Tell me about adoption

[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.

You have zero experience directly with adoption and are pretending to be some kind of advocate. OP is asking about how to adopt, not all the issues surrounding it. Start your own thread.

[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-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.

Of course not everything is rosy but that is not what OP is asking. Start your own thread. You knowing someone who is adopted and ranting isn't helpful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

The person ranting has clearly said they are not a birth parent, adoptive parent or child who was adopted.

[Anonymous]

A PP or two mentioned single mothers by choice, and i am also SMC. I went the foster care route and I adopted my first child when she was 14 months old. She is now 3.5 and the birth-mom has requested that her new baby boy also be adopted by me (she does not know me personally but she has my profile. ). So, I will have my 2nd baby home in a matter of weeks! I kept all my info at the agency up to date the past couple of years in case of a teeny weeny chance something like this may happen. My dad is on the edge of his seat to meet his new grandson!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A PP or two mentioned single mothers by choice, and i am also SMC. I went the foster care route and I adopted my first child when she was 14 months old. She is now 3.5 and the birth-mom has requested that her new baby boy also be adopted by me (she does not know me personally but she has my profile. ). So, I will have my 2nd baby home in a matter of weeks! I kept all my info at the agency up to date the past couple of years in case of a teeny weeny chance something like this may happen. My dad is on the edge of his seat to meet his new grandson!

Are you paying fees (via the agency) for the birth mom's housing, medical, maintenance, both for this adoption and your first child?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A PP or two mentioned single mothers by choice, and i am also SMC. I went the foster care route and I adopted my first child when she was 14 months old. She is now 3.5 and the birth-mom has requested that her new baby boy also be adopted by me (she does not know me personally but she has my profile. ). So, I will have my 2nd baby home in a matter of weeks! I kept all my info at the agency up to date the past couple of years in case of a teeny weeny chance something like this may happen. My dad is on the edge of his seat to meet his new grandson!

Are you paying fees (via the agency) for the birth mom's housing, medical, maintenance, both for this adoption and your first child?

No. As i mentioned in my post this is foster care (social services agency ) so it is basically free. You have to invest time, not money, to go through all the trainings and info sessions. I would not be able to afford private.

Paperwork should be done in 2 weeks or less. Baby on his way!

[Anonymous]

An adopt mom here. To keep everyone honest. It needs reminding that "free" (foster care) adoptions have costs and expenses too, same as private or agency adoptions do.But it's the taxpayers, not individual citizens who pay them. As much as everyone wishes the process could be free, it takes many people & specialists to find homes for children who need them. And those people have lives of their own to support as well.

[Anonymous]

To all the PPs on this thread who are not actual adoptive parents please stop!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To all the PPs on this thread who are not actual adoptive parents please stop!!

OP’s thread title is “Tell me about adoption”. Adoption ruined my mother’s life, brought her to attempt suicide many times and have extensive inpatient hospitalizations throughout my childhood. Her experience is unfortunately very common among relinquishing mothers who were told they were doing the best thing for themselves and for their baby but instead faced a lifetime of anxiety, regret, self-recrimination, and terror. OP needs to understand the coercive practices involved in infant adoption and understand that the full picture is not often ever understood or even considered by adoptive parents, whose experience is, for the most part a joyful one: they got what they wanted. So of course the adoptive parent voices here are almost all vitriolically and viciously awful toward those of us who exhort prospective adoptive parents to consider the adoption industry as a whole and the harm it does.

The adoptive parent perspective is only one small part of the adoption circle. The fact that they are satisfied is a given in most cases other than those where a child’s background or health status has been misrepresented. Some of us are posting here to urge her to seek out adoptee advocacy groups, voices of relinquishing mothers, and vast studies and publications around corruption and coercion in the adoption industry.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To all the PPs on this thread who are not actual adoptive parents please stop!!

OP’s thread title is “Tell me about adoption”. Adoption ruined my mother’s life, brought her to attempt suicide many times and have extensive inpatient hospitalizations throughout my childhood. Her experience is unfortunately very common among relinquishing mothers who were told they were doing the best thing for themselves and for their baby but instead faced a lifetime of anxiety, regret, self-recrimination, and terror. OP needs to understand the coercive practices involved in infant adoption and understand that the full picture is not often ever understood or even considered by adoptive parents, whose experience is, for the most part a joyful one: they got what they wanted. So of course the adoptive parent voices here are almost all vitriolically and viciously awful toward those of us who exhort prospective adoptive parents to consider the adoption industry as a whole and the harm it does.

The adoptive parent perspective is only one small part of the adoption circle. The fact that they are satisfied is a given in most cases other than those where a child’s background or health status has been misrepresented. Some of us are posting here to urge her to seek out adoptee advocacy groups, voices of relinquishing mothers, and vast studies and publications around corruption and coercion in the adoption industry.

How many years ago was your mother's adoption? There are so many other factors to this including pre-existing mental health issues. This is not the situation for every birthmother, just yours. An adoptive parent cannot fix a birthparents mental health.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:An adopt mom here. To keep everyone honest. It needs reminding that "free" (foster care) adoptions have costs and expenses too, same as private or agency adoptions do.But it's the taxpayers, not individual citizens who pay them. As much as everyone wishes the process could be free, it takes many people & specialists to find homes for children who need them. And those people have lives of their own to support as well.

