Passing along a few good reads in the world of adoption blogging and such.
From Yahoo News: Adopted or Abducted? Veil of secrecy lifts slowly on decades of forced adoptions for unwed mothers around the globe.
Most women describe giving birth to a child as a life changing experience – in a word – “challenging”, “joyous”, “miraculous.” But generations of young, unwed women describe their experience of giving birth to a child as a nightmare – and decades later their suffering has yet to end.
From Australia to Spain, Ireland to America, and as recent as 1987, young mothers say they were “coerced”, “manipulated”, and “duped” into handing over their babies for adoption. These women say sometimes their parents forged consent documents, but more often they say these forced adoptions were coordinated by the people their families trusted most…priests, nuns, social workers, nurses or doctors.
Read more here.
The second paragraph made me burst into tears. To see 1987 included there was tremendously validating to me. Over the years I have been told (often by other mothers who surrendered) that I had it easier, my time was better, my grief was less because I was not BSE and BSE ended in 1970. I have always responded with a big old BULLSHIT to that as it is so not true. It did not stop. Change? Yes. Get more decievious, creative? Yes. Stop. Not at all. I thank Dan Rather and all who worked on this article for including me, my era, my time, my loss in that article whether you intended to or not.
From [Birth Mother], First Mother Forum: No Matter How Adoption is Done, Grief Remains for Mothers
“Putting an end to secrecy in adoption does not erase the grief or loss embedded in the adoption experience” according to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute March, 2012 report, Openness in Adoption: From Secrecy and Stigma to Knowledge and Connections. With that caveat, the institute strongly endorses openness in adoption because “ending secrecy empower(s) participants by providing them with information and access so they can face and deal with facts instead of fantasies.”
Read the entire post here.
Photo credit: Joanna Fisher