I’ve been intrigued by the Infant Adoption Training Initiative for a long time. This is from their About page:
The curriculum developed by the Infant Adoption Training Initiative, Understanding Infant Adoption (UIA) is designed to train health care professionals how to provide adoption information and referral to pregnant women. The UIA provides participants with opportunities for self-reflection and open discussion of issues facing women with unplanned pregnancies, as well as the different service providers available in their areas. Understanding the different resources available for pregnancy counseling and adoption services is a key characteristic necessary to make informed referrals consistent with client/patient needs and preferences.
As I understand it, the IATI grew out of a discussion about bringing down abortion rates and the NCFA (the anti-open records — what they call “mutual consent” adoption lobbying group) got the initial grant in 2002 and designed the program although other groups now administer their own trainings (I’m not sure how much of the original material they still use or how much leeway they have in changing the material). Who’s going to these trainings? These people:
• State and County Health Department professionals
• School nurses
• Crisis Pregnancy Centers
• State Department of Social Services professionals
• Hospital nurses
• Title X Clinics
• Family Planning Clinics
• Migrant Health Services
• Staff from OB/GYN Clinics
• Staff from Primary Care Clinics
• Indian Health Services staff
• Urban Indian Health staff
• Abstinence programs
• Health Care staff from youth and adult correctional facilities
• Health Care staff from group care facilities & residential treatment centers
• Planned Parenthood
• Military Health Services
• Foster Care
• Public Housing
• College Campus Health Services
• Rape and Domestic Violence Crisis Centers
• Domestic Violence Shelters
Now I’ve talked to some folks who have gone to these trainings and they say they’re pretty good (these are adoption professionals, natch). And from what I can tell, they CAN be pretty good — depending on who’s doing the training.
The program is supposed to help counsel women (women are most definitely the target) about their options, which include parenting, terminating and placing. Get that? They’re supposed to talk to women about abortion options. One wonders how abstinence programs and crisis pregnancy centers manage THAT. From Out of Compliance? Implementing the Infant Adoption Awareness Act:
Federal regulations for the Title X family planning program require pregnancy counselors to “offer pregnant women the opportunity to be provided information and counseling regarding each of the following options: prenatal care and delivery; infant care, foster care, or adoption; and pregnancy termination.” If such information and counseling is requested, counselors must “provide neutral, factual information and nondirective counseling on each of the options, and referral upon request, except with respect to any option(s) about which the pregnant woman indicates she does not wish to receive such information and counseling.” DHHS also elaborates that “nondirective” means that counselors “may not steer or direct clients toward selecting any option.”
So is that happening? Are women getting the information that they need to make the best decision for themselves without anyone trying to “steer or direct” them towards selecting a particular option? I have my doubts. Adam Pertman phrases some of his concerns this way:
Here’s an example of how the way in which adoption is presented is so important: The curriculum presents the best interests of the “child” as paramount; that sounds just right and, in the adoption world, it’s accepted as a given. But it invariably refers to children who need homes, not ones who are not yet born. No professional standards of practice advise physicians and counselors to recommend to pregnant women that they weigh the best interests of their fetuses and as yet unidentified adoptive parents on a par with their own. This perspective implicitly furthers an agenda aimed at minimizing the option of abortion and perhaps even the option of parenting by the biological mother. [emphasis mine]
I’ve been digging around some more about this and came across this video about Grief and Adoption. If you’re interested in adoption reform or in reproductive rights, I encourage you to check it out. On the one hand, someone’s talking about grief and adoption and focusing on first mom grief even though they’re adoption professionals. Yay! Oh wait a minute, not so much yay. Because the focus is on counseling expectant mothers and it recommends that women start making plans for dealing with the grief before the baby is born. So, for example, the counselor recommends lining up who you will have take you home from the hospital. In other words, the focus is on getting an expectant mother to accept her birth mother role while she is still pregnant in the guise of helping her deal with her inevitable grief. Sounds like the same old adoption policies to me. There’s also discussion about “unresolved” grief, which makes it sound like if you handle your grief right and resolve it that there aren’t long-term consequences to placing your child.
(Note the young woman they have speaking to the birth mother experience. Note that she laughs every time she discusses something heart wrenching. Note that she insists that she’s dealt with her grief through her counseling and to prove it she says, “And you deal with [grief]. You don’t hide it, you don’t try to deny it. You accept it and work through it and in the end you come to healing and, ummm, a lot of happiness and joy for the whole situation.”
(In other words, if you’re still hurting you must be doing it wrong.)
I haven’t watched the other videos yet so I can’t speak to them.