If you adopt from the state adoption agency it is free to the adoptive parents and generally, not always you get a monthly stipend, health insurance and college help. If you adopt a child from foster care through a private agency they may charge for the homestudy and other things.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A PP or two mentioned single mothers by choice, and i am also SMC. I went the foster care route and I adopted my first child when she was 14 months old. She is now 3.5 and the birth-mom has requested that her new baby boy also be adopted by me (she does not know me personally but she has my profile. ). So, I will have my 2nd baby home in a matter of weeks! I kept all my info at the agency up to date the past couple of years in case of a teeny weeny chance something like this may happen. My dad is on the edge of his seat to meet his new grandson!

Are you paying fees (via the agency) for the birth mom's housing, medical, maintenance, both for this adoption and your first child?

The expenses depend on how you adopted. Some states don't allow for birth parent expenses, others do. If they went through the foster care route, no, expenses aren't paid and often its not a voluntary placement as there was abuse or neglect.

You clearly don't know a lot about adoption.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To all the PPs on this thread who are not actual adoptive parents please stop!!

OP’s thread title is “Tell me about adoption”. Adoption ruined my mother’s life, brought her to attempt suicide many times and have extensive inpatient hospitalizations throughout my childhood. Her experience is unfortunately very common among relinquishing mothers who were told they were doing the best thing for themselves and for their baby but instead faced a lifetime of anxiety, regret, self-recrimination, and terror. OP needs to understand the coercive practices involved in infant adoption and understand that the full picture is not often ever understood or even considered by adoptive parents, whose experience is, for the most part a joyful one: they got what they wanted. So of course the adoptive parent voices here are almost all vitriolically and viciously awful toward those of us who exhort prospective adoptive parents to consider the adoption industry as a whole and the harm it does.

The adoptive parent perspective is only one small part of the adoption circle. The fact that they are satisfied is a given in most cases other than those where a child’s background or health status has been misrepresented. Some of us are posting here to urge her to seek out adoptee advocacy groups, voices of relinquishing mothers, and vast studies and publications around corruption and coercion in the adoption industry.

Assuming this is a story of your birth mother-you were raised by your adoptive mother-correct?-it is truthfully a story of mental health challenges, first and foremost. I am sorry you are convinced it is otherwise.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To all the PPs on this thread who are not actual adoptive parents please stop!!

OP’s thread title is “Tell me about adoption”. Adoption ruined my mother’s life, brought her to attempt suicide many times and have extensive inpatient hospitalizations throughout my childhood. Her experience is unfortunately very common among relinquishing mothers who were told they were doing the best thing for themselves and for their baby but instead faced a lifetime of anxiety, regret, self-recrimination, and terror. OP needs to understand the coercive practices involved in infant adoption and understand that the full picture is not often ever understood or even considered by adoptive parents, whose experience is, for the most part a joyful one: they got what they wanted. So of course the adoptive parent voices here are almost all vitriolically and viciously awful toward those of us who exhort prospective adoptive parents to consider the adoption industry as a whole and the harm it does.

The adoptive parent perspective is only one small part of the adoption circle. The fact that they are satisfied is a given in most cases other than those where a child’s background or health status has been misrepresented. Some of us are posting here to urge her to seek out adoptee advocacy groups, voices of relinquishing mothers, and vast studies and publications around corruption and coercion in the adoption industry.

How many years ago was your mother's adoption? There are so many other factors to this including pre-existing mental health issues. This is not the situation for every birthmother, just yours. An adoptive parent cannot fix a birthparents mental health.

We have no mental illness in our extended family in general on my mother’s side. My mother experienced not just the initial trauma of relinquishment, not the unrelenting ongoing trauma of, on a daily basis, not knowing if her child is safe or loved or even alive. It is akin to the trauma of having a child kidnapped. It’s not a trauma that you eventually “get over” with therapy like you might a car accident or even a rape. My mother sought out every kinds of treatment available. Her only significant comforts were from support groups of other relinquishing mothers who didn’t gaslight or minimize her trauma, INCLUDING mother who very recently relinquished (for anyone who claims the trauma like this is a thing of the past.) Being brainwashed into believing that you can’t be a good mother and that the best thing you could do in life is give your child the gift of someone else as a parent does a NUMBER on self esteem and ability to parent.

(And frankly, your reflexive response about pre-existing mental health issues reminds me of people who hear of COVID deaths and immediately say, “Well what comorbidities or pre-existing conditions did the dead have, as if that negates the reality that they wouldn’t be dead now if it weren’t for COVID.)

Even if some relinquishing mothers who suffer extreme trauma from adoption HAD pre-existing mental health challenges, would you still be okay with the damages adoption causes? Are you really okay with how the for-profit adoption industry depends upon preying upon the most vulnerable pregnant women, including women with poverty, depression, and low self-esteem?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To all the PPs on this thread who are not actual adoptive parents please stop!!

Respectfully, no.