When adoptions don’t happen
Sep 19, 2006 Adoption
You know those stories where this couple waits and waits for a baby and then they decide to adopt through a lawyer or agency and they get a baby and take it home and parent it and love it (for 3 hours or 3 days or 3 months or 3 years) and then the child ends up back with their first family? Every single case I’ve ever heard of this happening there was some kind of legal issue that gets left out of the conversation. Legal issues like:
–The baby was not legally free to be adopted;
–The baby was taken back within the time set by the state in which the first family could change their mind.
Let me make this clear: Legal adoptions are rarely (if ever) disrupted. Placements are disrupted but a placement is not an adoption. A baby placed in the home of hopeful parents who is returned to his or her first family before the adoption is finalized is not a disrupted adoption; it’s a disrupted placement. (I wasn’t clear on this back when I first wrote about it.) Until the first family signs the legal surrender AND chooses not to revoke it (in the case of states where there is a revocation period after the surrender), the baby is not the child of the adoptive parents.
I’m not downplaying the grief of a family who thought a baby in their arms was theirs only to have the mom (or dad) change her mind. Those families have the right to grieve the loss of the child they hoped would be theirs. However I think it’s imperative that we get the terminology right and that we understand that their grief does not implicate and is not the responsibility of the parents who choose to parent.
Hopeful adoptive parents need to be well schooled on the rights of expectant parents. They need to understand the legal risk they take when they accept the placement of a child who is not legally free. And we must stop demonizing parents who exercise their right to change their minds about adoption plans.
If a parent considers adoption, makes an adoption plan, puts that plan in motion, chooses a family for placement, promises that family to go through with it, births the baby and releases that baby to the care of the family then CHANGES HER MIND, she is exercising her legal right as that child’s mother. She is not morally wrong. Her decision does not make her a liar or selfish or cruel or inhuman or unfeeling. Her decision does not (or at least should not) have anything to do with the adoptive family. This is HER life, HER crisis — we wannabe-adoptive parents, we’re just very interested bystanders living our OWN crisis.
A parent who changes her mind about adoption and chooses to parent is no different than any other parent who takes her baby home from the hospital. The presence of an adoption plan doesn’t make that child a better candidate for adoption than any other child who is born.
We cannot argue that a parent should place her child because she made a plan. We cannot say that the hopeful adoptive parents are better suited than she is because she made a plan. We have no right to trash her for exercising her legal right to parent the child to whom she gave birth instead of placing it with the oh-so-deserving wannabe-parents. We may as well take to the streets and demand that every woman who births a baby in circumstances we deem not ideal gives those babies to oh-so-deserving wannabe-parents. After all, that worked so well before!
I don’t mean to get sarcastic. I’m just frustrated that this is an adoption idea that will not die — that adoption promises mean anything before the surrenders are signed. They don’t. Adoption professionals need to do a better job of telling hopeful parents this. And the public needs more education about what an adoption plan means. (Nothing! For the hopeful wannabe parents it means nothing! It’s all about that family dealing with a crisis and exercising their options!)
We need to separate out our experiences. We (adoptive parents, hopeful adoptive parents) need to understand that our crisis — waiting for a child, hoping for a child, not being placed with a child we hoped to parent, not getting to adopt a child we parented for a short while — is ours and not lay it at the feet of families living their own crisis.
It would be nicer if we were able to sympathize with grieving wannabe parents (hopeful adoptive parents who did not get to parent a child they hoped to parent) without trashing families who changed their mind about placing their babies.
(This goes for fathers who decide they want to parent, too. I’m writing this after reading some comments on a blog entry about hopeful adoptive parents who were disappointed to learn a baby they had for a few days would not be theirs after all. The comments were not BY the parents, they were from some outraged bystanders who don’t seem to know much about adoption and how it works.)
September 19th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
Here, here.
September 20th, 2006 at 12:07 am
As hard as a “failed adoption” is for hopeful adoptive parents (and we had one, so I know firsthand), it is still the child’s firstparents’ right to modify their adoption plan as their feelings about it change. I’m glad you wrote this - I hope lots of adoptive parents have the opportunity to read it.
September 20th, 2006 at 12:19 am
I read the same entry. I had a comment all typed out, and was worried that it wouldn’t be taken in the spirit intended. I don’t belittle the hopeful adoptive parents grief. But the baby’s parents shouldn’t be the scape goats for that grief.
