The title is a quote from Dian Wellfare, a NSW adoption truth teller. Dain died at a young age, from cancer, about a year ago. RIP, Dian.
This diary is an expansion of my comment on KosAbility's recommended diary KosAbility: Living With PTSD If you have not read it, I encourage you to do so.
This diary is concerned with the psychiatric after effects of coerced adoption, notably PTSD. I draw my information from 15 years of adoption activism. I have met and worked with hundreds of women who have lost their children to adoption. The information I have is anecdotal...stories from self-selected individuals who are dealing with the after effects every day in their personal lives. While that may invalidate this information in the eyes of some, I consider this information to be first hand testimony of real victims. Testimony you are not likely to hear in the media or in society at large.
Exacerbating their trauma is the fact that the damage has never been acknowledged by the perpetrators, nor has there ever been a formal apology of any sort. This is a matter of social justice denied to an entire cohort of women who have lived their lives with the consequences of flawed social work theory. We are owed an apology. But that is a tangent that I do not mean to address in this diary.
More importantly and relevant to a political web site, the mythology of adoption as a win-win, and as a viable alternative to abortion, continues to spread unchecked throughout our culture. The larger point is that people like Sharron Angle push adoption as a solution to the abortion debate without mentioning the potential sequelae which are so familiar to those of us who suffer from traumatic adoption. These sequelae are generally hidden from the public, or acknowledged but in a minimized, downplayed sort of way, in the service of marketing adoption. Certainly they are not a part of the public debate in popular media which pushes an adoption agenda.
If the experience of my cohort is any indication, and if the Sharron Angles of the world get their way, we are headed for another generation of psychiatric casualities due to unnecessary adoptions.
This is what I would like people to grasp about post adoption life. No matter how much mythology is repeated about adoption, the bald fact of the matter is that losing your child is significantly traumatic. This isn't rocket science. Most people would rather cut off their right arm than lose a child. Most normal people have no problem whatsoever understanding this when it comes to a married couple or a family member whose child suddenly disappears from their life. But put this situation into the context of adoption, and all of a sudden, this understanding evaporates, and we are in the Land of Make Believe. That the societal denial of traumatic child loss in adoption is so widespread does not help women who lose children in this way. It is dehumanizing in the extreme to read or hear dewy eyed accounts of fairy tale adoptions, win-win, lemons into lemonade, and the like. It is as dehumanizing as the term "birthmother" and for the same reason; it reduces the natural mother to the function of giving birth, period. In this reading, the natural mother simply ceases to be after she gives birth.
But natural mothers are still here. Natural mothers are still regular old human beings. Just because the adoption industry wishes to sweep our existences and our pain under the rug, does not mean we aren't alive or that we feel no anguish over the situation. We have our human frailities, just like everybody else. We are just as vulnerable to human ills as the rest of the planet.
What's the problem here?
PTSD arises in situations where an individual experiences horror and powerlessness in a situation of grave personal harm to themselves or a loved one. In the toxic chemical environment of massively elevated stress hormones, the brain makes transcription errors in the recording of the traumatic event. These faulty memories manifest themselves as flashbacks, nightmares, exaggerated startle response, avoidance patterns of situations that symbolize the traumatic event. The memory is relived over and over as if it was happening in present time, and not in the past. The trauma is reexperienced over and over, when triggered. Chronic stress and depression , substance abuse, anger problems, phobias of all sorts, eating disorders can follow in its wake.
Cases in point:
So many of us have sought medical or psychological care for our pain, and as a result, many of us have been diagnosed as having PTSD. We developed this condition because we were unable to protect our children from those who would adopt them out to strangers; we were powerless; we experienced first hand the horror of our children disappearing into the black hole of adoption, where we, their mothers, had no knowledge of what could be happening to them. In fact, often did not even know their name... or even if they were dead or alive.
As a group, we have reported these difficulties: nightmares, fear of sleeping because of those nightmares, anniversary reactions, exaggerated startle response, eating disorders, increased stress related illness such as fibromyalgia, relationship difficulties, overanxious parenting, fears related to poverty (most of us lost our children because in the final analysis, we were poor) control issues (we were also powerless,) trust issues, panic attacks, a feeling of alienation from society at large because we understand adoption in a way that society generally denies, clinical depression, flashbacks. This almost certainly is an incomplete list.
Our symptoms can be triggered by almost anything that reminds us of our loss; baby showers, birth announcements, general images of loss, baby commercials on tv, movies involving adoption (especially frustrating is movies which show only the fairy tale ending and do not address the grief of the separated mother and child in any meaningful way,) "choose life" plates, the very word "adoption," the presence of adoptors or uninvolved individuals praising adoption with no real grasp of the damage that adoption can cause, people who MINIMIZE the damage adoption can do, social workers, clerics (if in fact clerics were involved in the adoption,) news articles and stories involving adoption, holidays that emphasize family, normal separations like a child returning to college in the fall...the list goes on and on. Our triggers are idiosyncratic, specific to our personal experiences. Again, this is not an exhaustive list. There is no way it could be. But it is a long, long, sad list.
WHY is any of this relevant?
Because we have a virulently anti-choice, forced-birth-no-matter-what fringe in this country.
Because we have people like Sharron Angle pushing an agenda of adoption as the solution to the abortion debate.
Because we have religious leaders who would deny birth control and sex education to young people.
Because we have conservatives who would cut funding to the poor, thus further pushing poor women towards adoptions for their children. When one quarter of the children in this country are on food stamps, this is not insignificant. Many women surrender their children because they are poor. (The fact that they most likely will not be poor for their entire lives is generally not mentioned.)
Because we have would-be leaders like Newt Gingrich whose understanding of the issue is so poor it leads him to state that we should bring back orphanages.
Because you will encounter the argument that things aren't like this anymore. That adoptions are done in a sensitive way. That open adoptions are a panacea, the answer. That people these days freely choose adoption, not that adoption is aggressively marketed to pregos in CPCs across the nation. That a handbook called "Birth Mother, Good Mother" exists to help CPC counselors sell adoption to pregnant women. That the National Council For Adoption in league with the Family Research Council jointly promoted that handbook.
What else won't they tell you? They won't tell you is that open adoptions aren't legally enforceable in every state. They won't tell you that open adoptions are closed every day, and that when they do, natural parents have no legal recourse. They won't tell you how many natural mothers in open adoptions simply disappear from their child's life because the anguish is too much to bear. They won't tell you how many natural mothers have to smile pretty and pretend in public that all is well in their adoptions, so the adoptors won't retaliate and close the adoption. And they certainly won't tell you about the natural mothers who suicide when those adoptions do close, as has occasionally happened.
Women who have children in open, ie, identified, adoptions experience just as much pain as their elder sisters whose children disappeared into closed adoptions. Some of them have PTSD, some of them have disenfranchised grief reactions. Some don't. But far too many of them are suffering as we did. In fact, my personal opinion is that for a significant number of them, things may be worse. They may not have been physically locked up in maternity reformatories and psychologically attacked in the same manner that we were. But they were targeted, coerced and exploited just as much as we were, and they suffer the same pain as we do.
All of which will be moot if the reactionary forces of the right have their way with women, and they roll society back to the 1950s. We MUST protect womens' right to choose and promote economic justice for all, not just the well off.
So what? What can you do about it?
GOTV.