Secondary infertility and adoption
May 7, 2004 Adoption
Really quick about the photo op with the birth mom holding the baby on 20/20: Ellen said it made her feel a little sad for the adoptive parents. Well, as an adoptive parent I think that there’s no reason to feel sad for the adoptive parents. After all, they get a baby. They get to do all the parenting stuff — soccer sign-ups and midnight feedings and bandaging skinned knees. The birth mom gets a photo op.
Rob has been nice enough to continue our conversation and he mentioned that he thought perhaps it may have been easier for me to contemplate an open adoption because we already have a bio child.
I wondered that, too, and I’ve talked about it with other adoptive parents — both those with bio kids and those without. And I talked to our social worker to get her take on it. I now think that having bio kids isn’t a predictor of the kind of adoption a family will choose although it obviously plays a big part.
I think there are those with primary infertility who want to try to replicate the family they meant to have and prefer less openness. And then I think there are those with primary infertility who are happy to take their blank slate and recreate their idea of family through open adoption.
I think there are those with secondary infertility who want their family to work the way it has been working without having to change their core family beliefs. And then I think there are those with secondary infertility who feel ready to grow as a family in a different direction.
What I mean is that having Noah was in many ways a deterrent to different kinds of adoption. He is the primary reason we didn’t adopt out of the foster care system, for example. As we considered open adoption, too, our concerns focused most often on whether or not this would be a good thing for Noah and what risks we were asking him to take with us.
When I consider our eventual embrace of open adoption, I think it has far less to do with having Noah and much more to do with our central values as a family. Here are some of the things that impacted my decision:
–I’m a feminist. And as an infertile feminist, I identify with other women whose lives have been forcibly shaped by the state of their fertility. I feel good about helping J. create a life that does not force parenting upon her but also doesn’t ask her to walk away from her daughter forever.
–There is a birth mother in my extended family. Because of this and because of my work at shelter, birth mothers as a population did not seem like a scary “other” to me.
–I had green hair in college and nursed my son ’til he was 4 1/2. I’m comfortable doing things that make people point at me and whisper behind their hands. In other words, in both shallow and profound ways, I enjoy challenging the status quo.
(I, of course, don’t speak for Brett and sadly, he doesn’t have a blog. In our discussions I can say that my reasons above resonated with him, too, but that he also has his own reasons and he also struggled to overcome issues that were not the same as my own.)
Again, I don’t think that those of us who choose adoption should all adopt in the same way. Thank heavens that some of us want older kids because there are older kids who need us. How wonderful that some of us want to go to foreign lands because there are children in foreign lands who need us. It’s fine that some of us want less openness because there are birth mothers who want less openness, too.
The most important thing, I think, is being sure that we’re making our choices for good reasons. Like when I considered foreign adoption, it was not because foreign adoption called to me so much as I was running from my fears. When I confronted that, I got comfortable with openness. Obviously, not everyone who chooses a foreign adoption is choosing it for those reasons. Too, Rob is surely right that some families take on more openness than they really want in their desperation to have a baby. Definitely a bad idea. Some of those families go on to close the adoption or disappear and leave the birth parents waiting by the phone and/or mailbox. This is the ultimate betrayal and it sickens me when I hear about it.
May 7th, 2004 at 1:19 pm
My husband and I are dealing with primary infertility, and are hoping for an open adoption. If things work out, as open as that portrayed on 20/20.
For me, the thing that helped me see the benefits of open adoption was a story about a boy, adopted shortly after birth, who had to write the story of the day he was born for a school assignment. So he made something up. And that made me think that a child should not have to feel ashamed of either the way he was born or the way he found his family. He should have access to the information that he needs. He should understand why he doesn’t look like mom and dad.
No doubt it would be easier emotionally on us for someone to hand us a baby and then fade into the background. And in some circumstances, that might be best (again, since we haven’t yet adopted, it’s hard to make decisions when you don’t know who all the players are yet). But the point is, I will never be able to deny how any children join our family…adoption wasn’t a decision made just to get a kid, this is for the rest of all of our lives.
It’s still scary as crap, though.
May 7th, 2004 at 2:52 pm
One thing that particularily hit me that you said in your “open adoption” post–that I’d never really thought about, and I’m actually sort of paraphrasing–is that after you confront the situation realistically, you are actually given alot more freedom. I guess I just assumed that all adoptive parents (and I truly don’t mean this negatively) wanted to get their baby, start their new family and then do everything within their power to create the illusion that this was in fact their natural born child. I don’t mean lying or pretending…I mean, lock out any history that the child may have had prior to the adoption. Sort of ignore the fact that the child did not come from their uterus. But that isn’t the truth. I’m learning that life is simply more complicated than that. However you try to wipe the slate clean, there is still a birth mother out there. Open or closed adoption aside, I think what I am learning is that acknowledging and accepting the real-life situation is important for everyone involved.
May 7th, 2004 at 4:25 pm
I’ve never tried to get pregnant, so I have no idea whether I’m fertile or not. I’ve always assumed (I guess naively, but commonly) that I am.
But we have chosen adoption to start our family and open adoption is our preference. We just don’t have a lot of fear about it. I think that because we planned adoption by choice, at the outset, we chose not to engage in much fantasy about biology, so we don’t regard doing it this way as a loss. It is also the case that one of our guiding ethics as a same-sex couple is the idea of chosen family. In a subculture of people for whom biology is often not an option (from rejection by biological family to inability to conceive together), queers learn early and we learn often how to bond with “biological strangers”.
As a presumptively fertile lesbian, given the choice of an anonyomous sperm donor or a known birthmother (and maybe more birth family) my personal ethics also push me to choose more connection rather than more alienation in my family.
And maybe because I’m a socialist, as well as queer, as well as progressive Christian, as well as anti-racist, and any number of other things that add up to a quite skeptical view of dominant cultural fantasies, the nuclear family is not a big ideal for me.
There’s one more take on open adoption and why someone might want to do it.