of illness or emergency, so it didn’t happen.

Sitting back and watching your child hurt without the ability to do anything but scream in silence is indescribable. I brought my daughter into this world and made a self-sacrificing decision to do what I thought was best for her, and because of ink laid out on two square inches of paper when she was only days old, I had no right to care for her ever again.

And then, this past year, when she entered college and I expressed my joy that I could somehow be more free to be a mother to her, she became angry and insulted that I would suggest such a thing. She clarified that I am not her mother—that I gave up that right a long time ago and I don’t ever get to have it back.

Children have the ultimate power to destroy their parents, and in my mind I have never not been her mother. But she has destroyed me with the reality of where her heart lies.

In her mind, perhaps she is better off without her birthparent. In my mind, I am not her birthmother. I am her mother. She is not my “birth daughter.” She is my daughter. And to think that your own child is better off without you is excruciating. It’s only echoing the fears and insecurities I had in my own head when I made the decision of adoption: “maybe she’s better off without me.”

But nothing in my heart believes it. And it’s painful to be a part of the silenced side of adoption: a birthparent. There is a lot of focus on adopted kids and adoptive parents. But for every one of those, there is a mother out there who gave birth to that child and might be hurting so deeply on the inside for the remainder of her life."

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/the-open-wounds-of-an-open-adoption/410143/

Powerful words.

This isn't an open adoption and the issue is this "mother" demanded coming back into her biological child's life and demanded to be mom again. Child didn't agree. She was inappropriate. This mom made a choice. The adoptive parents and child are not to blame.

The issue isn't being better off without her biological mom. The issue is this mom wanting to be a mom vs. a different kind of relationship and not respecting the child is bonded to their parents through adoption.

I am so sick of the American pathology of excusing any abuse as long as the person made one “choice” that contributed to the situation. We don’t punish serial killers this way.

I also bristle at the idea that a young woman with no education, means or support to raise a child had much agency in the matter. The same people screaming that it was her CHOICE to give up her child, would be the ones condemning her if she chose to keep her baby. Some “choice.” Paperwork signed mere days after giving birth so a huge likelihood of postpartum depression and trauma.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think this is pretty bizarre. I would think that we've had enough years of experience with blended families to know that kids in a family will have special people in common, and then maybe some special people who are just theirs. I don't think everything has to be "evensies" among kids in a family. Kids are different and come with differences.

If I were an adoptive parent, I would consider it my role primarily to be my adopted child's parent, and yes, of course I would expect all of my family to treat the child as ours. It would also be my role to facilitate healthy relationships between the child and any biological relatives who wanted to be involved. I think it would be a mistake, and very poor boundaries, if I and my biological children were to have our own relationships with the child's biological relatives (other than polite, warm and friendly relationship). I did not adopt the entire family; I adopted the child. I would never in a billion years think that the adopted child's grandparents should act like grandparents to my bio children.

It's interesting that this argument is focused on grandparents exclusively. Are we also adding on aunties and uncles and cousins for our biological child, when we adopt a child? And what about the adopted child's biological parents, if they are also in the picture here? Do they get some honorary relationship with my children? Hell no! You are not marrying the adopted child's family. You only adopted the child, and the child comes with some pre-existing family relationships that you must honor, however those do not become your family relationships.

I think the relationships governing situations like these are marriage and adoption. Marriage flows up and down and family tree - Grandparents take on a new daughter-in-law, for example. A new member of the family! And now they might have new grandchildren, the DIL's children from a previous marriage, and the grandparents (should) treat these kids as their own grandchildren because of the relationship of marriage between their son and the DIL. Then the son and DIL adopt a child. This is their grandchild because of the relationships of marriage between their son and DIL and the adoption. The marriages and adoptions make the relationships.

There is no marriage or adoption between your biological children and your adopted child's relatives. That's the difference. It's OK for your adopted child to have special relationships that your biological children do not.

I guess a scenario might be that you actually want for more loved ones in your biological children's lives. OK. But I actually think you'd be doing your adopted child a disservice to make his bio grandparents belong equally to your other children. The adoptive child should get to navigate that relationship without a lot of other people in the way. That's confusing.

No, it's not bizzare. It's a double standard. If you think this is OK for the adopted child then you must think the reverse is OK too: A biological child can have a special relationship with THEIR bio family members (aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins) that do not include the adopted child. Because they have a "special" biological connection like the adoptee's birth family?

I guarantee that any extended bio family which did this to an adopted child would be immediately pilloried, rightly so. But you are saying it's OK for the adopted child's family to exclude the bio children, giving them no more than polite yet detached recognition?

