The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  It was not long afterward that this woman left her job, having concluded that the agency wanted her to continue her predecessor’s policy of counseling all birth mothers in the same coercive way, insisting that their baby deserved an older, married couple as parents and that there really was no acceptable alternative to adoption.

  Our approach to counseling was entirely different at Adoption Connections, where we encouraged all our clients to consider every possible choice available, especially parenting. Every woman who called the agency spoke with either Patti or me, sometimes daily and for months-long stretches. We dealt with whatever issues arose and sometimes found ourselves counseling them about concerns such as abusive relationships or financial problems that had little (or possibly everything) to do with an adoption decision. It was a steep learning curve and, as with child welfare, the situations people were in were often sad and frustrating, but they were always compelling.

  It didn’t take long for us to come to the realization that we didn’t and couldn’t necessarily know what was best for our clients and shouldn’t sit in judgment of their decisions. Even with clients we got to know especially well, we were not in a position to determine what the right course of action would be for them, nor was it ethical for us to do so. We were careful to avoid even the appearance of coercion or bias about what a birth mother “should” do in regard to her decision to relinquish. This was equally true whether she was someone who we felt would be a completely capable parent or someone whom Child Protective Services would prevent from taking her baby home from the hospital.

  Our emphasis on counseling for all options sometimes seemed confusing to adoptive parents. After all, we were working for and being paid by them and, ethical considerations aside, if our job was to help them adopt a child, why wasn’t it also our job to encourage birth parents to relinquish?

  Some adoptive parents initially fear the involvement of a counselor, believing that if everyone can just avoid bringing up the tough issues throughout the pregnancy, and also avoid having the birth parents bond with the baby right after the birth, then everything will be fine. The goal seems to be to accomplish the adoption before the birth parents have had a chance to reconsider. Not only is that unethical, but it often backfires—as it should.

  Waiting adoptive parents can feel that they want a baby almost at any cost.

  However, no adoptive parent would really want to be involved in a situation in which the birth mother regretted having relinquished the child. If, as a hopeful parent, you doubt the truth of that statement, imagine a situation in which your child was one day faced with a birth mother who was filled with sadness, bitterness, and regret, and who felt that she had been pressured into the adoption. This scenario is among an adoptive parent’s (and a counselor’s) worst nightmares.

  All of these considerations informed our counseling philosophy at Adoption Connections: namely, that everyone benefits when birth parents address the reality of their situation early on. If birth parents are going to change their minds about adoption, we want them to do so as soon as possible, both so that they can start preparing for parenthood and so that the family hoping to adopt can avoid deeper emotional and financial investment and loss.

  Especially in the early years of Adoption Connections, many callers said at the outset that they felt committed to relinquishing and were simply looking for the right adoptive family. They insisted that they didn’t need counseling around this issue—they just needed assistance with coordinating an adoption. Nevertheless, we made it clear, both to them and to the adoptive parents, that we felt it was important to also talk with all birth parents about the idea of parenting their child. We felt it was necessary to at least acknowledge the possibility that the birth parents might change their minds about adoption at some point, and we wanted them to thoroughly explore their motivation for an adoption and to thoroughly understand their alternatives. We were intent on avoiding the scenario in which the birth mother single-mindedly insists that there will be an adoption, never allows for any other possibility, and rejects any sort of discussion about this issue.

  Indeed, birth parents who are adamant about adoption are the most likely to change their minds after the birth. This is because many of them have essentially been in denial throughout the pregnancy, not allowing themselves to fully comprehend how much they will love their child and how incredibly painful the loss of the child will be. Once the baby is born, they may find themselves overwhelmed by the unexpected emotion and interpret the love they feel for their baby as a sign that they should change their minds about the adoption. And, in all probability, they should—but they also should have allowed themselves to get the counseling that would have helped them recognize their true feelings before the birth.

  I am periodically asked to meet with a prospective birth parent who is “definitely” planning an adoption. The request often comes from a family who is planning a private adoption and working with an attorney who has referred them to me. This adoptive family has become aware of a friend-of-a-friend’s daughter’s boyfriend’s sister, who is pregnant and has chosen them as the adoptive parents for her baby. They assure me that this girl is headed for college and says she doesn’t even like children, so there’s no way she’ll change her mind, and everyone involved agrees with this assessment. My services are usually called upon late in the pregnancy to help create the post-placement contact agreement, which will spell out the details of their ongoing contact.

  Often, what I discover when I meet this girl is that, while her parents and the baby’s father are assuming she’ll do the sensible thing and relinquish, she is secretly hoping that they’ll all do the sensible thing once they see the baby and realize that she and they can’t possibly give it up. And she’s almost always right—the other people almost always do change their minds when confronted with both the baby and the mother’s desire to parent, and there is no adoption. If this girl had been allowed or had allowed herself to get some counseling and honestly explore the option of parenting, everyone would likely have foreseen this outcome—and been able to plan for it—much earlier in the pregnancy.

