I’m a birthmother AND an adoptee. Isn’t that special?

Oh boy, this is getting good.

First there were the rumors that Bristol Palin was secretly the mother of Sarah and Todd Palin’s youngest child.

But now the Palins are admitting that seventeen-year-old Bristol is five months pregnant and will be both parenting the child and marrying the child’s father.

Even more incredibly, the Palins have issued a statement on the matter in which they equate pregnancy/parenting with “growing up” and “the responsibilities of adulthood”:

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support.”

This couldn’t be happening at a better time. (For me as a blogger, anyway.)

First we have the Wall Street Journal’s “deputy Taste editor”, Naomi Shaeffer Riley, encouraging McCain to use his connection to adoption to woo evangelicals.

Then we have the suspicion cast on Casey Anthony, mother of missing toddler Caylee Anthony, intensified by reports that Ms. Anthony had considered adoption for Caylee whilst pregnant. Paradoxically, this has resulted in a great deal of hand-wringing by those who decry both teen parenthood and immature young women being encouraged by their own mothers to not relinquish their children.

And now we have the Governor of Alaska and candidate for the vice-presidency of the United States asserting that being a teen mom is going to make her daughter “grow up” into “the responsibilities of adulthood”.

Right.

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect example of the convoluted havoc that the issues of adoption, reproductive rights, and motherhood plays on our minds. Over the past week we have learned the following:

1. Adopting children is a noble thing and a Christian obligation, even if in some cases it is tantamount to kidnapping and human trafficking.

2. Adopting children makes a good campaign story, even when “the story” is not true. It is also a good way to make a somewhat tainted candidate look good to evangelicals.

3. Considering placing your child for adoption, on the other hand, is a bad thing, because it makes you a more likely suspect in the disspearance (possible death) of your child.

4. Discouraging your daughter from placing her child for adoption is likewise a bad thing, because you are encourging your immature daughter to care for a child she doesn’t want, and this is going to lead to your daughter doing something bad to the child.

(Still following me? Good.)

5. But if you are a state governor who is the running mate of the “adoption candidate” for the presidency of the United States, you are going to promote the idea that your teenage daughter’s pregnancy is a sure-fire path to adulthood and maturity.

Mixed messages, to be sure, and now I have a headache. Some analysis after my family barbecue.

To be continued. . .

As if things couldn’t get any stranger in the adopto-sphere, The Orlando Sentinel is reporting that Casey Anthony, mother of missing toddler Caylee Anthony, originally wanted to place her daughter for adoption but was discouraged from doing so by her (Casey’s) mother.

(The headline for this story reads “Caylee Anthony wasn’t a child who was wanted, court records show”)

This revelation brings several things to mind:

1. That Casey even considered placing Caylee for adoption is, for prosecutors and the media, evidence of guilt. Apparently, if a woman is found to have expressed any sort of ambivilancy about pregnancy and/or parenting, this is taken as evidence of her increased capacity for abuse, neglect and homicidal tendencies.

(Don’t believe me? Consider the case of Tabitha Walrond who briefly considered abortion while pregnant with her son. Ms. Walrond was eventually convicted of criminally negligent homicide after her son died of malnourishment because Ms. Walrond did not produce enough breast milk. The prosecutor argued that Ms. Walrond’s consideration of abortion “. . .is what led the defendant to a road that led [to her son's] death.”)

2. Pro-adoptionists and baby-dump advocates may well start screeching that this is what happens when women are discouraged from placing their kids for adoption and/or safe-havens are not available.

3. The general public is going to follow the lead of prosecutors and the media, and continue its negative assumptions about birthmothers/first mothers. Paridoxically, they are also going to go along with pro-adoptionists/baby-dump advocates in blaming Casey’s mother for nixing the adoption plan.

Myself? I think that the fact that Casey Anthony considered adoption for Caylee is irrelevant. This case (as are most cases involving the abuse/neglect/kidnapping/death of a child) is a one-off situation: A set of unique personalities and circumstances gave rise to (what may be) a heinous crime.

As some commenters in various forums have noted, it is not unusual for women to experience ambivalance about a pregnancy, particularly when they are nineteen years old and single. But in the end, those who carry to term typically keep and raise their babies, even if they had seriously planned on relinquishing whilst pregnant.