And sorry but your use of marriage in this case is not relevant. A DIL with children from a previous marriage can easily become an ex-DIL especially with 2nd marriage failure rates. In that case, the exH would only have legal custody/visitation with the adopted child not the woman's children from a prior marriage.

More importantly you are digressing from the adoption discussion which is an entirely different matter. This brings up just one complex, complicated issue about the current trend for open adoptions (with bio family in direct contact) which is NOT studied nor dealt with. Including its impacts on other children and the best way that BOTH extended families can navigate it all.

You are ignoring reality that bio children DO have special relationships with bio family that adoptees do not. They just DO. It’s not necessarily from a lack of love, it’s not necessarily from an overt difference in treatment. But it IS different.

I have 4 1st cousins from one family, the first 2 adopted, the 2nd two surprise bio kids after years of infertility. The WHOLE extended family of many dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins doted on the oldest 2 cousins because we were overjoyed that their parents had become parents after more than 15 years of hoping and trying. We adore them and they’re now adults. The younger two came along and we love them as much. But they DO have special connections their siblings don’t. My youngest girl cousin looks JUST JUST like our great-aunt. Like literally people will stop dead in their tracks and marvel at it. She’s heard it all her life. It’s part of her identity. Similarly, her closest brother in age could be my own brother and about 8 of our other cousins all of the same generation across many families. The genes are strong, and there’s a very cool connection when we’re all together. No less love. Just difference.

If the two older cousins were to find their first parents, it wouldn’t make them any less our family. They’d just have more people to juggle and to love. It wouldn’t be taking anything away from their younger sibs for them to have special relationships with loved ones that their siblings don’t have.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think this is pretty bizarre. I would think that we've had enough years of experience with blended families to know that kids in a family will have special people in common, and then maybe some special people who are just theirs. I don't think everything has to be "evensies" among kids in a family. Kids are different and come with differences.

If I were an adoptive parent, I would consider it my role primarily to be my adopted child's parent, and yes, of course I would expect all of my family to treat the child as ours. It would also be my role to facilitate healthy relationships between the child and any biological relatives who wanted to be involved. I think it would be a mistake, and very poor boundaries, if I and my biological children were to have our own relationships with the child's biological relatives (other than polite, warm and friendly relationship). I did not adopt the entire family; I adopted the child. I would never in a billion years think that the adopted child's grandparents should act like grandparents to my bio children.

It's interesting that this argument is focused on grandparents exclusively. Are we also adding on aunties and uncles and cousins for our biological child, when we adopt a child? And what about the adopted child's biological parents, if they are also in the picture here? Do they get some honorary relationship with my children? Hell no! You are not marrying the adopted child's family. You only adopted the child, and the child comes with some pre-existing family relationships that you must honor, however those do not become your family relationships.

I think the relationships governing situations like these are marriage and adoption. Marriage flows up and down and family tree - Grandparents take on a new daughter-in-law, for example. A new member of the family! And now they might have new grandchildren, the DIL's children from a previous marriage, and the grandparents (should) treat these kids as their own grandchildren because of the relationship of marriage between their son and the DIL. Then the son and DIL adopt a child. This is their grandchild because of the relationships of marriage between their son and DIL and the adoption. The marriages and adoptions make the relationships.

There is no marriage or adoption between your biological children and your adopted child's relatives. That's the difference. It's OK for your adopted child to have special relationships that your biological children do not.

I guess a scenario might be that you actually want for more loved ones in your biological children's lives. OK. But I actually think you'd be doing your adopted child a disservice to make his bio grandparents belong equally to your other children. The adoptive child should get to navigate that relationship without a lot of other people in the way. That's confusing.

No, it's not bizzare. It's a double standard. If you think this is OK for the adopted child then you must think the reverse is OK too: A biological child can have a special relationship with THEIR bio family members (aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins) that do not include the adopted child. Because they have a "special" biological connection like the adoptee's birth family?

I guarantee that any extended bio family which did this to an adopted child would be immediately pilloried, rightly so. But you are saying it's OK for the adopted child's family to exclude the bio children, giving them no more than polite yet detached recognition?

And sorry but your use of marriage in this case is not relevant. A DIL with children from a previous marriage can easily become an ex-DIL especially with 2nd marriage failure rates. In that case, the exH would only have legal custody/visitation with the adopted child not the woman's children from a prior marriage.

More importantly you are digressing from the adoption discussion which is an entirely different matter. This brings up just one complex, complicated issue about the current trend for open adoptions (with bio family in direct contact) which is NOT studied nor dealt with. Including its impacts on other children and the best way that BOTH extended families can navigate it all.

