The series Social Issues Firsthand is published by Greenhaven Press, the publishers of the Opposing Viewpoints series (see my review of Opposing Viewpoints: Adoption).
The Social Issues series does not consist of direct arguments by those with different beliefs, but does endeavor to have contributions from people with diverse experiences.
The volume Adoption, from the Social Issues Firsthand series, contains sixteen articles, approximately 600 words each, divided roughly into sections.
The first section is “Giving Up a Child for Adoption”. Many people today would object to the phraseology used here. Positive Adoption Language prefers “made an adoption plan” to emphasize that it was caring on the birthmother’s part, not abandonment, that made them choose adoption.
This chapter contains one essay from a woman who believes her decision to place her child for adoption 18 years ago was the right one, and one from a woman who believes that pressure from “counselors” at an unwed mothers home was coercive. She now believes that infants taken from their birth mothers suffer a deep wound. Another essay is by a birthfather who fought a two-year legal battle for a child whose birthmother did not tell him when the child was placed for adoption.
The chapter “Choosing to Adopt” contains an adoptive mother’s essay on adopting a daughter from China, a gay man’s essay on why he and his partner wanted to raise a child, an essay on a family’s experience adopting a child with disabilities from the foster care system, and a reflection from a woman who became the guardian of her brother-in-law’s two toddlers following a tragedy.
The next chapter contains essays by two adults who discovered later in life that they were adopted. There is also an essay from a seventeen-year-old adopted from Thailand, who was raised in a largely white community with his three sisters, who were also adopted.
The chapter on “searching” contains an essay from a grandmother whose extensive search for her birthfamily led to reunion with both her birthmother and birth sister. Also interesting is an article on the bureaucracy encountered by a university president who spent three years trying to get access to his adoption file and who is still searching for his birthmother. One woman found her birthmother to be a troubled woman who complicated her life.
Most interesting to me was an article written jointly by a thirteen-year-old and her adoptive mother. With the approval of counselors, the girl’s parents helped her search for her birthmother when she was ten years old. Her adoptive mother talks about the search needing to be “owned” by the child, done when and if the child feels ready. She describes the first phone call between birthmother, adoptive mother and child, and her nagging feelings of doubt when her husband took her daughter to meet birth family members when she was twelve. She says it feels good to “have the circle closed”. Her daughter says that her birthmother gave her love to grow, and her adoptive parents are her “parents of the heart”.
“I am who I am because of all of them,” she says.
Please see this related blog:
Should Adoptive Parents Search For Their Children’s Birth Parents?