It goes without saying that these women almost never kill their children, abuse them, nor go for a month before reporting their child as “missing” to the authorities. But since the “a-word” has been mentioned, common sense is likely going to have very little to do with how this case is tried in the media.

On the day of the release of UNICEF’s report exposing the corruption in Nepal’s adoption industry the WSJ.com published this piece of squishy adoption tripe from their “deputy Taste editor”, Naomi Shaeffer Riley. In it, she encourages John McCain to build bridges with evangelicals on the topic of adoption.

(Incidentally, Riely fails to mention that the McCains have brazenly “exaggerated” the circumstances of their daughter’s adoption, and the fact that this adoption took place while Mrs. McCain had a prescription drug habit that eventually resulted in her stealing drugs from an international charity.)

According to Ms. Riley, Evangelicals are renewing their committment to adoption: Dr. Russell Moore (dean of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)is writing a book that declares adoption to be a “priority” for Christians. Youth evangelist (an adoptee whose birthmother was “homeless, mentally ill, and a prostitute”) Tony Nolan, speaks at Christian concerts, encourging people to adopt and raising money to help local families with adoption expenses. Focus on the Family ran a public awareness campaign entitled “You are God’s Plan for the Orphan”.

What is curious to me, however, is that while indeed Christians are called to provide for the orphan, they are also to provide for the widow. Support is to be given to the most vulnerable without any strings attached (i.e. you don’t care for the widow and the orphan by taking the orphan away from the widow).

There is also the not-small matter of these coveted children not actually being orphans. As noted by UNICEF, it may be that as many as 80 percent of children in “orphanages” in Nepal aren’t orphans at all. Instead, they are simply “product” in the international adoption industry. The fact that Christians are more-than-bit-players in this evil charade is an indication that something is terribly wrong.

Are there real orphans who need families? Yes, there are. But most of the children in the “system” (whether domestic or international) are not orphans. Some of them were born to families and parents who could not, or would not, care for them. But many of these children were removed from their homes because their parents lacked resources, not love and committment. Still others were taken from their parents and families as the result of fraud.

We must care for the poor, not covet and steal their children.

Drat those Ten Commandments.

The globalization of the adoption industry has caught the attention of UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund): A study shows that only four out of every Nepali children adopted are adopted by a Nepali family. One NGO representative states: “The vast majority of children in centres don’t need to be there. They have family…The first priority, therefore, should be to reunite 80 percent of the children in institutions with their families, not to re-open intercountry adoption.”

UNICEF believes that such corruption “has created a culture of child abuse”.

After being uncermoniously (and mysteriously) nuked by their former ISP, Advocates For Children in Therapy are back at advocatesforchildrenintherapy.org .

The organization in their own words:

“We are an educational and public advocacy organization dedicated to halting the dangerous cruelty done to children by Attachment Therapy (AT), its associated Therapeutic Parenting practices, and other unvalidated, pseudoscientific interventions.”

Their previous URL is not redirecting to their new site name, so if you have links to this organization on your own websites, please edit them accordingly.

An abandoned newborn in Argentina was apparently rescued by a farmer’s dog and cared for alongside her puppies.

I wonder what the NCFA’s position on this is?

This essay was actually a post to alt.adoption back in (I believe) 1997 in response to numerous stories about potential adoptive parents who were “heartbroken” after investing huge amounts of time and money in pursuing “adoption situations” that “fell through”.  (In other words, they paid a lot of money and attention to an expectant mother who then decided to parent her own kid.)

I’ve always felt that adoption professionals who encourage this investment of time and money between strangers are being horribly irresponsible. This (slightly revised) essay remains a call to common sense in adoption practice.  While I am less enamored of infant adoption than I have been in the past, I also still believe that prospective adoptive parents are also vulnerable to the machinations of the adoption industry (though not so vulnerable as first parents and children). It is for them that I reprint this piece.