You are ignoring reality that bio children DO have special relationships with bio family that adoptees do not. They just DO. It’s not necessarily from a lack of love, it’s not necessarily from an overt difference in treatment. But it IS different.

I have 4 1st cousins from one family, the first 2 adopted, the 2nd two surprise bio kids after years of infertility. The WHOLE extended family of many dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins doted on the oldest 2 cousins because we were overjoyed that their parents had become parents after more than 15 years of hoping and trying. We adore them and they’re now adults. The younger two came along and we love them as much. But they DO have special connections their siblings don’t. My youngest girl cousin looks JUST JUST like our great-aunt. Like literally people will stop dead in their tracks and marvel at it. She’s heard it all her life. It’s part of her identity. Similarly, her closest brother in age could be my own brother and about 8 of our other cousins all of the same generation across many families. The genes are strong, and there’s a very cool connection when we’re all together. No less love. Just difference.

If the two older cousins were to find their first parents, it wouldn’t make them any less our family. They’d just have more people to juggle and to love. It wouldn’t be taking anything away from their younger sibs for them to have special relationships with loved ones that their siblings don’t have.

Agree. And the adopted child needs to have their adoption acknowledged. They know they are adopted, they know that is different from their bio siblings. Getting to have their own relationship with their bio relatives (if it's an open adoption like that) should be entirely in the adopted child's hands. I do not see who it benefits to pretend the bio fam and adoptive fam "married" each other and now they are all instant relatives. Makes no sense at all to me. Definitely not for the adopted child's benefit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think this is pretty bizarre. I would think that we've had enough years of experience with blended families to know that kids in a family will have special people in common, and then maybe some special people who are just theirs. I don't think everything has to be "evensies" among kids in a family. Kids are different and come with differences.

If I were an adoptive parent, I would consider it my role primarily to be my adopted child's parent, and yes, of course I would expect all of my family to treat the child as ours. It would also be my role to facilitate healthy relationships between the child and any biological relatives who wanted to be involved. I think it would be a mistake, and very poor boundaries, if I and my biological children were to have our own relationships with the child's biological relatives (other than polite, warm and friendly relationship). I did not adopt the entire family; I adopted the child. I would never in a billion years think that the adopted child's grandparents should act like grandparents to my bio children.

It's interesting that this argument is focused on grandparents exclusively. Are we also adding on aunties and uncles and cousins for our biological child, when we adopt a child? And what about the adopted child's biological parents, if they are also in the picture here? Do they get some honorary relationship with my children? Hell no! You are not marrying the adopted child's family. You only adopted the child, and the child comes with some pre-existing family relationships that you must honor, however those do not become your family relationships.

I think the relationships governing situations like these are marriage and adoption. Marriage flows up and down and family tree - Grandparents take on a new daughter-in-law, for example. A new member of the family! And now they might have new grandchildren, the DIL's children from a previous marriage, and the grandparents (should) treat these kids as their own grandchildren because of the relationship of marriage between their son and the DIL. Then the son and DIL adopt a child. This is their grandchild because of the relationships of marriage between their son and DIL and the adoption. The marriages and adoptions make the relationships.

There is no marriage or adoption between your biological children and your adopted child's relatives. That's the difference. It's OK for your adopted child to have special relationships that your biological children do not.

I guess a scenario might be that you actually want for more loved ones in your biological children's lives. OK. But I actually think you'd be doing your adopted child a disservice to make his bio grandparents belong equally to your other children. The adoptive child should get to navigate that relationship without a lot of other people in the way. That's confusing.

No, it's not bizzare. It's a double standard. If you think this is OK for the adopted child then you must think the reverse is OK too: A biological child can have a special relationship with THEIR bio family members (aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins) that do not include the adopted child. Because they have a "special" biological connection like the adoptee's birth family?

I guarantee that any extended bio family which did this to an adopted child would be immediately pilloried, rightly so. But you are saying it's OK for the adopted child's family to exclude the bio children, giving them no more than polite yet detached recognition?

And sorry but your use of marriage in this case is not relevant. A DIL with children from a previous marriage can easily become an ex-DIL especially with 2nd marriage failure rates. In that case, the exH would only have legal custody/visitation with the adopted child not the woman's children from a prior marriage.

More importantly you are digressing from the adoption discussion which is an entirely different matter. This brings up just one complex, complicated issue about the current trend for open adoptions (with bio family in direct contact) which is NOT studied nor dealt with. Including its impacts on other children and the best way that BOTH extended families can navigate it all.

