Finding the birth mother in a closed adoption from Eastern Europe

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oof. I'm going to assume this is Ukraine or Russia, and a 22 year-old DD means that she was given up for adoption in the middle of a huge economic meltdown in the region.

I don't know, OP. There are HUGE cultural and economic issues in play here. Placing kids for adoption is not something "nice girls" do in Eastern Europe, and if she's married now there is an excellent chance she hasn't disclosed the adoption.

I know you didn't ask this, but I think you and your DD have bigger issues than just logistics.

/Ukrainian American

+1 I lived and worked in that region for multiple years. I also volunteered at an orphanage in my time there, so I know more than I would like about the corruption of the adoption industry. Chances are good that:

1. If the mother is indeed married, she did not tell her husband about the baby she gave up. Attitudes about women are somewhat...antiquated in many ways there, especially in that timeframe. The birth mother will NOT be happy to hear from your daughter, whom she likely views as a shameful secret she wishes to keep from her husband and family. It would be horrible to break the terms of the sealed adoption this way. Consider that the birth mother is living in a harsher world than your daughter and even without family medical history, your daughter has so many more open paths available to her. Leave the birth mother alone and respect the fact that cultural differences you haven't considered might make her life very difficult if you persevere.

2. It was/is very common for family history/medical records to be fudged or changed, and people from consulting doctors down to orphanage admin work together in this to give children a chance. Your "connection" might be part of that: orphanages are so underfunded and conditions so poor, futures so bleak for orphans, that lying to help get a child a home with wealthy foreign parents is considered normal and acceptable. The mother might very well not have been a "college student" at all. There are so many babies born to drug/alcohol using women, some of whom are prostitutes, or from horribly abusive situations. Most families would not encourage their pregnant daughter to give up the baby in that way if there were any other option. It would be better for your daughter to never find out the family medical history than to risk learning that she is the product of one of the many situations I saw that resulted in a baby being placed for adoption there.

Just leave it, OP.

It isn’t up to the OP to just leave it. OP’s daughter didn’t accept any terms of the adoption. It’s completely natural to want to know about your birth parents. Hopefully the OP’s daughter will get something positive from it, hopefully she’s prepared for a rejection if that occurs (adoptive mom here, and I would try to encourage my children to seek counseling prior to searching to help them figure out why they want to search and deal with any negative outcomes), but it’s as much her right to know about *herself* as it is her birth mom’s right to remain secret. Moreover; we don’t even know what the birth mother wants. I’ve heard about these stories ending both in positive and negative ways, so you never know.

Have you ever lived in Ukraine or Russia? I have, and so have some of the other PPs who are offering similar advice. You do not understand the situation. We do.

A woman who placed her child for adoption in Ukraine or Russia at that time was living a certain hell. This is clear to anyone who has lived in that region and understands the culture surrounding unwed mothers, adoption, and attitudes about family there at the time. The birth mother was not a well-fed teen mallrat with a relatively stable home life who might be mildly annoyed to learn of your DD's request. She is almost certainly a woman who was devastated by whatever happened to her that placed her in a the situation you cannot understand or imagine, which resulted in her giving birth, etc. to your DD. She does not want to hear from your DD: that is why she arranged a sealed adoption. She does not want a reminder, and she does not want or need the stress and fear of wondering if her family will find out. Encouraging your DD to violate this could have consequences for the birth mom you will never understand because you yourself did not grow up in or witness the hellish circumstances of most women from that region who gave up babies in that era (or now).

Please, OP, just steer your DD away from this idea.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ukraine now and 20 years ago isn't equivalent to the US in the 50s vs now. Let's say 90% of women that were low income and gave birth and now in a better place would not want to have your daughter show up. The 10% that might no longer live in Ukraine/Russia. They got out.

There are still similar attitudes about adoption. Why do you think there are so few in country adoptions?

I'm the one who volunteered in orphanages in that region. This is true: adoption is viewed differently there. If there is anybody at all who cares about a pregnant woman, they will discourage her from placing her child up for adoption and do whatever they can to help her (unless the baby is deformed or disabled: there was and still is a higher degree of acceptance--even encouragement--to place these types of children in orphanages, which is part of the reason there are so few in-country adoptions and also part of the reason for the high proportion of US parents raising adopted children whose disabilities or FAS came as a surprise).

[Anonymous]

Leave her alone. I put a child up for adoption because I had been raped. I wanted nothing to do with her but somehow she found me and all she wanted was money. People have closed adoptions because they do not want that child in their lives. Again, LEAVE HER ALONE!

[Anonymous]

OP: repeating that this adoption did not take place in Russia or Ukraine. Also concur that even if we find the birth mother, her reaction could be a shock. Having someone contact her and say a 22 year old woman from the US claims to be your daughter would be earthshaking to say the least.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Leave her alone. I put a child up for adoption because I had been raped. I wanted nothing to do with her but somehow she found me and all she wanted was money. People have closed adoptions because they do not want that child in their lives. Again, LEAVE HER ALONE!