Lotto Tickets (2008 Edition)

If you are thinking about adopting, or are trying to adopt, you’ve probably spent some time getting scared by all of the horror stories out there. Many a prospective adoptive parent has written about spending huge amounts of time, money and energy in pursuit of adopting a child, only to have things “fall through”. Something has always bothered me about these stories, and finally I figured out what it was:

Adoption has become a lotto ticket.

Potential adoptive families find (or are found by) a prospective birthmother. Prospective birthmother has something they want, and something they are willing to risk money, emotions, and energy to get.

So the prospective adoptive parents buy a lotto ticket, in hopes of winning the “prize” of the baby. They pay for an apartment, furniture, maternity clothes, food, doctor’s visits, etc. They drive the prospective birthmom around to appointments, listen to her tales of woe for hours on end, and take her out to the movies. Each time they take her out, each dollar they spend, is another lotto ticket for the “chance” of parenthood.

Finally, when the big day arrives, and the baby is born, the big draw takes place: Will she or won’t she relinquish? If she doesn’t relinquish, it is back to square one, with more lotto tickets being purchased for other “prizes” or giving up on the lotto entirely. If she does relinquish, well, hot dang, they’ve won the friggin’ lotto!

Frankly, this whole system seems wrong to me. For one thing, when people are willing to be parted from their money, confidence games abound. Women who have no intention of relinquishing their children or who aren’t even pregnant have found that the “adoption” con is one of the easiest, because most states do not require a prospective birthmother to repay any support given to her. Plus, if illegal payments to the prospective birthmom were made, the prospective adoptive parents are unlikely to incriminate themselves by reporting her.

If we want to clean up this mess of exploited prospective adoptive parents (and birthparents, who are more often the losers in the adoption industry, anyway) we need to stop this nonsense of potential adoptive parents paying for the care and upkeep of a pregnant woman. Potential adoptive parents should stop greedily buying lotto tickets for babies, and instead insist on working with an ethical adoption agency that provides pregnant women with the assistance and support that they need. If prospective adoptive parents insist in only working with ethical agencies, women will start using agencies themselves, which is probably a better way of handling adoption in the first place.

Prospective adoptive parents need to stop being so involved in the lives of prospective birthparents. They need to stop being best buddies during the pregnancy, stop being present at labor and delivery, and stop taking custody of the child when s/he is only a few hours old. Mothers, even those who are considering relinquishing their children for adoption, need to feel empowered as mothers:  Having someone in the hospital room assuming care of one’s baby is not empowering.

(In fact, I often wonder if those mothers who change their minds days or even weeks after relinquishment would NOT be changing their minds if they had been permitted to be the sole parent of their child in the beginning, and to relinquish the baby on their own terms, on their own time. I truly think that many of these women “change their minds” because they were not permitted to mother their children completely, and thus panic when they realize that they never had control over the child and their situation.)

To those trying to adopt a child, I say: Please, in your desire to parent a child, be sensible. Don’t give money tostrangers because they may give you something you want. Don’t assume the role of “parent” with all its emotional baggage before a child is even close to being yours. Don’t set yourself up for disapointment: The lotto has terrible odds.

Some years back I wrote a little essay for alt.adoption called “Lotto Tickets”, in which I decried the tendency of some prospective adoptive parents to “romance” prospective birthmothers with gifts and dinners and “emotional support” in the hopes of claiming their baby.  (I am actually working on revising the thing and should have it up here soon.)

So imagine my surprise when I saw this this headline from TheCabin.net:

LITTLE ROCK Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said Friday he’s confident a proposed constitutional amendment to create a state-run lottery and an initiated act banning unmarried couples from fostering or adopting children could survive any court challenges.

Well, I thought it was amusing.

The Tennessean reports that gentleman in Nashville (who is wisely only speaking to the police about this matter) found a sunburnt, but otherwise healthy, baby girl in his front yard on Sunday morning.

Given the extreme unlikelihood that she grew out of his lawn, one can safely assume that she was abandoned there. One might also assume that she was abandoned there by her confused and distressed mother.

But we might never know.

Unless someone steps forward and either claims the baby as their own or is able to help in identifying the baby’s parents, chances are that she will disappear into the child welfare system. (We can only hope that she fares better than Masha or Candace.)

Responses to the Tennessean are predictably indignant, with people wondering why, since Tennessee has a safe-haven law, someone would just leave their baby on the front lawn of someone’s home.