Yes, I am absolutely saying that. The only change I would make to what I wrote is this: You only adopted the child, and the child comes with some pre-existing family relationships that you must honor, however those do not become YOUR family relationships -- unless time and affection makes it so.

I do not believe that members of the adoptive family should be putting themselves in the same relationship to the biological family as the adopted child. The adopted child is the primary consideration, and should get the lead in the relationships with her biological relatives. A very strong lead.

This is not true. There is NO legal requirement for the adoptive family to establish nor continue any contact with the bio parents/family. Period.
This is nonsensical. Are you saying that Aunt Sarah (a member of the adoptive family) SHOULD NOT consider herself to be an aunt (same relationship) to Adoptee Larlo's siblings?

You have not yet gained comprehension that this open adoption landscape is rife with challenges and problems that NO ONE has studied nor has answers for?

One thing I do agree with you is that children in a family should be of primary consideration - both adopted AND bio. It's about time for experts to start examining these open adoptions issues for ALL family members or else 20 years from now we will be looking back saying, "How in the world could anyone think this was going to be psychologically healthy for children?"

All we have now is ad hoc opinion which amounts to nil.

There is no legal requirement for adopters to maintain their child’s kinship relationship with her first family and extended kin; that is legally true. But it is not morally so. As other have stated above, our current legal adoptive system of completely severing a child’s ties to bio family and replacing them with a fictional identity —- even to falsify government records and create a new “birth” certificate with a different name and different family names, is VERY new. But in the less than 100 years that this has been the norm, it has caused vast psychological damage to generations of families torn asunder by adoption. It has also in some cases created beautiful different families, but very often does so with enormous loss and trauma on the part of the adoptee and the relinquishing family.

I don’t understand what you are trying to say about Aunt Sarah and Larlo. If I’m Sarah and my sister Mary adopted Larlo and then had two bio children, I would love all three abundantly and would have a full aunt relationship with all 3. Larlo might also have half-siblings from his bio family. I would not be THEIR aunt. They would be the half-siblings of my nephew. And I would not expect the parents of his half-siblings to consider his full siblings (in his adoptive family) to be their nieces and nephews, no.

It’s not really all that complicated. I have a HUGE Catholic family and sprinkles among our many branches are divorces, steps, half-sibs through remarriage, and half-sibs through adoption reunion. We manage it all just fine. Sometimes people are at the holiday table who are “family adjacent”, like the in-laws of my cousin…just as my half-sister in my mom’s side is not actually related to my cousins on my dad’s side, but they know her now, are FB friends with her, and even some vacationed with her. There are various degrees of closeness and relation. It doesn’t have to be one size fits all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One birth mother's view of open adoption with pertinent insights:

"Because I was young, I believed that where I was in life at that point would last forever. And that place was not ideal for a baby. When time and experience taught me that circumstances change and life is always moving forward, it was too late to go back. The papers were already signed. She was someone else’s now. Forever.

We did end up staying in each other’s lives. We visited at least once a year. We talked on the phone and sent letters, photos, texts, and the like. As the years progressed, I found it more and more difficult to watch someone else raise my child, not to mention watch my child call someone else “mom.” I had no voice in the choices they made for her. I was forced to sit back and observe, while my child grew without me in a home that was entirely foreign to my own.

It has been the ultimate form of psychological and emotional torture. The worst hit me when my daughter considered suicide and ended up in a hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to contact her because I wasn't a direct relative. Or was it years earlier when she wanted to run away and considered living with me, but her parents wouldn’t grant me legal guardianship to take her to the doctors in case of illness or emergency, so it didn’t happen.

Sitting back and watching your child hurt without the ability to do anything but scream in silence is indescribable. I brought my daughter into this world and made a self-sacrificing decision to do what I thought was best for her, and because of ink laid out on two square inches of paper when she was only days old, I had no right to care for her ever again.

And then, this past year, when she entered college and I expressed my joy that I could somehow be more free to be a mother to her, she became angry and insulted that I would suggest such a thing. She clarified that I am not her mother—that I gave up that right a long time ago and I don’t ever get to have it back.

Children have the ultimate power to destroy their parents, and in my mind I have never not been her mother. But she has destroyed me with the reality of where her heart lies.

In her mind, perhaps she is better off without her birthparent. In my mind, I am not her birthmother. I am her mother. She is not my “birth daughter.” She is my daughter. And to think that your own child is better off without you is excruciating. It’s only echoing the fears and insecurities I had in my own head when I made the decision of adoption: “maybe she’s better off without me.”

But nothing in my heart believes it. And it’s painful to be a part of the silenced side of adoption: a birthparent. There is a lot of focus on adopted kids and adoptive parents. But for every one of those, there is a mother out there who gave birth to that child and might be hurting so deeply on the inside for the remainder of her life."