What disturbs me most is that in the guise of loving compassion the video seeks to normalize and thus neutralize the prospect of birth parent grief. It IS normal to grieve. It IS healthy to grieve. Absolutely, I agree. But the video and I part ways when it intimates that to move through your grief in a healthy manner you should be preparing for it WHILE you make your adoption plan (i.e., while you’re still in the decision-making phase).
Let me see if I can explain this better. Imagine if you were contemplating divorce and you went to a therapist to work it out and the therapist’s whole focus was on preparing you to grieve your marriage as part of your decision-making process. I don’t mean that the therapist just asks you to think about how you’ll feel when you first see your partner out on a date with someone else, I mean that you spend time each session planning your divorce ceremony. I mean that the therapist starts referring to you as “single.” I mean that the therapist spends time comparing you to your partner’s future girlfriend and reminding you of how much work you still need to do to be as appropriate for him as she is. Imagine if the therapy, in short, isn’t about helping you make a decision but is more about helping you come to terms with a decision that is ordained for you the minute you walked in the door.
Ok, so in THAT context, a discussion about grief starts seeming suspect, right? Because the foregone conclusion is that the grief is part and parcel of your experience without the question of whether that experience is necessary. Here, grief is presented as something to help birth parents deal with before they are birth parents! It’s not something to talk about as part of the decision making process and that, my friends, is setting someone up NOT to be as informed as the infant adoption awareness training purports wanting women to be.
That last paragraph is so dang convoluted that I need to stop here and untangle my brain.
(I’ve just ordered a whole slew of the materials they offer and hopefully they’ll send them. I’m not done trying to learn more about this.)
Related posts:
Here is where you are so extraordinary, as a thinker about the adoption process. You dare to look at this stuff.
I think this is very similar to the early 60′s paradigm. There is, implicit in this, the idea that a pregnant woman is destined for suffering… because she’s a sinner, right? Because if she wasn’t a sinner, wouldn’t the suffering be better shared around, somehow? However, because we are compassionate about your sin, we’ll help you with the grief process. And we want that over by the time the baby is born because, at that moment, you cease to be a mother. That’s the handoff, you’re done. Someone else is “the mother” now. Tidy.
As far as the issue of anti-choice organizations discussing the options in a neutral way, no prob. The clue is in here: offer pregnant women the opportunity to be provided. That means, in practice, that if a woman doesn’t ask for information on abortion, you needn’t give it to her. Just by having the door open, you “offered her the OPPORTUNITY” to get this info. Her neglecting to ask is her responsibility. She could have marched up to the window and demanded a pamphlet, but she just went with the program. What do you expect of a sinner, anyway.
Are you including every point in time pre-birth/placement as part of the decision making phase?
(This would be easier in person. Take this as me being eager to talk about this b/c I also find it fascinating but needing to clarify this one point first so I know I understand what you’re saying!)
[...] video I linked to in the last post, the target audience for it is not expectant mothers or hopeful adoptive parents; the target [...]
[...] settled back for some light reading, knowing that I’d likely be waiting a bit and was shocked, when just minutes later, he walked [...]
First question: Why do we actively encourage something that we know will result in grief? Punishing the sinner, perhaps, as Brooke wrote?
Second question: Does processing/resolving grief result in joy or happiness over the situation? I would argue no. I’ve never heard anyone say they are joyful about a loved one’s death. I think the joy/happiness resonse is denial and suppression, resulting in life-loing unresolved grief – yet this is what the agencies promote.
1. Exactly. That’s the problem with normalizing the grief.
2. Exactly again. I’m looking at that young woman on the video and thinking in five or ten years she’s not going to love watching herself push away the grief like that. She looks like she’s in the midst of it to me and not “over” anything (as if “getting over” such a loss is a reasonable goal — more that parents who have placed will have to learn how to live with the loss not “move on” from it).
“…parents who have placed will have to learn how to live with the loss not “move on” from it.”
Agreed. We live with it, we cope to the best of our abilty, but we do not “move on” from it.
The mother in the video is still very young….will she still claim she has no regrets 30 years later? She may need to hold on to this claim throughout her life to rationalize the adoption, which is often quite hurtful to the child. I’ve heard many adoptees say they are hurt when they hear their mother say she is happy she gave them away or that she has no regrets about it. This can negatively impact their relationship later in life.
The discussion about a ritual is odd to me (I’m from a different era, my son is 27 years old) I can’t even begin to fathom any ritual that would help with adoption grief. The scene described by the mother in the video made my skin crawl – birth mother and adoptive mother went to church together for a ceremony of some type and the pastor talked about INFERTILITY of all things! Sounds like the focus was on adoption as a solution to infertility – but wasn’t this ceremony supposed to be about the birth mother’s grief and healing? Hmm, doesn’t sit right with me.