And we might never know.

One of the consequences of anonymous abandonment, whether through the legal “safe haven” route or an illegal “dumping” in a garbage can, church doorstep or a Nashville lawn, is that we simply don’t know anything about the circumstances of the abandonment. We don’t know who left the baby, we don’t know why they left the baby, and we don’t have any idea of what happened to the baby’s mother. She may be alive and well and going back to school, or her mutilated corpse may be lying in a ditch somewhere.

According to the New York Times the effectiveness of these laws is hard to gauge, and people still abandon and kill newborns anyway. One aspect of these laws is that while they tend to be very particular about the circumstances under which a child might be abandoned (i.e. the baby must be less than 72 hours old, the child must be left at a hospital, fire or police station, can only be left by his/her mother, etc), communicating these restrictions to those who might kill or abandon a baby is another matter entirely. In my opinion, these laws may have the unintended effect of increasing “unsafe” abandonments rather than curbing them.

Think about it: If a woman is unable to even consider picking up the phone and calling 911 after giving birth alone, what is the likelihood that she has researched safe haven laws? While she might have heard that it was “ok” for her to abandon her baby, what makes us think that someone who is this dysfunctional is going to understand the nuances of a safe haven law?

But of course, because abandonments are anonymous, without law enforcement getting lucky in an investigation, we will never know the impact these laws had on someone’s decision to abandon their child.

What we do know is this: Somebody gave birth to a baby girl. Somebody didn’t kill that baby girl. Somebody left that baby girl where she would be found, but made no effort to alert people to the presence of the baby girl or to protect her from the elements. We know nothing about this somebody, and we don’t even know if there was only one somebody, or whether there were multiple somebodies.

We also know that Safe Haven laws didn’t protect this baby from the sun that burned her tiny body and they are not going to protect her mother who appears to be the chief suspect in this crime. We know nothing about how the Safe Haven law may have confused somebody into thinking that abandoning a child was ok.

In short, when it comes to most of the crucial details of this case (and the effect of Safe Haven laws in general) we know nothing.

(Seems that many adoptees have heard that one before.)

Happy Monday.

I’ve just learned that Connell Watkins, the unlicensed “therapist” who, along with three other adults, killed eleven year old Candace Newmaker (born Candace Tiara Elmore) during an attachment therapy rebirthing session, has been released from prison into a halfway house. Watkins had been sentenced to 16 years in prison back after being found guilty of “reckless child abuse”. Apparently she is now “working” in her community, though, thankfully, not with kids and not administering “therapy”. Unfortunately, these restrictions came too late for Candace, who has become the poster child for alternative therapies (and adoptions) gone wrong.

Candace was separated from her parents, grandparents, and siblings when she was adopted by Jeane Newmaker, a well-regarded pediatric nurse practitioner. While teachers and neighbors described Candace as a likable girl, Newmaker felt that Candace had not appropriately “bonded” with her and sought professional help. The result was a hodge-podge of diagnoses and the “treatment” of Candace with psychiatric drugs. Finally Newmaker decided to explore the possibility of “attachment disorder”, a condition that, as journalist Christopher Caldwell once noted, is only diagnosed in the person who is NOT paying the bills.

Armed with her suspicion of “Attachment Disorder”, Newmaker sought attachment therapy for Candace. When the therapies failed to produce the desired results, Candace was taken to Colorado for more intensive treatment. While there, her hair was cut (against her will), and she was subjected to other bizarre “therapies”, not the least of which was having to lie under her “robust” adoptive mother while having her faced licked.

(When Candace, who seems to have had more sense than all of the adults involved in her “therapy” combined, was asked by Watkins why she was in Colorado, she said, “To be tortured.” When asked why this should be, Candace replied “Because you like to torture people”.)

Candace’s final therapy was “rebirthing” during which she was wrapped in a flannel sheet, surrounded by cushions, and pressed on by adults in an attempt to simulate the experience of a fetus during labor and delivery. The procedure was supposed to result in Candace being psychologically “born” to her adoptive mother. Instead, Candace died. The transcript of the rebirthing depicts Candace as being confused as to how the process was supposed to work, yet also trying to be cooperative. Eventually, however, Candace’s body rebelled: She vomits, loses control of her bowels, and eventually suffocates as a result of the torture. Despite the fact that she went silent and still, her tormentors did not unwrap her for fifty minutes after her last spoken word, and only after Watkins announces that they are going to “. . .talk to the twerp”.

