- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Open adoptions are just plain wrong, and this very sentimental article, while trying to present the opposite viewpoint, merely solidifies the truth.
Only a society deeply conflicted about motherhood and the meaning of family could have ever come up with such an arrangement. Famililies are not (contrary to what one poster says) made up of "friends and people we have chosen", but are blood relationships that can't be easily duplicated by legal arrangements and fancy talk.
The people who are most rarely fooled by this legalistic folderol are children -- they know instinctively that they have a "real mother" and a "real father" out there, and that what makes one parent "real" and another merely custodial is biological and genetic, spiritual and literal. That's why adopted children nearly always want to search for a real biological parent, no matter what decent and good people have adopted them.
It's a tragedy when a young mother is forced by circumstance to have to give up a child, and certainly there are times it is unavoidable. You really have to wonder in the story here, as the birth mother is from a very wealthy family (country clubs, etc.). Surely this was not necessary from a financial point of view, and the birth mother was 19 -- not a child herself. I feel deeply that she will live to regret this tragic decision (perhaps forced by her parents?) for the rest of her life.
A lot of the people glorified as open-adoptive parents are merely selfish yuppies who have delayed childbearing for way too long, and in their self-aggrandizing way, simply want to take the babies of others who are less economically fortunate. At the same time, there is a desire to sooth the guilt by continuing a relationship with the birth mother -- keeping alive a pretense that all is well, everyone is fine, and it's just one big happy EXTENDED family.
I really have serious reservations about the birth mother in this story, who is deliberately choosing to place her bi-racial child with a white family -- why? what's going on with this? Yet everyone is too polite to ask or talk about it.
Open adoption is wrong for every party -- for the guilty adoptive parents, for the child raised with "two mommies", for the biological mother who thinks this arrangement will give her some contact and influence with a child she isn't really raising. It's like a case of mass delusion. And it only exists because of a shortage of (premium) adoptable babies for middled aged yuppies who were too ambivalent to decide on childbearing when they were of a reasonable age.
The real tragedy will not be apparent for decades, until the child adopted this way reaches adulthood and understand the the abnormality of the arrangement, and the conflicted feelings about adopted family vs. biological family, and which is "real" or authentic.