@maybe, I thought of that, too (re., the ritual’s mention of infertility) and I wondered about her saying she didn’t really remember it but she remembered THAT part. Now, I don’t remember much about my wedding ceremony (in the judge’s chamber) because I was so nervous but it still struck me that she couldn’t remember most of it but remembered THAT and it struck me as significant. It could just be the way the tape is edited and I could be reading too much but it still struck me. I just hate that simplistic way of looking at adoption — like people are puzzle pieces and one’s crisis fits another’s joy. I appreciate some people find solace in looking at the world that way but I think too often it’s our justification for complicity.
I just watched that video. Ow.
The girl shakes her head “no” every time she says she has no regrets, her family has no regrets, they were totally supportive… and very strongly during “I have no regrets at all.” With the sound off, you’d know she was saying, “I’m LYING here.”
It’s the uncomfortable, too-bright laughter that does it for me. I have given that exact too-bright laugh while insisting I was fine and I tell you, I never ever ever was fine. You can’t laugh that too bright laugh and be fine, especially when you’re so clearly shiny-eyed from trying not to cry.
Who are we normalizing it for? Who benefits from normalizing it? Those that are coercing, intimdating mothers to surrender? Those that are recieving the babies? Are we attempting to normalize it so that those that take babies from mothers can feel better about themselves or are we attempting to make those mothers feel better cuz we KNOW they weill be forever damaged by the loss of their child? Or maybe, just maybe, we still want desperately to make something very wrong feel very right?
Let me share with you that before I surrendered my daughter to a broker, I was given ZERO counseling on grief, loss, PTSD and more. When I put myself into therapy less than a year after my daughter was placed, I was met with a therapist who told me I should be glad that someone was willing to adopt the child born to a whore like me. (true story).
I suspect that was his way of normalizing my grief.
I wonder how many mothers would place if they were instructed to grieve pre birth? That assumes they are being told all the horrible things that they may feel and experience (and that their child may as well, no?).
Once you dislose the reason for the possible grief, does the mother still place?
If someone had to me I would be forever damaged, that my subsequent children would be hurt, my intimate relationships negatively effected, my daughter inflicted with primal wound or other, I would like to believe I would have thought twice.
I think part of what happens is that everyone involved starts thinking that when a mother is coming apart before the surrender (after birth), they should say, “Remember we told you that it would be hard but let’s go through our coping mechanisms” instead of “Ok, let’s start over. Let’s talk options.”
Agreed.
Well the adoptee’s grief is given all of two sentences and that is “normal”
So how can people say this is good for children. Sick.
If you have an interest in seeing the actual trainer’s manual or the binders given to participants, let us know. We were briefly involved in the Hope Cottage version of the Infant Adoption Awareness Training Initiative over a year ago, and have some materials left over. Hope Cottage was the “lead” agency chosen by Spaulding (who got the grant after Gladney lost it) and they contracted with various agencies around Texas. Parts of the program were good, but overall, it seemed, the primary goal was a Bushesque effort to pitch a sugar-coated perspective of the adoption option as an alternative to abortion (and spend plenty of federal dollars to do it.)
So, I am confused a little. If a pregnant woman does not want to keep her child, is it better to abort or adopt? I fully agree that coercion into adoption when Mom may want to raise her child is despicable. But, I feel that the consensus is that if the woman does not want to be a Mom then abortion is just as desirable, or maybe even more desirable, than adoption? Am I misunderstanding?
I am an adoptee, born in 1970. All records were closed. As long as I can remember I have known I was adopted. I did not feel a hole, or that I was treated different than my brothers (both born to my Mom. To clarify, my Mom is my Mom… the woman who raised me. the only Mom I have known).