September 20th, 2006 at 12:31 am
I haven’t seen this particular post, but I’ve come across (usually after the fact) folks who had disrupted placements, and there does seem to be a tendency to displace the grief of loss onto rage at the mother who changed her mind. I’m really disturbed at the thought of women who WOULD change their minds, but can’t bear to disappoint or enrage potential adoptive parents whom they’ve already gotten to know.
September 20th, 2006 at 1:05 am
I agree. I saw this same post. Post was respectful, but the comments, not so much. As much as I want a baby and want to parent, I don’t ever want to blame someone for exercising their rights. When you sign up to do domestic adoption, I think you have to be prepared for a number of failed placements. With foster-adopt, I know it is possible a family member will step up, the parents will finally get their act together, or DHS will choose another option. With domestic, the same variables exist, with the added fact that these are FIT parents until proven otherwise. FIT. Someone is not unfit just because they or their partner chose to investigate adoption. I think that gets lost in a lot of these situations. Merely investigating adoption is not an admission that you are not a fit mother or father, not a blackmark on the parenting report card. If they decide that another option makes more sense, then that is their right. One of the reasons why people cannot relinquish prior to birth is precisely because things change. Not for everyone, but there are those who will change their mind about what they want after the baby arrives. Demonizing them or faulting them for changing their mind seems counterproductive when that is the purpose of the waiting period. Yes, it hurts. Yes, I fully expect that we will go through several emotional failed placements or “almost” situations before finally getting the situation that works for us. Yes, it sucks. I will cry. But, I refuse to blame the parents/DHS/relatives. This is not the parenting olympics and I won’t get trapped into thinking that we would have been the best choice. I can’t know that. I think a better use of the grief is to channel it to say “This sucks for us, but I’m really happy that I was able to be a part of their decision–of helping them decide to do what they decided.” I’m so sorry that someone who has already gone through a lot of loss is suffering again, but demonizing someone exercising their rights just isn’t the appropriate response.
September 20th, 2006 at 2:19 am
Thank you. We have been through an adoption and always knew that any birth mom could change her mind. For us, we feel as though the best scenerio is for the child to stay with their biological parents, but if they can’t that is where we would be available. I feel as though birth parents have every right to change their mind … it is her baby at that point.
September 20th, 2006 at 3:09 am
Absolutely right, Dawn.
When I think back to when we were in the process of adopting, I’m struck by how ENTITLED I felt - and never prepared for the possibility that our children’s mothers might reclaim them. I definitely agree that better preparation by agencies is essential.
September 20th, 2006 at 4:39 am
My fears about my own reaction to a situation like this are part of why we decided to adopt internationally.
[bracketing: yes, poverty is coercion of a different sort, yes, nasty unethical things can happen in international adoption as well. I'm doing my best though.]
I wish that the commenters on that site had stopped for a minute not to make totally classist assumptions about the baby’s parents, but to imagine themselves in the place of that father.
Yes, yes, he said he was okay with the adoption. But doesn’t everything change once you get to fall in love with that baby? That baby - not an abstract u/s image? Why is it so easy to deny him the parental love we claim for ourselves?
September 20th, 2006 at 4:54 am
To respectfully disagree, I think the majority of the comments merely sympathized with the sadness the hopeful adoptive parents must have felt and left it at that. Only a few took a nasty swipe at the first parents/birth parents. And the post was not intended to educate about the rights of first parents/birth parents vs hopeful adoptive parents — it was a request for sympathy for a grieving friend and so logically focused on the friend’s loss.
I appreciate your sensitivity on the subject, Dawn, but to me your post seems to be saying, in essence, “well, you were only HOPEFUL adoptive parents, so you really shouldn’t feel that bad,” and thus really IS minimizing their grief, despite the disclaimer at the end that this is not intended. I am not sure how that is any more moral than “blaming” the first parents/birth parents?
In any event, I appreciated your comment on the other blog as a tactful reminder to those who inappropriately placed blame.
September 20th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
It so often happens that the post itself is respectful but the comments (usually by people not so involved in adoption) are really ignorant and offensive. This really drives home just how isolated we are in our state of enlightenment regarding adoption: most of the general public really doesn’t get it. They think of the baby scoop era as the golden age, and they totally buy into the happy ending fantasy.
