People in general and women in particular used to have a lot fewer rights. My cites are all women I’ve known who simply had the baby taken from them at birth, never even allowed to see the child, and no one ever asked them their preferences.
That’s also why the big, big secrecy that used to be around adoption - to protect the mother, assuming she had “learned her lesson” and only had respectable sex and reproduction afterward, and not telling the kid or anyone else because of the shame of being born out of wedlock.
A “fallen woman” didn’t have rights to her baby. Pretty much her parents or any doctors involved just did want they wanted and hang what the girl wanted.
My mother in law was “forced” to give up a child. Her husband - yes, she was married - was not ready to be a father yet. She could have divorced him - but this would have been around 1958 or so, she wouldn’t necessarily have gotten child support from him or alimony - he was a student.
By the way, my sister in law was reunited with my mother in law years ago - and while our relationship is…strange…she is a fine, normal, upstanding person (a little Evangelical for my own taste - she was raised in a very religious household - which is probably fitting since my father in law was a raging atheist when he forced the adoption).
The ADHD thing is sort of fascinating - I have a book with a reference to a study…girls with ADHD are somewhat more likely to get pregnant as teens - makes some sense because ADHD sometimes causes problems with things like planning (maybe I should be on the pill) or causes implusive behavior (lets have sex even though we don’t have a condom). But they also seem more likely to choose adoption - nine months is enough time for reflection.
Its one study, its dated, and I’m going from memory.
By the way, none of this makes for people being any more flawed than any other people - my bio daughter is the one who is ADHD. My mother in law really wanted to parent, but that door was closed to her at that moment. My father is adopted - because his bio dad and mom split up and his stepfather adopted him - he isn’t more flawed than the average guy (I’m biased, but he seems less flawed than most), and while my grandmother was a raving bitch, my bio grandfather seems like a normal guy - just one who didn’t want to live with a raving bitch. My friend Joe is a school principal, his adoptive parents are the nicest people you could meet, perfectly normal - and his birthmom is a really neat lady - who had a bi racial child in the 1960s when she was eighteen and had no hope of caring for him without raising him in poverty - so she put him up for adoption so he’d have opportunities - and she’d have opportunities - she wouldn’t get as the single white mother of a child who is very black looking in 1968.
I was put up for adoption in the late 1960s. In Mississippi. The stigma of adoption was nearly as bad as the stigma of unwed pregnancy. My dad’s best friend had a sister that was really his niece. She didn’t find out until she was an adult, and her anger, depression, and addiction only ended with her death in jail at 30. She was just a couple of years older than me. My parents have oodles of stories of girls being forced to give up their children. What was a teenaged girl in the 1960s going to do with a baby after she was kicked out of her home? I understand that legally the mother had to agree, but we’re talking about real life here, and real life options.
FWIW, I have Asperger’s and my sister, adopted 6 years later in another state, has Fetal Alcholol Syndrome. Adoption isn’t responsible for either of those, but with a bio kid you generally have some idea if the mom is a stumbling drunk or if spectrum disorders run in the family.
One of my closest friends in high school was adopted. It bothered her a great deal and she had a very unhappy life. Honesty meant a lot to her. She was probably the only person I ever knew that made me feel guilty (kind of) over little acts of dishonesty for pocket money, because she was such a good person. As the depression got worse I asked the couple that adopted her why they wouldn’t let her look for her biological family since it obviously bothered her. They got angry and told me it was none of my business. I have always thought that if she had been raised in my family (okay, not with my mother and father as the guardians, but some other actual mature, adult relative of mine) as an orphan with the option to search for her family, she would still be alive.
My reaction is: your story is pretty apocryphal and furthermore somewhat insulting to people who were adopted. Not to mention the mothers, who you’re accusing of being mentally ill in some way because of their decision.
It absolutely was none of your business. How do you “know” that her parents prevented her from investigating anything. Do you think high-school aged girls ever exaggerate about their parents?
Again I wonder what is meant by success and failure. I lived in a town with tons of adopted kids, none from the unwed mother source, but from various countries as the doors opened and closed. The kids adopted from Korea in the early 1980s universally did very well, top of their class, well adjusted, good colleges. Kids from Columbia adopted a few years later had issues despite excellent parenting. Some with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome got adopted from within the US and also had problems. I know some adopted from Russia, but we left before I could track their progress.
Kids with prenatal or early childhood disadvantages are not going to do as well as those who don’t. But I’m pretty confident that each one of these kids has had a better life than if they were left where they were. I think that’s a success, unless you want to adopt a potential Rhodes Scholar.
She wasn’t the property of the couple that adopted her. She was my friend. It was my business to try to help her. That’s what true friendship means. And I observed the couple that adopted her preventing her from investigating everything about her birth.
No where in my post did I imply that I thought my friend’s mother was mentally ill. I know nothing whatsoever about her mother and neither did she. She was prevented from learning any information about her mother. I find it very insulting to people who have been harmed by adoption for anyone to make a blanket statement that the institution is always beneign or even a social good. My friend’s problem were probably directly the result of her adoption. I have encountered plenty of adoption victims like her in subsequent years.