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/the-open-wounds-of-an-open-adoption/410143/

Powerful words.

This isn't an open adoption and the issue is this "mother" demanded coming back into her biological child's life and demanded to be mom again. Child didn't agree. She was inappropriate. This mom made a choice. The adoptive parents and child are not to blame.

The issue isn't being better off without her biological mom. The issue is this mom wanting to be a mom vs. a different kind of relationship and not respecting the child is bonded to their parents through adoption.

What you are not recognizing here is the sick, dehumanizing, cruel system of adoption now. This woman IS her daughter’s mother. She just IS. No papers make that untrue. The fact that she signed legal papers relinquishing her infant does not, in reality, erase her existence as the child’s mother. I could have died the day after my son was born, but I would still forever be his mother, even if another woman raised him and adopted him later.

It is very likely that this birth mother surrendered her baby because she was told (brainwashed) into believing that was best for her baby. That was unselfish. That was the guest and best thing she could do as a mother. She believed that because the entire adoption industry and our current very pro-adoption society told her so. They tell birth mothers that this is the best way to be a mother. The child in that quote seems to have, at many times, sought out her first mother for love and safety, but her ADOPTIVE parents wouldn’t allow it. She needed her first mother then, in crisis, and her parents denied her that. It’s no surprise she later lashed out against the first mother who she then felt abandoned her twice. That’s traumatic. But it’s not the birth mother’s fault. To want to love your daughter is right and natural.

No one warns mothers that relinquishment through adoption can be a lifetime of INCREASING suffering and pain. My mom was told she would forget and move on. She never forgot. Every single day of her life without her first two babies was suffering. She literally didn’t have a day of true peace in 50 years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One birth mother's view of open adoption with pertinent insights:

"Because I was young, I believed that where I was in life at that point would last forever. And that place was not ideal for a baby. When time and experience taught me that circumstances change and life is always moving forward, it was too late to go back. The papers were already signed. She was someone else’s now. Forever.

We did end up staying in each other’s lives. We visited at least once a year. We talked on the phone and sent letters, photos, texts, and the like. As the years progressed, I found it more and more difficult to watch someone else raise my child, not to mention watch my child call someone else “mom.” I had no voice in the choices they made for her. I was forced to sit back and observe, while my child grew without me in a home that was entirely foreign to my own.

It has been the ultimate form of psychological and emotional torture. The worst hit me when my daughter considered suicide and ended up in a hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to contact her because I wasn't a direct relative. Or was it years earlier when she wanted to run away and considered living with me, but her parents wouldn’t grant me legal guardianship to take her to the doctors in case of illness or emergency, so it didn’t happen.

Sitting back and watching your child hurt without the ability to do anything but scream in silence is indescribable. I brought my daughter into this world and made a self-sacrificing decision to do what I thought was best for her, and because of ink laid out on two square inches of paper when she was only days old, I had no right to care for her ever again.

And then, this past year, when she entered college and I expressed my joy that I could somehow be more free to be a mother to her, she became angry and insulted that I would suggest such a thing. She clarified that I am not her mother—that I gave up that right a long time ago and I don’t ever get to have it back.

Children have the ultimate power to destroy their parents, and in my mind I have never not been her mother. But she has destroyed me with the reality of where her heart lies.

In her mind, perhaps she is better off without her birthparent. In my mind, I am not her birthmother. I am her mother. She is not my “birth daughter.” She is my daughter. And to think that your own child is better off without you is excruciating. It’s only echoing the fears and insecurities I had in my own head when I made the decision of adoption: “maybe she’s better off without me.”

But nothing in my heart believes it. And it’s painful to be a part of the silenced side of adoption: a birthparent. There is a lot of focus on adopted kids and adoptive parents. But for every one of those, there is a mother out there who gave birth to that child and might be hurting so deeply on the inside for the remainder of her life."

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/the-open-wounds-of-an-open-adoption/410143/

Powerful words.

This isn't an open adoption and the issue is this "mother" demanded coming back into her biological child's life and demanded to be mom again. Child didn't agree. She was inappropriate. This mom made a choice. The adoptive parents and child are not to blame.

The issue isn't being better off without her biological mom. The issue is this mom wanting to be a mom vs. a different kind of relationship and not respecting the child is bonded to their parents through adoption.

What you are not recognizing here is the sick, dehumanizing, cruel system of adoption now. This woman IS her daughter’s mother. She just IS. No papers make that untrue. The fact that she signed legal papers relinquishing her infant does not, in reality, erase her existence as the child’s mother. I could have died the day after my son was born, but I would still forever be his mother, even if another woman raised him and adopted him later.