It is significant that Jeane Newmaker, a woman who had spent her adult life caring for the medical needs of children, was present for much of the rebirthing, yet left the room after Candace responded “no” to Watkins’ asking her if she wanted to be reborn. While it is understandable that someone who had a strong love for children would want to be loved by and “bonded” to Candace, it is also obvious that Jeane Newmaker was willing to suppress her professional training and experience (as well as her common sense) in order to get the sort of daughter that she wanted: A child who would love her, forget her first family, and become her daughter.

Sadly, Candace’s story is not an isolated incident. There are numerous documented cases of children who have been tortured, even killed, in the name of “attachment therapy”. Naive adoptive parents, troubled by what they perceive as rejection, are particularly vulnerable to these snake-oil-therapists. Inherent in notion of “attachment” subscribed to by these therapists is the idea that there is something wrong with a child if s/he does not regard his/her adoptive parents as “parents” and/or expresses anger and frustration while in their care. What is usually overlooked is that these children almost always have families (parents, siblings, grandparents, etc) to whom they may well have strong attachments: They just can’t be with them.

These kids are expected to respond “appropriately” to the “needs” of their adoptive parents, which typically includes the expectation that the child will behave as if family intimacy and love exists, regardless of their attachment to, and feelings for, their first family. When the child can’t, or won’t, participate in this charade, and expresses his/her rage, frustration, and anger, the s/he ends up with a psychiatric diagnosis.

If I was doing home studies, particularly for those who have indicated that they would like to adopt an older child, there is one question that I would make sure to ask potential adoptive parents, not once, but several times throughout the process:

“So what if the kid just doesn’t like you?”

I’d pay a lot of attention to their answers.

See, the truth is that a lot of people just don’t like each other. This is true of humans at all stages of development, and in all sorts of family configurations. Families that have never even heard the word “adoption” can have conflicts that make the Hatfields and McCoys look like The Brady Bunch. So it doesn’t seem to be a huge stretch to imagine that, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, there are going to be adoptive placements where parents and kids don’t much like each other. I’d further argue that when the adoptive parents are insisting that a child ignore reality and become “instant family” to them, this dislike is going to be intensified.

So when I would ask parents what they would do and feel if their child didn’t like them, I’d want to hear them acknowledge that attachment is a two-way-street. That just as they would want a child to love and accept them “as they are”, they would want to love and accept a child “as they are”. They would acknowledge that while they have chosen to define themselves as parents, the child has a right of definition as well. They would accept that a child has a right to define his/her family relationships as s/he sees fit, not as social services, adoption agencies, judges, or the adoptive parents themselves wish.

They would also acknowledge that their commitment to the health and well-being of a child is not conditional on that child’s regarding them as parents. They would acknowledge that they are the adults, and that adults don’t transgress the boundaries of decency and common sense just because a child doesn’t respond to them as they would like. They would acknowledge that it is wrong to expect any sort of “return” on their investment in a child and that chasing their losses with desperate, inappropriate behavior is not acceptable.

Unfortunately for the kids, though, the “adults” hold all the cards, even if these adults don’t want to think and behave like adults: After all, it is the adults who get to select therapists and consultants and doctors who will meet their own needs, not the needs of the child. And as Candace learned, if you don’t respond in the way that these adults want you to, you are going to be tossed by your adoptive parents and their advocates into a downward spiral of unmet parental need:

First they will say that you are sick.

Then they will medicate you with strong drugs.

Then they will terrorize you in the form of “therapy” on a regular basis.

Then they will take you across the country and make you live with people who cut your hair, threaten to shave your scalp and tattoo it, yell at you, and call you names.

Then they will wrap you in a sheet and push on you.

And then they won’t let you have any air.

And then they will mock you when you begin to die.

And then after you are dead they will call you a twerp.

Rest in Peace, Candace.