I do have a poem somewhere (was up on the wall, but is in a box somewhere after the last move) that Mom gave me about 2 women, 2 mothers. It fills most of a full sheet of paper and talks about 2 women who loved me…one who made a difficult decision to carry me and then give me up. The other the Mom who chose to be my Mom. That the ‘choice Mom (my words)’ loved me AND the birth Mom… me cuz she loves her baby and birth Mom for her sacrifice. Now, it may be argued that she (birth Mom) didn’t have a choice. I am not sure, but I think she did. I say that because I got to meet her once. On the little bit of paperwork that came to me from the hospital was a mention of ethnicity. My birth Mom’s ethnic makeup included Indian. In 1970 Indian=Native American. This intrigued me for innocent and selfish reasons. If there were really a tribal relationship to be had, learning that culture was something I was very interested in. Also, having that tribal affiliation could provide certain benefits. So, from the age of 20 to 24 I toyed with trying to get the records. Then I did. We had dinner once. I learned some of my heritage; the Indian connection was slight and actually Canadian in origin. But, I do know I have a 1/2 brother and 1/2 sister out there. She (birth Mom) has chosen not to be in contact since 2004. She was not sure how to tell her kids. I wonder if it is a residual guilt that she was somehow evil or bad for getting pregnant or that, after 20+ years, not sure how her kids would react. Anyway, I let her decide the course of action. My main goal for meeting was to see her (curiosity), to get more detailed medical history and to let her know I grew up great. I said that, while I occasionally wondered about my birth parents, I suspected that she would have thought of me a lot more often. She gave up her baby; how could you not wonder. I wanted her to know that I grew up with not only a wonderful home and immediate family but that my extended family was wonderful. Everyone has issues and shortcomings, but I don’t think I could have chosen a better family if I tried.
I guess this whole story is just to illustrate that I don’t think it is any more fair to always judge adoption as some harmful mass life trauma to the adoptee that it is to judge the birth mothers as sinful whores.
Finally, while the focus seems to be on whether the groups that would traditionally be anti-abortion truly offer neutral termination advice, does Planned Parenthood truly offer neutral non-abortion advice?
Tony, women need the freedom and support to make their own best decisions about their reproductive lives, including adoption. Right now there is a lot of money to be made in moving babies as commodities and while many professionals in the adoption community are working to help women, many others are just trying to make a buck. And players like the National Council for Adoption are particularly coercive in their advocacy.
I don’t believe adoption is a “harmful mass life trauma” to adoptees but I do believe it’s a “harmful mass life trauma” to most birth parents. (Your birth mom’s reaction underlines this for me — have you read The Girls Who Went Away? I think you’d find it illuminating.) And I do believe that adoption is always loss for an adoptee no matter how fabulous their adoptive homes might be.
I have to say, I think our family is pretty fabulous but I don’t think this mitigates the loss of Madison’s birth family. I believe that how she feels about us and how she feels about her birth families are separate. I’m seeing you conflate the two — as lots of adoptees do — but I think this is part of our cultural misunderstanding of adoption. You have two families. Madison has two families. How you feel about one does not necessarily have to dictate how you feel about the other. Madison can love me and love her birth mom. She can love Brett and still miss her birth dad.
Finally, I wonder (and I type this gently) if your insistence that you are totally ok with your adoption, totally ok with your birth mom’s rejection and that your adoptive family erases any loss you felt/feel is “he doth protest too much.” I mean, when you comment here or at Open Adoption Support your comments tend to be long and more insistent than I think I’d get for someone who honestly didn’t care. I think you DO care. I think you’re allowed to care. I think having feelings about your birth family is not a betrayal of your love of your adopted family. You are a whole complicated person with a whole complicated story (as are we all) and your story happens to include adoption, which is YOURS, you have a right to it, you have a right to feel however you want about it and your parents (by birth or adoption) aren’t the boss of you about it.
Hmm. I agree that adoption is a loss to birth parents, no matter how wonderful and caring and pure the motives of the adoption professionals with whom they work. Those parents are losing a child.
Re: your ‘gentle’ typing. There could be some truth there. Truly, growing up I have no memories of thinking about my birth family. Once I was early 20s, though, I was curious. Once I found her and we met, I was disappointed that she did not want to meet anymore. I would like to know my 1/2 siblings, I think. So, perhaps you are right, I care more than I want to admit.
First, I am sorry for the length of the prior response. I do tend to ramble; just ask Abby.
One other point though is birth fathers. I know this is a Mom blog and that is the audience. But, when I went through the process of tracking down my birth Mom, the agent asked if I wanted to find birth Dad. He (the agent) warned me that it could get expensive and there is a low chance of finding him. Apparently, in that era (born 1970), unmarried birth fathers were routinely banned from being on a birth certificate. In fact, according to him, there would be almost no record of the birth Dad be associated with me or birth Mom.
I understand it is the Mom’s choice and she is the one with a lot of emotional ‘skin in the game’. But, Dad’s are not inconsequential.
