“In order to be adopted you first have to lose your entire family“
Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath
Adoptees reckon with corruption in orphanages, hidden birth certificates, and the urge to search for their birth parents.
April 3, 2023
Audio available
Listen to this story
You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.
0:00 / 1:31:21
To hear more, download the Audm app.
On August 1, 1966, a baby girl is born in Norfolk, Virginia. Her mother names her Melanie Lynn. She is placed in foster care for two months to make sure she has no medical issues. Then she is adopted by a couple who live a hundred miles away.
On a day in 1970, a baby girl is born in Incheon, South Korea, a port city just west of Seoul. Her mother names her Eun-hee. Eun-hee lives with her mother and her mother’s parents in Incheon until she is three years old. When she is nearly six, she is sent to adoptive parents in America.
On September 18, 1985, a baby girl is born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her mother does not give her a name. The mother relinquishes her at birth to an adoption agency. The mother is asked if she wants to hold the baby and says no.
One evening in December, 2021, Deanna Doss Shrodes had come home from work. The TV was tuned to a news segment about the oral arguments at the Supreme Court for the case that challenged Roe v. Wade. Deanna is a pastor and a director of women’s ministries at a Pentecostal church in Florida. She is opposed to abortion, and was glad that Roe might soon be overturned. But then Amy Coney Barrett asked about “safe haven” laws, which permit a mother who doesn’t want to keep her baby to drop it off anonymously in a deposit box at a hospital or a fire station. Why, Barrett wanted to know, didn’t safe-haven laws remove the burden that was allegedly being imposed upon a woman who couldn’t obtain an abortion? The woman wouldn’t be forced to be a parent, and the baby could be adopted. At this point, Deanna became so upset that she stopped listening.
Deanna is adopted, and she has spent much of her life grappling with the emotional consequences of that. She believes that a child who starts life in a box will never know who they are, unless they manage somehow to track down their anonymous parents. It distresses her that many of her fellow-Christians, such as Barrett, talk about adoption as the win-win solution to abortion, as though once a baby is adopted that is the end of the story. If someone says of Deanna that she was adopted, she corrects them and says that she is adopted. Being adopted is, to her, as to many adoptees, a profoundly different way of being human, one that affects almost everything about her life.
“I explain to friends that in order to be adopted you first have to lose your entire family,” Deanna said. “And they’ll say, ‘Well, yes, but if it happens to a newborn what do they know? You were adopted, get over it.’ Would you tell your friend who lost their family in a car accident, ‘Get over it?’ No. But as an adoptee you’re expected to be over it because, O.K., that happened to you, but this wonderful thing also happened, and why can’t you focus on the wonderful thing?”
https://www.thenewseachday.com/comments/88136
Comments
Post a Comment