I did, however, get a nastygram from an adopted woman named Michelle. Michelle's comment was publishable, despite her statement that none of my five children have the right to exist.
In full, it read:
This has nothing to do with adoption and everything to do with a sad woman who needs help and should never have had children by birth or adoption. You and your
friends should really go out into the world to see just how children are really treated before you talk about ending adoption. You are right about one thing - everything in your blog is about YOUYOUYOUYOUYOU and not about children who need homes with families who love them (as a child I fit that description). As a person who gave up their child for adoption you have no right to tell a needy child they don't deserve a family who loves them and will care for them. NO right at all.
I'd like to respond to Michelle .
So Michelle,
I encourage you to visit http://www.babyscoopera.com/ for the down low on how the adoption industry took our children from us illegally, before you pass judgement. My labor was induced and my daughter was pulled out of my body with forceps while I was drugged and in four point leather restraints. The baby was spirited away, secreted from me. I never saw her, and never even heard her cry. This happened in a hospital delivery room in Cleveland Ohio, in December 1968. Contrary to what your letter implies, I wanted my baby. I refused to sign adoption papers. When I got out of the maternity reformatory, I immediately secured a job and a place to live. I went back to claim my baby, and the agency refused to hand her over. (Please note, I was her legal mother.) When I refused to sign surrender papers, the social wrecker assigned to my case threatened to have me involuntarily committed to the local county mental hospital. I know women who were committed, drugged, given shock treatments because they refused to sign papers.
There was nothing wrong with us. We were not neurotic. We were pregnant, and that is all. I happened to be pregnant via rape, but most of the women I know were simply pregnant by their boyfriends. Pregnant teens... one of the most common stories the human race has to offer. We committed no crime except being pregnant and unmarried in an era when women did not enjoy the equal protection of the law... at least in this country. Young women of that era also did not enjoy the technological advances of reproductive medicine that exist today. We were subjected to the religious and misogynistic whims of a society that looked upon women as nothing more than vessels for the desires of a man. There were few to no women physicians, lawyers, business professionals in those days. The legal reforms of the 1970s changed all that ...and put an end to The Baby Scoop Era, as well.
But for those of us caught up in it, it was and continues to be, a living hell.
The impact of the excesses we experienced at the hands of the adoption industry have lasted for our lifetimes. All the research shows that the aftermath of adoption loss lasts a lifetime. It is an irresolvable loss.
For us, and for many people, adoption is the gift that keeps on giving.
This is why we work at educating people about the adoption industry. It's not about MEMEME. It's about human rights. It's about the right of Anywoman, anywhere, to raise her own child.
NO ONE should have to suffer the way we, our husbands and our children, have because of the untested hypotheses of a discipline like social work. Their theory was that unmarried mothers were neurotic sex delinquents whose most pressing need was social rehabilitation.
Obviously, they were wrong.
The industry used to be able to abuse women in this way - and they got away with it. Since they can no longer get away with locking women into maternity reformatories, taking away all their civil and human rights and stripping them of their babies, these days they use marketing to sell adoption plans to pregnant women.
I encourage you to look at our website and read more on the blog, especially the entry called "Second Verse Not the Same As the First"
http://babyscoopera.blogspot.com/2008/04/second-verse-not-same-as-first.html
and "Marketing Adoption"
http://babyscoopera.blogspot.com/2008/02/marketing-adoption.html for more information.
Barb, for myself
Posts
2 comments:
Very good answer, B. And, after reuniting with my adult children, I can say that, even as a young women, I was more qualified to rear them than their adopters. They made some horrible mistakes that have caused my children no end of pain and bad life choices that bring them down. They were never given coping skills, taught empathy or taught to take responsibility for their own actions. It makes me want to cry.
My daughter was raised by a convicted criminal and his screwed up wife, Robin. I want to weep when I think of who she shoulkd have been and compare that to who she is.
It is sobering to see how a foreign environment can so influence genetic endowment. As I have said repeatedly, I hardly recognize this person as being a member of my family, much less my own child. Her values are so different, so foreign, I can hardly grasp it.
They took my perfectly good baby and they ruined her.
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