OP: adoptions from that country are closed by law. Very sorry this happened to you.

[Anonymous]

I would do Ancestry or 23andMe over myheritage. You can upload your results from the other 2 for free to myheritage afterwards. You can also upload for free to GEDmatch and Familytree DNA. I've done both Ancestry and 23andMe. My Biological Mom's side is well mapped out now. Pretty certain who my biological father is, but I at least know my grandparents for sure on my dad's side.

[Anonymous]

If she wants medical info OP,.she could.get an ancestry dna test and run the results through one of the many sites available, like Prometheus.

20 years+ ago, most mothers would not have assumed it would be as easy as it can be today to track them down.

[Anonymous]

I am from Eastern Europe as well and I second all the PPs who say that this is a very different mindset and the birth mother is highly unlikely to be anything but devastated to hear from the child and most likely never let her current family know about her.

Adoption is viewed VERY differently in EE than here, even now and certainly back in the 1990s. People don't have children they put in an orphanage because they are devout and don't want to abort and/or hope for that child to find nicer situation in life parents, or because they were shamed into giving away a child they would have loved to have kept. They do it because they don't want the child (for emotional and/or economic reasons) and somehow were not in a position to abort. They KNOW that when they give up the child, parental rights are terminated and any adoption that would happen is sealed (if the child is in an orphanage adoption is not likely btw - they probably thought child would not be adopted.) They neither expect nor want to hear from that child again. All the people saying that a birth mother from EE should expect a child to possibly find them are not only forgetting that 1990s was a different environment with adoptees having a much harder time tracking birth parents, but that this is a very different environment where the culture does not expect the child to have either the means or the interest in looking a birth parent up.

I mean, nobody can stop you, do what you want. But it is not going to end well for your child and it will probably devastate the birth mother.

Also, PP who mentioned people in EE don't go for DNA websites is correct. My family and friends from different EE countries are all pretty uniform in viewing it as a weird American past time. If you come from a place where everyone has lived in the same town for the last gazillion years and everyone knows who their third cousin twice removed is because extended family networks are crucial, there isn't much point for doing this sort of thing other than for medical information because you know your relatives, you know where you came from, etc. I am not sure if you will have any success with that route.

[Anonymous]

I do not agree that all EE birth mothers don’t want to have anything to do with their kid. May be I watch too much tv from back home, but adopted children looking for their birth mothers / families is a very common theme / occurrence in these tv shows. And circumstances differ. Some cases it was poverty, domestic violence, in others just young age, getting pregnant at 15 or 16. In many cases the birth moms have simply no way of finding the child, especially if the child was adopted internationally. Even if mom does not welcome it, there may be cousins, half siblings, who may be happy to meet their half sibling.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It will be super easy to do once there. The problem is finding a reputable police office/detective.
For all you know they can find her "mom" take a bunch of her money and leach off your and her forever.

But that’s when you do the dna test to prove the woman is actually the mother. That’s why I suggested you go with law firm / PI set up.

Of course. But, how likely is the bio mom going to accept a DNA test? Makes OP's dd act and sound like a jerk. People that seek birth parents are vulnerable to scams like this. For all we know, op's daughter might end up causing her half-siblings to have divorced parents! Now, depends on the country too. I know in my EE country adopting in possible only after a child I a year old. And they prefer that parents are from the birth country even if they ow reside somewhere else. And birth parents can show up and take the child, no joke! Adoption agencies do as much as they can to place the child with relatives. But, who knows, maybe I am just a Debbie Downer and maybe mom has been looking for her child for years. Or mom will end up beaten to death by her husband when he hears this news.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It will be super easy to do once there. The problem is finding a reputable police office/detective.
For all you know they can find her "mom" take a bunch of her money and leach off your and her forever.

But that’s when you do the dna test to prove the woman is actually the mother. That’s why I suggested you go with law firm / PI set up.

Of course. But, how likely is the bio mom going to accept a DNA test? Makes OP's dd act and sound like a jerk. People that seek birth parents are vulnerable to scams like this. For all we know, op's daughter might end up causing her half-siblings to have divorced parents! Now, depends on the country too. I know in my EE country adopting in possible only after a child I a year old. And they prefer that parents are from the birth country even if they ow reside somewhere else. And birth parents can show up and take the child, no joke! Adoption agencies do as much as they can to place the child with relatives. But, who knows, maybe I am just a Debbie Downer and maybe mom has been looking for her child for years. Or mom will end up beaten to death by her husband when he hears this news.

If biomom is interested and curious about her daughter she will. If she’s not, then she won’t do a dna test but then OP’s daughter will also have her answer.