Quick tangentially related story: a friend of mine, after we had become less close, and his girlfriend were pregnant. The decision was made to terminate. Sometime after, over a couple of beers, he told me about recurring dreams he had had for some time after the termination. A little toddler would approach him and ask “daddy, why did you kill me?”. I tell this for a couple of reasons: while the woman is obviously facing extreme physical and emotional issues with a termination decision, the man is not immune. Also, while my own personal views of abortion are still a bit fluid, I remind myself of this story when I hear anti-abortionists try to characterize the choice as a casual, easy one to make. It is not. Finally, I found this blog via my cousin Abby. It speaks to me as an adoptee but I rarely see men commenting on the posts. Again, I expect this is due to the intended audience, but (and I think I warned about this before) I do like to hear (read) my own voice sometimes. I want to add a different perspective sometimes..
Thanks Dawn, and Thanks Abby for linking to this blog so that I could find it.
T
Thank you for your post. I am a birth mother with a 38 year old daughter that I reunited with 8 years ago, and I’m STILL dealing with grief. That may seem hard to believe, but not so hard to believe given the type of silencing that most birth mothers went through in the 60s and 70s. I am pro-choice and couldn’t agree more that placing the interests of adoptive parents first and those of an unborn child, shows little mercy for the living. All this would be great if I thought that the people advocating for adoption as a solution would have compassion for birth parents. Unless things have changed dramatically since I relinquished in 1971, I doubt that’s the case. I don’t remember encountering the tiniest scrap of compassion or kindness from anyone except several aunts and uncles and a cousin. Certainly not any from professionals who were persuading me to “do the right thing.”
Thank you again for your courage on speaking out on something that is still seen from the adoptive parents point of view all to often.
Hey, I just wanted to comment on the IATI course. I am a birth mother (I placed my son in a VERY open adoption 5 months ago), and because of my experience I have decided I want to be a pregnancy counselor. So, I took the IATI course just to see what it was like. There wasn’t anything I disagreed with. They talk about how to present a girl with the option of adoption, as opposed to abortion, and things like how to use more acceptable terms- they even mentioned that a birth mother isn’t a birth mother until she has placed! I was also able to give a birth mothers perspective to the group. I wish they could have a birth mother at all of these trainings to give their input. Over all it was a great course, and I found the materials given (videos, brochures, etc) to all be acceptable. I am very happy that they are doing this!
Ashleigh
I did the course through Catholic Charities, which is actually the agency I placed my son with. They, of course, are anti abortion. Presenting adoption as an option was pretty much the entire course. So no, abortion and parenting weren’t covered much, though with all the role playing adoption was presented as an option only after the girl had voiced that she could not parent, and did not believe in abortion. Not before. They did cover the different laws in the different states, and that open adoption was not legally enforceable except in California (I think?) and even then a judge wasn’t likely to rule against the A parents. They did not really cover the long term stuff as much, which is some thing that I do disagree with.
Yes, I have taken a great interest in reading about Roscoes affect on every one. I worry about how it will affect Phillip whenever I have more children. I also worry on how it may affect me.. I’ve started reading Jenna’s personal blog (I also read her posts on adoption blogs), and I went back to the beginning where she talks about how placing Munchkin affected her as a parent to her son.
Yes, I am SO blessed to have such an open adoption. I read a few blogs, and am apart of a few online support groups. I search out other bmoms stories, so i can better educate others. When speaking of my experience, I am always sure to stress that my situation is NOT normal. And when I say how I feel about some thing, I always tell who ever I am speaking with that one birth mother may feel like such and such, and another like this or that. I always tell them that every birth mother is unique in the way they grieve, and in their situation as a whole. And also that birth mothers never get closure. You can never place birth mothers into a group, it just doesn’t work. Also, when speaking with a young girl who is trying to decide what to do, I always stress parenting first before thinking of adoption. If you can raise your child, then do it! And yes, my feelings will change. In the last five, almost six months, they have changed several times already!
Ashleigh
Ashleigh, I’d be interested to read a blog about your experiences when you’re doing the counseling (hint hint! you can do it anonymously!!) because I think we need to be talking more about how infant adoption awareness training is really playing out. There’s a great maybe out-of-print book called Bitter Fruit that’s about women’s experiences of unplanned pregnancy. It’s writing from women who have had abortions, placed children for adoption and parented and it’s very very interesting. It had a big impact on me when we were going through infertility and I’d be interested to hear what you think of it.
I would love to write a blog about my experiences! Right now I’m training to be a peer counselor at a pregnancy resource center, and I’m also mentoring my sons cousin (in his Afam) who is 15 and pregnant. Thing is, I’m afraid I wouldn’t keep it up like I should. I keep a journal for Phillip, for when he starts asking questions, and I don’t even write in IT as much as I should! We’ll see though, maybe I can get my act together and start one
I’ll definitely check out that book- Thanks!
Ashleigh