Closed Adoption and found the birth mother

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05/05/2018 22:15

Subject: Closed Adoption and found the birth mother

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What I find most disturbing about this thread is the stories of rape that went unreported. Imagine how many more times these perpetrators got away with similar crimes, whether or not those rapes resulted in pregnancy.

It's also horrifying to think of those girls who were forced by their parents to carry pregnancy to term. I wonder how often this still happens today? It really got me thinking about whether or not it could be legally recognized as child abuse, assuming the girl does not want to continue pregnancy.

I have some friends who have adopted recently and those adoptions are open, at least somewhat. The OP describes a closed adoption scenario that is more increasingly rare. Any person has a right to their medical information and family health history. No one has a right to impose a relationship on another person, and this includes adoptees who want to reunite with biological family members.

Overall, any woman who willingly chose to carry a pregnancy to term and made the sacrifice of adoption, should be entitled to personal privacy if that's what she wants. Part of her sacrifice should be the sharing of basic medical information for the health of the adoptee. Beyond that, it needs to be her choice. However, it seems reasonable that I had an adoptee could contact the birth mother initially to see if there is any interest in getting to know each other.

OP, your sister should not have contacted her birth mother's family but rather the birth mother herself. If there was no way to contact the birth mother, she should have left the family alone. I realize that is very painful for her, but she should remember that her birth mother already gave her the gift of life, and that may have to be enough.

Adoption has changed so much over the past 20 years that it is difficult to look at prior adoptions under the same lens as adoptions occuring today.

I respect your view, but see the situation quite differently. I do not view biological mother is as having made the sacrifice of giving up their children for adoption. For those women who chose adoption because they were unwilling to acknowledge the truth that they had had a child as they moved forward in life, they did it for selfish, or self-centered, reasons. Not to give a gift of life to someone else. The baby was just an unwanted by product. They did what they did to live up to cultural and family expectations, without having to raise the child or do any of the hard work involved in parenting. They, along with the biological father is, created a life. Those babies did not have the ability to consent or withhold consent from any document allowing the facts of their biological origins to be covered up for the convenience of biological parents wanting to conform to cultural norms or to withhold things from their future families. In my view, nobody has a legal obligation to be in a relationship with anyone else. Equally, though, nobody has a right to stop anybody from stating the truth to whomever they wish. Ethically, which can be viewed separately, I think it is apparent for someone prioritizing their ability to keep a secret they may be ashamed of as a priority over another person knowing who their biological family is. It is of course understandable that people would fear how their family members would react to finding out that information about another biological child had been withheld. But the reason family members may be upset about this is because they may view it as relevant to them. As something the biological mother should have shared. That she didn’t share it is her own choice. When you choose not to share a difficult part of your history, sometimes it comes to bite you back in unpredictable ways and there are consequences.

Well put. There were a lot of ways to hide people in the past. One way was to hide kids born of teens in the home as if they were children of the parents, so the mother is actually being passed off as aunt. DNA has blown the lid off that, too. Disabled children were put into residential homes, etc. Babies were forcibly removed from unwed teens after they were sent to maternity homes. The stories out of Ireland and Boston are chilling. They were medicated in these homes, too, to keep quiet.Twins were often separated. Young children were separated from siblings. Sealed adoptions are part of the ugly past. Also, fathers had no rights at all- their children could be adopted out without any input from them, and given no options of raising the children on their own. These were all bundled up with a ton of other ugly civil issues that affected people through the 70s- for women, people of color, societal abuses- many based on faulty and dangerous belief systems.

There was this belief that wherever a child landed that it would be their new name, ethnicity, etc. Tabula Rasa...clean slate. We know now that this is all ridiculous and people who are adopting really want more information, too.Adoptions are open, or semi open, and everyone understands that information is controlled only for the time of a child's minority..until age 18- even if it is a closed adoption. Sealed afoptions really do not exist anymore. People who had them, as bio parents or adoptive parents, aren't going to be "grandfathered" under old societal mores, especially when we all realize how dangerous these ideas were.

For a long time, children were placed in ethnically similar homes with helped facilitate closed adoptions, but that ended in the 60s. There are now interracial adoptions, adoptions to same sex couples, single people, etc. Adoption is no longer a secret or astounding fact for anyone ( just like all the before mentioned situations in family types).... such as so many years ago.The game has changed and the child is his/her own agent- no one can really make any decision for another person once they reach majority. At that point they can seek what information they want about themselves and the circumstances of their birth. They can also find out the information may not be pleasant, but it is still their information. Most kids adopted in the last 25 years have some information- it depends a lot on how the adoptive parents handled it. For the most part, they are advised not to maintain any fairy tale ideas a child may have, and there is a lot written on the subject to guide parents today.

So, basically you are saying that women should just abort if faced with an unwanted pregnancy - there is no other choice to be able to move on with their life without future repercussions. I hope you are pro choice.

It is not about me at all. It is about the reality which is: no more secret births. Technology and legal systems have done entirely away with that.

Have you read the news about adoptions even in the past 5 years? There are still plenty of horror stories and the courts allow it to happen. And, those are only the ones that are openly talked about. My child's birthmom hid our child for several years from her parents and family.