It is very likely that this birth mother surrendered her baby because she was told (brainwashed) into believing that was best for her baby. That was unselfish. That was the guest and best thing she could do as a mother. She believed that because the entire adoption industry and our current very pro-adoption society told her so. They tell birth mothers that this is the best way to be a mother. The child in that quote seems to have, at many times, sought out her first mother for love and safety, but her ADOPTIVE parents wouldn’t allow it. She needed her first mother then, in crisis, and her parents denied her that. It’s no surprise she later lashed out against the first mother who she then felt abandoned her twice. That’s traumatic. But it’s not the birth mother’s fault. To want to love your daughter is right and natural.

No one warns mothers that relinquishment through adoption can be a lifetime of INCREASING suffering and pain. My mom was told she would forget and move on. She never forgot. Every single day of her life without her first two babies was suffering. She literally didn’t have a day of true peace in 50 years.

Drop it already. You are projecting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One birth mother's view of open adoption with pertinent insights:

"Because I was young, I believed that where I was in life at that point would last forever. And that place was not ideal for a baby. When time and experience taught me that circumstances change and life is always moving forward, it was too late to go back. The papers were already signed. She was someone else’s now. Forever.

We did end up staying in each other’s lives. We visited at least once a year. We talked on the phone and sent letters, photos, texts, and the like. As the years progressed, I found it more and more difficult to watch someone else raise my child, not to mention watch my child call someone else “mom.” I had no voice in the choices they made for her. I was forced to sit back and observe, while my child grew without me in a home that was entirely foreign to my own.

It has been the ultimate form of psychological and emotional torture. The worst hit me when my daughter considered suicide and ended up in a hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to contact her because I wasn't a direct relative. Or was it years earlier when she wanted to run away and considered living with me, but her parents wouldn’t grant me legal guardianship to take her to the doctors in case of illness or emergency, so it didn’t happen.

Sitting back and watching your child hurt without the ability to do anything but scream in silence is indescribable. I brought my daughter into this world and made a self-sacrificing decision to do what I thought was best for her, and because of ink laid out on two square inches of paper when she was only days old, I had no right to care for her ever again.

And then, this past year, when she entered college and I expressed my joy that I could somehow be more free to be a mother to her, she became angry and insulted that I would suggest such a thing. She clarified that I am not her mother—that I gave up that right a long time ago and I don’t ever get to have it back.

Children have the ultimate power to destroy their parents, and in my mind I have never not been her mother. But she has destroyed me with the reality of where her heart lies.

In her mind, perhaps she is better off without her birthparent. In my mind, I am not her birthmother. I am her mother. She is not my “birth daughter.” She is my daughter. And to think that your own child is better off without you is excruciating. It’s only echoing the fears and insecurities I had in my own head when I made the decision of adoption: “maybe she’s better off without me.”

But nothing in my heart believes it. And it’s painful to be a part of the silenced side of adoption: a birthparent. There is a lot of focus on adopted kids and adoptive parents. But for every one of those, there is a mother out there who gave birth to that child and might be hurting so deeply on the inside for the remainder of her life."

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/the-open-wounds-of-an-open-adoption/410143/

Powerful words.

This isn't an open adoption and the issue is this "mother" demanded coming back into her biological child's life and demanded to be mom again. Child didn't agree. She was inappropriate. This mom made a choice. The adoptive parents and child are not to blame.

The issue isn't being better off without her biological mom. The issue is this mom wanting to be a mom vs. a different kind of relationship and not respecting the child is bonded to their parents through adoption.

What you are not recognizing here is the sick, dehumanizing, cruel system of adoption now. This woman IS her daughter’s mother. She just IS. No papers make that untrue. The fact that she signed legal papers relinquishing her infant does not, in reality, erase her existence as the child’s mother. I could have died the day after my son was born, but I would still forever be his mother, even if another woman raised him and adopted him later.

It is very likely that this birth mother surrendered her baby because she was told (brainwashed) into believing that was best for her baby. That was unselfish. That was the guest and best thing she could do as a mother. She believed that because the entire adoption industry and our current very pro-adoption society told her so. They tell birth mothers that this is the best way to be a mother. The child in that quote seems to have, at many times, sought out her first mother for love and safety, but her ADOPTIVE parents wouldn’t allow it. She needed her first mother then, in crisis, and her parents denied her that. It’s no surprise she later lashed out against the first mother who she then felt abandoned her twice. That’s traumatic. But it’s not the birth mother’s fault. To want to love your daughter is right and natural.