September 20th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Carla, I didn’t say they were “only” hopeful adoptive parents. Emphasizing that they were NOT the parents of the baby does not in any way dismiss their feelings. We just need to separate that from the experience of the potential birth parents who decide to parent. One is its own thing and the other is its own thing.
I feel morally obligated to say something when people confuse the connections in adoption. We have so many hurtful, shameful stereotypes and one of them is that a child belongs to waiting adoptive parents before the surrenders are signed. Google around, hang at adoption bulletin boards and watch the extreme entitlement of waiting adoptive parents who rail against parents who choose to parent. It is a deeply ingrained assumption that drives a lot of the injustice in adoption.
September 20th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Wow, great topic! Back in Appalachia, there was a similar case of the birth mother trying to get her baby back. She was pilloried in the news and everyone knew what a bad slut she was because after all this time she was demanding the child be returned. Meanwhile, the adoptive parents had all the big religious groups on their side, they held a *public rally of support* hosted by a former Mrs. America (I’m not making this up) who was also huge in the Christian circles.
Finally, someone at the local paper interviewed the mom. The adoption had never been legal and she’d been trying to get the baby back ever since the non-legal adoption went through — five years. She seemed like a nice young woman, period, not some evil drug-taking whore (and I know that birth mothers are not evil drug-taking whores — hope everyone understands I’m only ventriloquizing the prevailing public opinion).
September 20th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Thank you for writing such a clear post about this situation. The comments on the thread keep getting more and more nasty, and while I know I am being naive - I still find it shocking how disrespectful and two-faced the perceptions of parents considering adoption are. It makes me angry to think about how many people act as if they are doing potential birthparents a favor..and the expectant parent/potential birthparent should feel obligated. Dude - PAPs need to realize that they are getting a gift - a child and the birthparents’ faith/trust that their child will be raised well in another family’s home. And as with all gifts - the giver is in no way obligated to actually give one. Be grateful if they do - but one can never *expect* a true gift. Ugg - sorry for being a bit incoherent here - it just makes me mad.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Dawn,
I think you are correct in what you wrote about making a distinction that birth mothers and birth fathers have legal rights to decide not to go through with adoption plans. We were fully aware of what we were getting into legally and emotionally with adoption for both our kids. As much as I knew it would hurt if a child left our home after being placed with us, I knew the legal limits. My wise adoption attorney also counseled us that if we didn’t respect the birth family’s legal rights, we’d have to face our son or daughter in the future and they would know what we did. Our attorney always stressed treating the birth family with complete respect because the birth family is our child’s family and is part of them.
The only thing I will say is this: when we talked to my children’s birth mothers, we said to them that we would survive if they decided not to go thru with the adoption plan. We would be sad if they decided to change their minds, but we would survive. If at all possible, we asked them to consider their choices sooner than later–to not wait until the very end of the legal limit.
We paid for a counselor for my daugther’s birthmother (she chose the counselor) for a month or two after birth so that she could work thru her decision–to make sure it was right for her (in CA the waiting period was 90 days). The birth mother almost decided to not go thru with the adoption. When she decided it was the right decision, I felt that it wasn’t made just to please us. Was it easy to live thru? No. But, I can, when my daughter is an adult, tell my daughter the truth about what happened, and I don’t have to be ashamed of how I acted.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
I didn’t read the post you are referring too, but your post made me think about that child named Richard, I think back in the 90’s. His birth father hadn’t consented to the adoption and it went to the courts, and the child was returned after three years? But the aparents had thought it was legal and final? I’m still haunted by him crying for his mother as they took him to live with his biological dad. It breaks my heart into little pieces. I think if the child has been with the aparents for years, and sees those people as his/her parents, then it is cruel to take the child back entirely. I know this may not make sense legally, but I really think there should be joint custody in that case. I know this almost never happens, and is sort of beside the point of your post, but it made me think of it. And I’m talking about adoptions that appeared legal, but an honest mistake was made.
September 20th, 2006 at 5:28 pm
I went looking at both the Baby Richard and Baby Jessica cases. According to wikipedia (take that with a grain of salt), Baby Richard’s bio-dad did file for custody within the 30 days the state allowed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Richard_Case
This was true of Baby Jessica as well (as I understand it). In both cases the adoptive parents chose to fight for custody even though the law was NOT on their side.