[Anonymous]

If I were Op, I would ask myself how well I knew this contact, what I paid him, and how much I really trusted him. It sounds like this was a privately arranged adoption not an orphanage. So the girl’s situation might have deviated from the more common paradigm in a number of ways. The contact may have been a friend of her family, her professor at college, her sugar daddy, her pimp....
didn’t the agency have to get her signature on the paperwork? So the agency would have some information on her?

[Anonymous]

OP wrote it's former Yugoslavia. Well attitudes can vary widely as there are varying religions there. Bosnia has lot of Muslims; Croatia Catholics; Serbia Orthodox.

But contact the US embassy in that country if you want a reputable PI referral.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oof. I'm going to assume this is Ukraine or Russia, and a 22 year-old DD means that she was given up for adoption in the middle of a huge economic meltdown in the region.

I don't know, OP. There are HUGE cultural and economic issues in play here. Placing kids for adoption is not something "nice girls" do in Eastern Europe, and if she's married now there is an excellent chance she hasn't disclosed the adoption.

I know you didn't ask this, but I think you and your DD have bigger issues than just logistics.

/Ukrainian American

+1 I lived and worked in that region for multiple years. I also volunteered at an orphanage in my time there, so I know more than I would like about the corruption of the adoption industry. Chances are good that:

1. If the mother is indeed married, she did not tell her husband about the baby she gave up. Attitudes about women are somewhat...antiquated in many ways there, especially in that timeframe. The birth mother will NOT be happy to hear from your daughter, whom she likely views as a shameful secret she wishes to keep from her husband and family. It would be horrible to break the terms of the sealed adoption this way. Consider that the birth mother is living in a harsher world than your daughter and even without family medical history, your daughter has so many more open paths available to her. Leave the birth mother alone and respect the fact that cultural differences you haven't considered might make her life very difficult if you persevere.

2. It was/is very common for family history/medical records to be fudged or changed, and people from consulting doctors down to orphanage admin work together in this to give children a chance. Your "connection" might be part of that: orphanages are so underfunded and conditions so poor, futures so bleak for orphans, that lying to help get a child a home with wealthy foreign parents is considered normal and acceptable. The mother might very well not have been a "college student" at all. There are so many babies born to drug/alcohol using women, some of whom are prostitutes, or from horribly abusive situations. Most families would not encourage their pregnant daughter to give up the baby in that way if there were any other option. It would be better for your daughter to never find out the family medical history than to risk learning that she is the product of one of the many situations I saw that resulted in a baby being placed for adoption there.

Just leave it, OP.

You are nuts.

OP, try to find the birth mother. Of course be discreet, and if there is a new family only reach out to the birth mother. She might want to talk, she might not. You won’t know unless you try.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oof. I'm going to assume this is Ukraine or Russia, and a 22 year-old DD means that she was given up for adoption in the middle of a huge economic meltdown in the region.

I don't know, OP. There are HUGE cultural and economic issues in play here. Placing kids for adoption is not something "nice girls" do in Eastern Europe, and if she's married now there is an excellent chance she hasn't disclosed the adoption.

I know you didn't ask this, but I think you and your DD have bigger issues than just logistics.

/Ukrainian American

+1 I lived and worked in that region for multiple years. I also volunteered at an orphanage in my time there, so I know more than I would like about the corruption of the adoption industry. Chances are good that:

1. If the mother is indeed married, she did not tell her husband about the baby she gave up. Attitudes about women are somewhat...antiquated in many ways there, especially in that timeframe. The birth mother will NOT be happy to hear from your daughter, whom she likely views as a shameful secret she wishes to keep from her husband and family. It would be horrible to break the terms of the sealed adoption this way. Consider that the birth mother is living in a harsher world than your daughter and even without family medical history, your daughter has so many more open paths available to her. Leave the birth mother alone and respect the fact that cultural differences you haven't considered might make her life very difficult if you persevere.

2. It was/is very common for family history/medical records to be fudged or changed, and people from consulting doctors down to orphanage admin work together in this to give children a chance. Your "connection" might be part of that: orphanages are so underfunded and conditions so poor, futures so bleak for orphans, that lying to help get a child a home with wealthy foreign parents is considered normal and acceptable. The mother might very well not have been a "college student" at all. There are so many babies born to drug/alcohol using women, some of whom are prostitutes, or from horribly abusive situations. Most families would not encourage their pregnant daughter to give up the baby in that way if there were any other option. It would be better for your daughter to never find out the family medical history than to risk learning that she is the product of one of the many situations I saw that resulted in a baby being placed for adoption there.

Just leave it, OP.

You are nuts.

OP, try to find the birth mother. Of course be discreet, and if there is a new family only reach out to the birth mother. She might want to talk, she might not. You won’t know unless you try.

You are crassly insensitive and pushy, the typical American whose only knowledge of other cultures is the time she spent walking around tourist-magnet capitals. You simply cannot comprehend that other cultures might think differently, and that one privileged American girl's want might not trump another person's right to privacy and peace.