No one warns mothers that relinquishment through adoption can be a lifetime of INCREASING suffering and pain. My mom was told she would forget and move on. She never forgot. Every single day of her life without her first two babies was suffering. She literally didn’t have a day of true peace in 50 years.

Drop it already. You are projecting.

There is an insane person here, and has been here for several pages, gaslighting and being really stupid and boring. Let's ignore her. PP, i appreciated your post that ends with you mother's experience. Heartbreaking.

[Anonymous]

I just want to point out that there are SEVERAL of us here who are advocating for soap to consider the perspectives of ALL people in the adoption circle (it’s truly more than a triad) with the CHILD at the center, and with adoptive family and first family perspectives in the periphery.

Way too often, prospective adoptees just listen to the experience of adoptive parents. Did it “work” for you? Hoe long did it take? How expensive was it? What problems came up? Are you glad you didn’t?

They don’t consider:
*Adoptee voices
*Substantial research demonstrating significantly higher rates of mental illness and suicide among adopted persons
* criticism of the adoption industry in general
* significant evidence demonstrating that the vast majority of relinquishing mothers are poor woman, often minors, without equitable access to legal reorientation, unbiased counseling, or any alternative to the financial support and health care offered in the adoption contract, with no benefit beyond the initial need for premarital housing and care.
* voices of relinquishing parents
* perspectives of other family members who have a stake in kinship relationships with family members separated from them through adoption.

Jeff can look and see that there is definitely more than one voice here trying to offer a splash of reality. OP wants to know about adoption. I don’t think adoption is always wrong, though it always involves trauma. I do think it is most often coercive and unethical, especially with infant adoption. I have loved ones and dear friends who are wonderful adoptive parents and went into it understanding that adoption is trauma as well as joy, and that adoptive parents who want to do it right need to have a full proctors of the lives and hearts that are connected to the child they choose to love.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One birth mother's view of open adoption with pertinent insights:

"Because I was young, I believed that where I was in life at that point would last forever. And that place was not ideal for a baby. When time and experience taught me that circumstances change and life is always moving forward, it was too late to go back. The papers were already signed. She was someone else’s now. Forever.

We did end up staying in each other’s lives. We visited at least once a year. We talked on the phone and sent letters, photos, texts, and the like. As the years progressed, I found it more and more difficult to watch someone else raise my child, not to mention watch my child call someone else “mom.” I had no voice in the choices they made for her. I was forced to sit back and observe, while my child grew without me in a home that was entirely foreign to my own.

It has been the ultimate form of psychological and emotional torture. The worst hit me when my daughter considered suicide and ended up in a hospital, and I wasn’t allowed to contact her because I wasn't a direct relative. Or was it years earlier when she wanted to run away and considered living with me, but her parents wouldn’t grant me legal guardianship to take her to the doctors in case of illness or emergency, so it didn’t happen.

Sitting back and watching your child hurt without the ability to do anything but scream in silence is indescribable. I brought my daughter into this world and made a self-sacrificing decision to do what I thought was best for her, and because of ink laid out on two square inches of paper when she was only days old, I had no right to care for her ever again.

And then, this past year, when she entered college and I expressed my joy that I could somehow be more free to be a mother to her, she became angry and insulted that I would suggest such a thing. She clarified that I am not her mother—that I gave up that right a long time ago and I don’t ever get to have it back.

Children have the ultimate power to destroy their parents, and in my mind I have never not been her mother. But she has destroyed me with the reality of where her heart lies.

In her mind, perhaps she is better off without her birthparent. In my mind, I am not her birthmother. I am her mother. She is not my “birth daughter.” She is my daughter. And to think that your own child is better off without you is excruciating. It’s only echoing the fears and insecurities I had in my own head when I made the decision of adoption: “maybe she’s better off without me.”

But nothing in my heart believes it. And it’s painful to be a part of the silenced side of adoption: a birthparent. There is a lot of focus on adopted kids and adoptive parents. But for every one of those, there is a mother out there who gave birth to that child and might be hurting so deeply on the inside for the remainder of her life."

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/10/the-open-wounds-of-an-open-adoption/410143/

Powerful words.

This isn't an open adoption and the issue is this "mother" demanded coming back into her biological child's life and demanded to be mom again. Child didn't agree. She was inappropriate. This mom made a choice. The adoptive parents and child are not to blame.

The issue isn't being better off without her biological mom. The issue is this mom wanting to be a mom vs. a different kind of relationship and not respecting the child is bonded to their parents through adoption.

