Connections

I used to work in the pro-choice movement. I loved it, and I’m still proud of the years I spent doing that work professionally and as a volunteer.

When I was on the board of a local abortion fund, raising money to give small grants to women who had chosen to terminate their pregnancy but couldn’t pay for it, we talked all the time about how many women were making enormously meaningful decisions based on having or not having ridiculously small amounts of money – sometimes as little as $50 for a bus ticket to get to a clinic in the next county over or $100 for a half day of childcare. 

The money was what we were focused on, but of course it was just a stand-in for the real issue, which is coercion. A person who has support from partner or family or friends in her decision about what to do about a pregnancy but who has to make that decision based on money has still been coerced by her community’s failure to support her adequately, in whatever way that means (yeah, I’m a socialist).

Some women who we couldn’t help told us that they would have to relinquish their baby because they didn’t have any other options to pay for termination but woudn’t or couldn’t parent. Most of these women we spoke with were very early in their pregnancy, so I couldn’t tell you what they decided to do in the end.  But the idea that the decision was based on something so stupid (though so real) as money was wrenching.

It never occured to me until we started the process to adopt that someday I would look at adoption the same way. Roo’s first family would never have relinquished him if their community had supported them better. It’s so obvious to me what should have been different for them, but it would take a sea change to get that support into place for them and for all the other first parents who relinquished because they didn’t – or felt they didn’t – have the resources (tangible or emotional) to parent.

I’me very proud to be both pro-choice and an adoptive parent. It feels like putting my money where my mouth is, in some ways.  But the more I learn, the more it starts to feel like I’m barely scratching the surface.

Just something I’ve been thinking about.

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A different spin on it

Save the (Celebrity) Children!

African family adopts Britney’s kids.

By Ellen Tarlin
Posted Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007, at 5:19 PM ET

LOS ANGELES—A Malawi couple has completed adoption paperwork for Sean Preston Federline, 2, and Jayden James Federline, 1, after their mother, Britney Spears, lost custody of the children Monday.It was Ms. Spears’ inability to provide car seats that initially brought the plight of her children to the attention of the Malawi couple, who wish to remain anonymous, and who will be referred to here as Mr. and Mrs. M. But it was the widely circulated photograph of Ms. Spears’ vagina that really drew their concern. “In our country, a good mother does not show her business to the press,” Mrs. M said. “It is very bad luck.” After Spears’ “performance” at MTV’s Video Music Awards, the adoptive couple knew they had to do something. “We could not allow innocent children to live under such horrific conditions anymore,” they explained. “The Third World can no longer turn a blind eye to the tragedy affecting so many U.S. celebrity children.”Los Angeles, where the Federline children have been living, is one of the richest cities in the world, trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of depravity, narcissism, and veganism. Nearly 27 percent of the children in Los Angeles suffer the misfortune of having celebrity parents. Mr. and Mrs. M were stunned by the deplorable conditions these victims live in. Children are subject to verbal abuse via cell phone, and babies are dangled over balcony railings. “Fathers kill mothers, and then put out badly written books about it,” Mr. M said. “And the names these children must bear,” said Mrs. M. “Apple, Fifi Trixibell, Fuchsia, Moxie CrimeFighter, Pilot Inspektor, Sage Moonblood—what kind of future can these poor children have?”

And so they have circumvented the North American nation’s adoption laws, which impose strict restrictions—including a law forbidding foreigners to remove from the country babies who have at least one legal parent.

The children’s father, Kevin Federline, said, “I am the father of Sean Preston and Jayden James, who have been adopted. I am very happy because, as you can see, there is spiritual poverty in this village, and I know they will be very well looked after in Malawi. Peace out!”

But Mr. and Mrs. M are not content to save just two children. “After learning that there are thousands of biological celebrity ‘orphans’ in Hollywood, it is our wish to open up our hut and help them escape a life of extreme affluence, hardship, and in many cases, Scientology.” And so they will set up a center in Los Angeles to facilitate the adoption of other celebrity children. Numerous couples have already come forward from Afghanistan, Cambodia, China, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam, and other countries that can offer children a better life.

The response has been overwhelming. So far, couples have put in requests to adopt the offspring of O.J. Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Michael Jackson, George and Laura Bush, and Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. Inquiries have also been made about the Culkin kids, as well as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and the Olsen twins, who clearly suffer from severe cases of malnutrition.

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Roo makes it official

Roo makes it officialOriginally uploaded by Roundisfunny1

We did it!

Thirteen and a half months after Roo made us a family of three, we’re legal.