  Fortunately, our emphasis on counseling at Adoption Connections greatly reduced the incidence of eleventh-hour changes of heart. This is not to say that we eliminated them entirely. But because we focused on counseling, it was more common for a birth mother to change her mind during the pregnancy, after a counseling session or a meeting with an attorney, or after some other concrete step in the process. Adoptive parents sometimes struggled to understand that such a change of heart wasn’t caused by the counselor or attorney but was simply a matter of the birth parents facing the reality of the pregnancy earlier rather than later.

  It is crucial for adoptive parents to understand that, just as unbiased counseling does not cause a birth mother to change her mind, women who choose to relinquish do not do so out of any failure to bond with their babies. It is not the case that if a birth mother is given time to bond with her baby, she won’t be able to follow through with the adoption. On the contrary, the exact opposite is more likely to be true: birth mothers are able to relinquish precisely because of the strength of their love and their commitment to giving their child a life they feel unable to provide. Most of the birth mothers we worked with relinquished their babies for the same basic reason: they did not feel that, at that time in their lives, they were able to be the type of parent they wanted their child to have. They all loved their babies and bonded with them during the pregnancy. Their decisions to relinquish were reinforced by that bond.

  It is certainly less complicated and less painful for us all to believe that good women and good mothers would never consider relinquishing their parental rights. Imagining the loss of a child is so unthinkable that it is easier for us to assume that women who would consider adoption simply must not care as much about their children as the rest of us do. It is easy to believe, from the vantage point of a stable and comfortable life, tha
t there is no circumstance in which you would willingly give up your child.

  But in reality, there are circumstances in which loving parents make incredibly painful and selfless decisions because they believe these decisions are in the child’s best interests. The majority of the women I’ve worked with chose adoption because they truly believed that their children would be better off in an adoptive home. It is through their love for their children that these women find the strength to endure their own grief over the loss of the child.

  It should go without saying that the decision to relinquish is as difficult and painful a decision as a person can make, and also that a woman facing this decision deserves unbiased counseling. Sadly, many birth parents planning adoptions get no counseling at all, let alone the unbiased, professional counseling they deserve. There are strong forces working against this type of counseling for birth parents, and there don’t appear to be any counterbalancing forces at work to promote the involvement of a counselor, other than in the most minimal ways.

  A few years after becoming co-director of Adoption Connections, I sent a letter to the many Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) in Washington State, introducing myself and my agency. I held out a shred of hope that they would read what I had to say about unbiased counseling and respecting the wishes and values of each client, but I was soon disabused of that notion. I got exactly one response—a phone call from a woman in eastern Washington who wanted to know only one thing: “Do you believe that marriage is between a man and a woman?” “That is the definition of traditional marriage,” I told her, and added that most of the birth mothers we counseled were looking for couples in a traditional marriage. She then asked if we would ever place a baby in anything other than a traditional family, and I responded that the choice of the adoptive family was not the agency’s to make. I told her that our job was to help birth parents make whatever decisions and plans they felt were right for their baby. This was greeted by an audible “tsk, tsk” so I added that good counselors would never presume to tell their clients what they should or shouldn’t do. The woman said a crisp goodbye and hung up.

  I wasn’t really surprised that a Crisis Pregnancy Center counselor wasn’t interested in unbiased counseling; I guess I wasn’t even surprised that she would be so blatant about it.

  Obviously, Crisis Pregnancy Centers aren’t going to provide unbiased counseling. Their primary purpose is to prevent abortions, and everyone is entitled to promote their own beliefs on that subject. What is objectionable is the way they lead women in crisis to believe that they can come to Crisis Pregnancy Centers for decision-making counseling that covers a full range of options. Instead, CPCs provide a reasonably appropriate service for clients who already share their views about abortion, and hard-sell anti-abortion rhetoric for those who don’t. But that is not how they advertise themselves. They promote a misleading image: that of a garden-variety pregnancy/adoption counseling service to which you can turn for help with an unplanned pregnancy.

  Typically, the first decision someone with such a pregnancy makes is whether to have an abortion. Also typically, because the pregnancy was unplanned and often not even acknowledged in the early stages, the decision about abortion is extremely time sensitive. Despite the wishes of the CPCs, many, probably most, women with unplanned pregnancies consider abortion as an option and believe they have the right to make that decision for themselves, without the interference or condemnation of others. Because the CPC ads clearly state that they provide counseling and assistance, with no mention of an anti-abortion agenda, women have no way of knowing what they will encounter when they contact a CPC counselor. Expecting counseling, they will instead be assaulted with proselytizing, at best, and underhanded coercion, at worst.