September 20th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
Speaking of adoptions that don’t work out, I wonder how many adoptive parents would have the heart and guts to do this.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/urban/family/features/975/
September 21st, 2006 at 6:27 am
Several years ago (10, maybe?) I covered a seminar/talk given by an adoption/surrogacy/etc. lawyer in California, for a publication I was then writing for. What he said about the “Baby Richard” case is that, when the bio-dad first asked for the baby back, the adoptive parents consulted not an adoption lawyer, but their usual family lawyer. Usual family lawyer, not being up on adoption law, advised them to keep the baby and fight for him. Now, obviously, you would expect an adoption lawyer to want potential a-parents to go to him over general lawyers, but I do think that his general point holds true. In pretty much all of these “crying child reclaimed” stories, it’s a case where the adoption was never finalized to begin with, and the outcome was foreordained to begin with. The ones ultimately responsible for a talking child being “ripped” from the people who have raised him are the loving, well-meaning would-be adopters who don’t give him up. Tragic but true.
September 21st, 2006 at 2:48 pm
i remember baby jessica. i was furious with the adoptive parents. if i have the story straight, it was within days that the request was made for the baby back. i think initially it was made by the mom, but cause she had signed the relinquishment papers, the dad then made the request and then it took several years.
it was said that the adoptive parents didnt relinquish jessica cause once the a-mom held the baby, she felt it was hers. but of course it wasnt. i felt even then that she shd have immediately given the baby back, rightly or wrongly. (i am not meaning to diminish any pain that aparents have, but it was so soon after.)
i recall there were two different states involved and i believe this was part of the problem, since each state had different laws re adoption.
also, the a-parents were seen as more educated & better off economically.
one thing the bio parents did, that i felt uncomfortable about was changing the name of the child, once they finally got her back. i believe they did it gradually, but didnt feel it shd have been done at all.
sorry for the long poat
September 21st, 2006 at 3:59 pm
i dont want to misrepresent the case so here is a link to info about it.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978889-2,00.html
September 21st, 2006 at 5:18 pm
I take issue with the idea that a refusal to sign adoption papers is the same as “deciding to parent.”
My view is no doubt colored by working in family court. However, the idea that all parents who choose not to go through with adoptions go onto to actually parent the child is patently false.
That’s where some of my “judgement” comes from. It’s difficult to remain steadfastly optismitic or even respectful of every parent when you see them time and again in familiy court.
It’s a complicated situation. While I certainly do not agree with demonizing anyone, pretending that shared DNA equals a true best interest of the child is equally absurd.
September 21st, 2006 at 6:26 pm
Kathleen, there is a big difference between someone in the early stages of domestic adoption- usually within days of birth,someone who wants to TPR of their own free will, and someone who ends up in family court with the threat of having their parents rights involuntarily terminated. No one here is advocating biological rights above all else.
There are crummy biological parents, there are crummy adoptive parents. I am sure we all know of situations where children might be better off with another family. But that shouldn’t be a given just because someone considers adoption.
September 21st, 2006 at 7:00 pm
[...] Kathleen wrote: I take issue with the idea that a refusal to sign adoption papers is the same as “deciding to parent.†My view is no doubt colored by working in family court. However, the idea that all parents who choose not to go through with adoptions go onto to actually parent the child is patently false. [...]
September 21st, 2006 at 7:02 pm
I understand the legal “safeguards” built around adoption, and of course I understand why a mother (or father) might change their adoption plan and decide to parent after the baby is born. It is a heartwrenching decision on everyone.
But I think that parent that changes the plan must also understand the pain of a hopeful adoptive family. They shouldn’t base their decision on this, of course, but they must understand the effect of their actions, just as a family planning on adopting must understand that a change in the plan is a possibility.
I don’t think it matters emotionally if it’s a placement or an adoption — to prepare for a baby, to fall in love with that child before they are even born, to care for the mom while she’s pregnant, and then to have that child in your home, to finally hold that baby — and then to have a birth parent change their mind — it’s got to just tear your heart out.
How could you not be angry with someone for taking back something that you thought they were giving to you?
I’m not saying that changing the plan and deciding to parent makes a mom or a dad a bad person, but I do understand the anger of the hopeful adoptive family, and friends of the family. The anger doesn’t seem inappropriate to me.
Acting on the anger, or being hurtful or unkind to the parents would be inappropriate, of course, but feeling the anger? Expressing it in a safe place among friend?
I get that…