After 3 post-placement visits, 3 months of paperwork snafus, and another 3 months of waiting on a slow bureaucracy, we were in the courtroom for about 4 minutes. But it was beautiful. We had fifteen friends and family members there, and the judge and the clerks in the family court loved doing it, according to the lawyer, because they spend the rest of their week presiding over contested divorces and custody cases.

The judge asked us a few random questions, signed whatever was in front of him, and handed the gavel to Roo, instructing him to “make it official, young man.”

Afterwards, down in the clerk’s office, our lawyer checked on the petition she had filed that morning to request a copy of Roo’s original birth certificate. Our agency had told us we had no legal access to it, and the statutes seemed to support that, but the clerk handed it right over. Because of where we live, and because we’re married, we’ll get a birth certificate that lists us both as his moms, but of course it won’t list his first parents. So it felt like a real coup to get the original for him. What dumb luck, right?

Because we’re married, we were able to adopt him together today, which was incredible. This was a legal change, not a functional one, but it’s huge. When we got married we became a legal family with the legal protection provided to very few same-sex couples in this country. This felt like it closed the loop: each of us legally bound to one another.

This is the stuff I didn’t know I could wish for.

Too late but not too little

ABC – the Access to Birth Certificates Bill – passed in Massachusetts today!

This means adoptees born before 1974 or after January 2008 will have access to their original birth certificates.

I feel really sad for Roo, who doesn’t qualify to get his. We begged our placement agency, to no avail. I am counting the days until finalization (10 and a wake-up, thank you very much), and I won’t pretend I won’t be thrilled to be his legal parents as well as his parent in every other way, but it seems so weird to get a birth certificate with our names on it, as if we gave birth to him and Miranda and Michael never existed.

I can’t imagine not knowing my history, or even knowing it but not having any legal documentation. Who ever thought it was a good idea to erase all of that as if you could join a new family – even if it was on the first day of your life – and move forward as if there never was anything else?

What’s happening in Guatemala?

Adoption probe traps babies.

This orphanage has been shut down under allegations of baby stealing and baby-selling.

I can’t figure out from this article exactly what’s happening.  On the surface, it looks like the orphanage was shut down to protect women whose children are becoming available for adoption against the will of the moms. But the DNA evidence, at least according to this one article, doesn’t seem to support that.

Anyone have a better understanding of any of this?

b-mother

I’ve got a book review up over at Open Adoption Support. Go read it.

 If you’ve already read b-mother, what did you think?

On the radio

Since open adoption has been occupying a huge proportion of my brain space these few weeks, I was happy to hear that NPR has been doing a week-long series called Adoption in America.

 They look at domestic, international, transracial, closed and open adoption from everyone’s perspectives. This morning, at the end of the series, they read a letter from a listener who relinquished her daughter in an open-in-theory/mostly-closed-in-reality (the first mom’s choice) adoption when she was 17. Now her daughter is 17, and she has been using the internet – including MySpace - for the past few years to quietly track her daughter’s progress. She didn’t want to interfere with her daughter’s life and so has hesitated to make contact, but recently read on her daughter’s MySpace page that she wants to meet her birthparents.

I feel breathless for this mom, and for her daughter. I wonder what it must have felt like to read that on her daughter’s MySpace page, after 17 years of keeping her distance?

All week I’ve been talking with my co-workers about seeing Roo’s first family. Their questions are a reminder for me of how many people without experience with open adoption think about it: Did you let his birthmother hold him? At what point can she no longer change her mind about the adoption? Weren’t you afraid when she saw him she would change her mind? Don’t you feel threatened by them? Was it sad that he looked like them and not like you?

I’m okay with these questions, though it makes me a little sad that those are the questions people need to ask. There’s a lot of work to be done here, clearly, but I’m happy to do it. I feel like it’s something we knew we were taking on when we decided to build our family this way.

Yesterday, though, I got a totally different kind of response from another co-worker who was asking me about how the visit went. I told her, and she wrote back with this story:

I have a very dear friend who adopted both of her daughters (now adults). The eldest went and “found” her birth mother several years ago after many many years of searching (with adopted mamma, one of my best friends, support). Well. she’s getting married in september and the invitation reads something like this:

 

adopted parents names

and

birth parents names

joyfully invite you to join us for the marriage of

our daughter,

daughters name

and

other person

son of so and so.

 

It is the most beautiful invitation (just because of the wording) that I have ever seen.  To witness two families coming together in the love of one child….. I can’t explain it. Anyway… the point is: YOU GO FOR IT.

 

Love. Her.