If You Could See Me Now. Michael Mewshaw
Curtis swore he had never heard of any. In his experience, once adoptees gained access to their files, whether by subterfuge or with the help of a private investigator or a computer hacker, most of them found the people they were looking for. After that, 90 percent of the time, the birth mother and father welcomed contact.
Wishing me good luck with what he referred to as my "search," he recommended a book that would answer many of my questions and ease the doubts he sensed I had. Written by Adam Pertman, a former journalist for the Boston Globe, Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming America was based on a series of articles that had won Pert man a Pulitzer Prize nomination. As Richard Curtis had promised, it provided an excellent grounding in the subject and supplied most of the statistics I sought. It also helped me understand that my misgivings were far from exceptional among people whose lives have been touched by adoption and whose pasts had caught up with them.
The number of these people is staggering. According to the best estimates, the United States has an adopted population of five to six million—and this doesn't include the vast number of adoptees who aren't aware of their status. When one factors in birth parents, adoptive parents and adoptive brothers and sisters, it's possible that adoption in America may directly involve tens of millions of people. In a comprehensive survey in the late 1990s, the Evans B. Donaldson Adoption Institute concluded that 60 percent of Americans—more than 150 million people!—were adopted, had given up a child for adoption, had adopted a baby or had a close friend or family member who fell into the triad. Small wonder that Adam Pertman referred to the United States as the "adoption nation. "
Despite improvements in contraception, the legalization of abortion and the increased acceptance of single motherhood, there continue to be 130,000 to 150,000 adoptions annually, and there is a surplus of Americans eager to adopt. What's more, they're willing to go to almost any lengths and to pay any price. The cost of adopting a white baby in the United States now runs from $15,000 to $35,000. According to Pertman, this reflects supply and demand. With six prospective parents applying for each available baby and ready to pay whatever the market will bear, there have been ugly accusations of baby buying. Even in open adoptions, where couples cover a birth mother's prenatal care and living expenses, the generosity of the compensation sometimes suggests an unsavory fee for services. Foreign adoptions can be nearly as expensive as those in the States when one includes travel, payoffs to intermediaries and medical fees for infants who have been malnourished or poorly treated in institutions.
As Pertman cautions, the intrusion of cash into adoptions has pernicious consequences. It eliminates otherwise qualified families who can't afford the cost, and it ensures that the majority of adoptive parents are white and, at a minimum, middle class. This makes adoption appear to be a zero-sum transaction, with poor birth mothers relinquishing their babies to families of greater wealth and privilege.
Pertman, who has two adopted children himself, argues that open adoption can remedy these problems. By allowing for an ongoing relationship, it places all parties on a more equal footing and reduces the chance that the birth mother will feel exploited, then dumped. Adoption, Pertman stresses, should not be "a one-time curative event but a process that forever remains part of its participants' lives. "
In an ideal world, just as birth mothers and adopted children wouldn't feel that they had been robbed of their rights, Pertman believes that birth fathers have a role to play. This notion resonated with me. Even today, birth fathers often have little say in what happens to their children. At times they don't even realize that a woman is pregnant, much less that she plans to relinquish a baby. Back in the early 1960s, there was little chance that a man might raise a child on his own or remain in contact after an adoption. In 1964, the year of Amy's birth, 80 percent of unwed mothers gave up their babies. Today, fewer than 3 percent do. Yet the involvement of birth fathers continues to be minimal, sometimes, admittedly, because men want it that way, but often because the adoption process still marginalizes them.
While it may be politically incorrect to discuss "gender differences," Pertman cites statistics that indicate substantial disparities between the sexes. Of the tens of thousands of adoptees who search for their birth parents, 80 percent are women. What's more, they are usually tracing their mothers, not their fathers.
To assist them in their searches, dozens of affinity groups have sprung up. As I had already learned, Amy had joined the Adoptees Liberation Movement Association, which had been founded around the time of her birth. ALMA, like many of its sister organizations, has pushed for two basic reforms: the right of access to original birth certificates and access to blood relatives.
Bastard Nation, as the name implies, takes a more provocative and confrontational approach. Calling on some of the same tactics as ACTUP, the radical gay-rights organization, Bastard Nation has used everything from guerrilla theater to legal challenges and legislative campaigns to break down barriers and change the public's perception of adoption. In addition to flooding the Web with information, it inaugurated a program called Terminal Illness Emergency Search, which permits adoptees with fatal diseases to contact birth relatives who may have relevant medical data or who might donate organs.
In a country like the United States, which places a premium on mobility and where many children detach early from their families, the desire of adoptees to reconnect with their roots might seem anomalous, even slightly neurotic. Yet there's no denying the power of the emotions involved. As Pertman explains, "nearly all adoptions are initiated by women and men suffering from heartbreak and grief. For many . . . the wounds never heal. " If this is true for birth parents, it is doubly so for children whose yearning is compounded by a compulsion to find out the facts no matter how painful they prove to be.
Yet I had an uneasy sense that there existed a compulsion just as powerful: the human desire to hide from a searing truth and from blood attachments that have been severed. While some adoptees will go to any expense and run any legal risk to trace their birth parents, I suspected that there are those parents whose desperation to escape the past is every bit as fierce and unrelenting. Adoption Nation acknowledges that there have been birth mothers who have sued to preserve their anonymity and filed civil actions against agencies and private investigators for invading their privacy. Some complain that they have been stalked by adopted children and emotionally destroyed by abandoned offspring who won't take no for an answer.
In the end, while I managed to gather the statistics I wanted, they provided little consolation. I had been intellectualizing, focusing on facts at the expense of feelings. The truth was, I realized that I was letting myself get caught up in an imbroglio that mirrored a larger, national debate about privacy and the rights of adopted children. Although willing to help Amy and to meet her if she was telling the truth, I worried how she would react when she learned her mother's identity. More than that, I worried what her mother's response might be.
C h a p t e r T h r e e
A manila envelope with a Los Angeles postmark reached me in London less than a week after Amy's call. Reminded of letters from college admissions offices, from publishers and judging committees for grants and fellowships, I confess to nervousness about opening it and confronting . . . what? My fate? Some ultimate acceptance or rejection?
In addition to a photograph and several pages of Xeroxed documents, Amy had enclosed a note on unlined stationery."I hope we meet one day," she had written and signed off with "Love." Her scrupulously legible handwriting seemed that of a conscientious child. But the snapshot, a color close-up of her smiling face, showed a beautiful, vibrant woman in her early thirties. The shape of her eyes, the texture of her tanned skin, the set of her jaw with its slightly cleft chin, the lustrous dark hair, the tension of her mouth whose economical upper lip con trasted with the generosity of the lower one, her large bright teeth— everything called to mind the woman I had loved.
The Xeroxed documents were in the form of a letter to Amy from the postadoption coordinator at the Children's Home Society (CHS) of California. Atop the first page, the agency's CHS logo had balls poised above the C and the S and a stick figure of a child as the crossbar for the H.Though the stick figure might have been meant to suggest a kid gamboling on a jungle gym, it resembled someone struggling to push iron prison bars apart.
Dear