  A good birth-parent counselor, by contrast, helps her clients make their own decisions. Rather than persuade or pressure her clients to adopt a particular stance on abortion or single parenthood or on what the religion or sexual orientation of an adoptive family “should” be, or on other such topics, she lets birth parents work through their own feelings about these things, with the counselor being careful not to signal suggestion or judgment.

  This does not mean that a counselor must remain passive in a situation where a clearly incapable birth parent makes the decision to parent. In fact, the opposite is true: counselors are legally required to make a referral to Child Protective Services if they feel a child is endangered. In such situations, I believe it is ethical, reasonable, and helpful to talk with the birth parent about alternatives to having the state put the baby into foster care. But even in these situations, it is unethical for a counselor to pressure a birth parent to relinquish. While other forces may compel her to do so, that is not the role of the counselor.

  23

  Two Open Adoptions

  Our society often views birth parents and adoptive parents as natural enemies, fighting over a prize they can’t both have. My experience has taught me that this perception couldn’t be more distorted. What I’ve almost always seen, in the adoptions I’ve been privileged to be a part of, are people who come together out of a shared need for each other and with the shared goal of providing a wonderful life for a child they all love. But birth parents and adoptive parents are like everyone else in the world; they’re all different. Some are people who will develop a valued relationship with each other, even outside the realm of planning an adoption. Others are people who will have a special bond because of the child, but little else in common. In some extreme situations, the circumstances may be such that an ongoing relationship isn’t desirable or even possible. Happily, almost all of the birth- and adoptive-parent relationships that I have been directly involved with fall into one of the first two categories.

  Adoptive parents who recognize and freely acknowledge the significance of the birth mother’s gift to their family will, in turn, give her the gift of their understanding. The birth mother’s contribution can be acknowledged by talking with the child about how it took love and courage for her to be able to plan an adoption for her child. It can also be acknowledged in simpler, day-to-day ways such as telling the child, “Your birth mom has beautiful brown eyes [or a wonderful sense of humor, or loved music, or whatever the case may be], just like you.” A few comments like these go a long way toward helping a child avoid the impression that there is something negative or unmentionable about birth parents or adoption (or the child). When adoptive parents demonstrate comfortable, nonjudgmental attitudes toward birth parents, it has a profound effect on the child’s self-esteem and sense of well-being.

  One spring day, a college student who had just discovered that she was seven months pregnant called me. Emma had gotten my phone number from a friend whose mother had placed a child through our agency several years earlier. She was calling from North Carolina, where she was in her junior year at a small private college. She sounded stressed, but also polite and articulate, and we weren’t long into the conversation before it was clear that she was highly intelligent, responsible, and thoughtful. She had been dating a fellow student, and they had gone their separate ways months before she knew she was pregnant, but they remained friends. Both were good students on athletic scholarships.

  An unplanned pregnancy was so far out of the realm of possibility for Emma that she had managed to avoid “knowing” until the end of her seventh month. This seems incredible, but denial can be overpowering, and when coupled with strong stomach muscles and a forgiving wardrobe, it is indeed possible to hide a pregnancy. I’ve known a number of young women who managed to hide their pregnancies from everyone—including themselves—until they delivered a baby.

  The more I talked with Emma, the more I liked her. She told me that she had definitely decided on adoption because she felt she wasn’t in a good position to give the baby the home she wanted her to have. She did not see herself resuming her relationship with Garrett, the birth father, although he had offered, and she didn’t want her baby to be
raised by a single parent. Emma had obviously done a lot of thinking before she called me and had tried to educate herself about adoption.

  At first, Emma had assumed that she would work with an adoption agency in the state where she lived but had been terrified when agencies there told her that she would not be able to select an adoptive family prior to birth because her baby was going to be biracial. It seems they needed to know what the baby would look like before finding an “appropriate” family. I was skeptical when she told me that this was the policy there, but it turned out to be true—and was a real eye-opener for me about the still-present regional differences in this country regarding race.

  Emma’s first and most pressing question for me was whether she would be able to go ahead and choose her baby’s adoptive family. Happily, I was able to reassure her that she could, and that she was going to have a lot of families to choose from. I told her that I would spend some time contacting prospective families and would send her a package of profiles within a few days.

  Calling families about Emma was a pleasure; I had to restrain myself from going on and on about how great I thought she was, even though I didn’t know much about her beyond her basic biographical information and the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed talking with her.

  When I asked Emma what she thought she wanted regarding ongoing contact with the adoptive family, she was fairly vague, insisting that she didn’t want to make demands—she just wanted to find the best family. Since the portfolios I was sending her were all from families in Washington, it seemed that frequent, ongoing, in-person contact was unlikely. I sent her five family profiles, and after talking with most of them, Emma settled on one couple. She expressed relief to have found an adoptive family, they were excited, and we jumped into preparations for a long-distance adoption because the baby was due in not too many weeks.