"In
order to bring the issues surrounding the intermediary system
into clear focus, it is necessary to examine the myths and motives
that surround the adoption experience. Outsiders need to realize
that social agencies not only control adoption procedures, but
also control the information about the institution which is provided
to the courts, the legislatures and the public.
"It
is the child welfare establishment that has provided the picture
of 'birthmothers'
as indifferent -- as mothers who abandon their unwanted children
with a wish to remain forever hidden from them. They know that
this is seldom true, but it helps to facilitate their work for
the public to believe this. Society does not dismiss the importance
of the natural family as readily as the social planners, and so
it is useful to portray relinquishing parents as different from
caring parents.
"The
'birthmother' must
be different, an aberration; for if it were
true that she had the same degree of love for her child as all
other mothers, the good of adoption would be overwhelmed by the
tragedy of it. Adoptive parents are presumably somewhat
relieved of guilt if they can be assured that the [first] parents
truly did not want their child; for, under those circumstances,
it is possible to feel entitled to claim the child of others.
Neither society nor the mother who holds the child in her arms
wants to confront the agony of the mother from whose arms that
same child was taken.
"But
that agony is real, as we have come to learn through our experience
with reunions. It is a cruel punishment for relinquishing parents
to bear the life-long anguish over the fate of their lost children
... If concern for [first] parents is genuine, then a compassionate
legislature ought to provide some way that the [first] parent
can learn of the fate of their children who were lovingly relinquished
to a better life than they could give them. These women, the determination
to continue their protection, is really a determination to hold
them to a life sentence. People who are parents should be more
empathetic.
"Who
really believes that a mother does not want to know of her child?
' Protection' is a subterfuge on the part of agencies protecting
their power and on the part of adoptive parents who have
a real but irrational fear that their child would prefer the [first]
parents."