What you are not recognizing here is the sick, dehumanizing, cruel system of adoption now. This woman IS her daughter’s mother. She just IS. No papers make that untrue. The fact that she signed legal papers relinquishing her infant does not, in reality, erase her existence as the child’s mother. I could have died the day after my son was born, but I would still forever be his mother, even if another woman raised him and adopted him later.

It is very likely that this birth mother surrendered her baby because she was told (brainwashed) into believing that was best for her baby. That was unselfish. That was the guest and best thing she could do as a mother. She believed that because the entire adoption industry and our current very pro-adoption society told her so. They tell birth mothers that this is the best way to be a mother. The child in that quote seems to have, at many times, sought out her first mother for love and safety, but her ADOPTIVE parents wouldn’t allow it. She needed her first mother then, in crisis, and her parents denied her that. It’s no surprise she later lashed out against the first mother who she then felt abandoned her twice. That’s traumatic. But it’s not the birth mother’s fault. To want to love your daughter is right and natural.

No one warns mothers that relinquishment through adoption can be a lifetime of INCREASING suffering and pain. My mom was told she would forget and move on. She never forgot. Every single day of her life without her first two babies was suffering. She literally didn’t have a day of true peace in 50 years.

Drop it already. You are projecting.

I am “projecting”? You are unkind. I am simply someone whose life has been greatly impacted by adoption, in both good and bad ways. You seem to only want to present a rosy picture of all that adoptive parents can enjoy about adoption. That’s not the full picture. Not even close.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just want to point out that there are SEVERAL of us here who are advocating for soap to consider the perspectives of ALL people in the adoption circle (it’s truly more than a triad) with the CHILD at the center, and with adoptive family and first family perspectives in the periphery.

Way too often, prospective adoptees just listen to the experience of adoptive parents. Did it “work” for you? Hoe long did it take? How expensive was it? What problems came up? Are you glad you didn’t?

They don’t consider:
*Adoptee voices
*Substantial research demonstrating significantly higher rates of mental illness and suicide among adopted persons
* criticism of the adoption industry in general
* significant evidence demonstrating that the vast majority of relinquishing mothers are poor woman, often minors, without equitable access to legal reorientation, unbiased counseling, or any alternative to the financial support and health care offered in the adoption contract, with no benefit beyond the initial need for premarital housing and care.
* voices of relinquishing parents
* perspectives of other family members who have a stake in kinship relationships with family members separated from them through adoption.

Jeff can look and see that there is definitely more than one voice here trying to offer a splash of reality. OP wants to know about adoption. I don’t think adoption is always wrong, though it always involves trauma. I do think it is most often coercive and unethical, especially with infant adoption. I have loved ones and dear friends who are wonderful adoptive parents and went into it understanding that adoption is trauma as well as joy, and that adoptive parents who want to do it right need to have a full proctors of the lives and hearts that are connected to the child they choose to love.

BLESS YOU. You are a strong voice. I am another here trying to say the same.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just want to point out that there are SEVERAL of us here who are advocating for soap to consider the perspectives of ALL people in the adoption circle (it’s truly more than a triad) with the CHILD at the center, and with adoptive family and first family perspectives in the periphery.

Way too often, prospective adoptees just listen to the experience of adoptive parents. Did it “work” for you? Hoe long did it take? How expensive was it? What problems came up? Are you glad you didn’t?

They don’t consider:
*Adoptee voices
*Substantial research demonstrating significantly higher rates of mental illness and suicide among adopted persons
* criticism of the adoption industry in general
* significant evidence demonstrating that the vast majority of relinquishing mothers are poor woman, often minors, without equitable access to legal reorientation, unbiased counseling, or any alternative to the financial support and health care offered in the adoption contract, with no benefit beyond the initial need for premarital housing and care.
* voices of relinquishing parents
* perspectives of other family members who have a stake in kinship relationships with family members separated from them through adoption.

Jeff can look and see that there is definitely more than one voice here trying to offer a splash of reality. OP wants to know about adoption. I don’t think adoption is always wrong, though it always involves trauma. I do think it is most often coercive and unethical, especially with infant adoption. I have loved ones and dear friends who are wonderful adoptive parents and went into it understanding that adoption is trauma as well as joy, and that adoptive parents who want to do it right need to have a full proctors of the lives and hearts that are connected to the child they choose to love.

BLESS YOU. You are a strong voice. I am another here trying to say the same.

I am another.

What I have noticed is that there have been many posters on this thread who ONLY have peripheral knowledge of adoption ("I have a cousin" or "I have a friend") and are not on the front line.
While everyone can have an opinion on an issue there is a vast difference between those who live it day to day and others who are merely observers.