I would tend to say yes, you should have a legal right to know pertinent medical history. IANA doctor or a lawyer, so as to what all would be considered pertinent is beyond my knowledge to answer. I can see how it would be difficult to implement, so my gut feeling and the practicality of it or very likely two very different things.
I’ve thought long and hard about this thread, my posts and your responses. This thread is not really academic per se for me but about emotion, feelings and my understanding of projecting feelings on others.
First off, I said the birth parents fucked up in the adoption. I didn’t mean to imply any moral condemnation on their part. I meant to convey the impression that they were unable to avoid the choice they were confronted which was a result of a mistake on their part. Clearly and Precisely and what any adopted child could hope for IMHO. Could you possibly imagine an adoptee finding out that their parents were wealthy like say members of the Kennedy clan? That they let you go because they already had enough kids. I would reserve any moral condemnation to a parent who deliberately conceived to give up their child to another. Sometimes I feel I must be direct and to the point.
However, I considered what if it was my daughter with the choice. I wouldn’t dare tell her she fucked up by getting pregnant without an established future. That’s when I realized being direct isn’t always the best and most humane approach. This could be really sensitive for some people here and I would feel for them, that is birth parents who have given up a child. One of the most dramatic moments of my life for me occurs in the film “Sophie’s Choice”, which I saw once and will never ever see again.
Secondly, despite a lot of bullshit, I feel deeply enriched and strong by the histories of my mother and fathers families. Today I worry that my two daughters will only have each other (familial ties) after my wife and I die. We’ve encouraged deeper relationships with cousins but that’s not going as well as I’d like. Still, I wonder what its like for an adoptee to participate in these extended family events that so often are subject to comments I’ve enjoyed like “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”.
Thirdly, after the age of 14, when my mother died I experienced the “love” of a stepmother. Cinderella is a very plausible story to me.
No matter how much that new child of Madonna thrives under her care, I’ll always wonder how that child feels about his father. My own father, as intellectually and financially challenged as he was kept his family of seven children housed clothed and fed, by himself under his roof after my mother died. Dad died last year. He wasn’t a popular man, and I’m sure a lot of people thought he was a bit looney, but everyone of his kids loved and respected him to the nth degree. Thank God he kept us all together.
A child who is adopted not only loses a mother, that child loses a father, 4 grandparents and a lot of uncles aunts and cousins who share deep history. No kid chooses to give that up IMHO.
So yes, I’d like to give every adopted kid the best chance if he/she so chooses to look their birth parents in the eye. I’m cool if the child doesn’t want to though.
A child who is adopted gains a mother, a father, 4 grandparents and lots of uncles aunts and cousins who share deep history. The glass is more than half full.
You are projecting a lot of feelings and imagination that isn’t there under every circumstance.
I have an adopted son and a biological daughter. They are only a year apart. There are times when we say “yep, she is just like her Dad.” Or “her smile is just like her mom’s.” You know what? We look at him and say “you have a great sense of humor, just like your Dad’s.” He is the only Korean in our family. She is the only one we have much contact with that has blue eyes. You are placing a lot on genetics that doesn’t necessarily happen.
Surrogate parents do exactly what you condemn - they get pregnant intending to give up the child. You know what? Successful surrogates are some of the most unselfish and generous people imaginable.
This isn’t Sophie’s Choice - you aren’t handing a child over to the Nazi’s. Nor is this Cinderella. You are giving a child a chance to grow up in a home where parents will love them and wanted them very much. Most domestic adoptions are now open to some extent - the birthmother is chosing a family to raise her child. She usually meets them and speaks to them. She may interview several. She may be looking for a family who is a good fit - with her values or perhaps her hobbies. She may be looking for a family that enjoys sports, or one that is already setting money aside for college.
I’m very fortunate that my son’s birthmother elected to have him and make an adoption plan for him. I certainly HOPE my son would never look her in the eye and accuse her of fucking up. I hope, should he ever undertake a search, that he looks her in the eye and says “Thank you. Thank you so very much for caring enough to see I had the best possible opportunity for a good life.” I know if I ever get the chance to meet her, I will shed tears of both sorrow and joy and thank her from the bottom of my heart.
Also, my son did give up his birthmother. But circumstances are not the same for everyone. It is unlikely that placed for adoption he’d ever have known his birthfather’s family. His mother had no contact with her mother and its unlikely that she would have been able to retain contact with her family as a single mother. His best chance for having an extended family is to have the one he ended up with. None of us may be great matches for kidney donation, but he has a mother and father, three sets of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, great aunts and uncles - far more than he’d be likely to have had he been able to stay where he was. He gets deep history, not by blood, but by tradition. How much of your history is your aquired culture and how much are you born with. He also has an opportunity for education and a future, something that the Korean system would not have been able to provide without a birthfather.
That isn’t to say every adoptee’s life (like every bio kids life) is a bed of roses. Sometimes kids don’t fit in with their families - some adopted kids don’t, some bio kids don’t. Some people really want to be parents and turn out not to be very good at it - whether they chose to become parents through adoption or via more traditional methods.
I hesitated to respond to this with my point of view, because Dangerosa said it so well. But, here is my 2 cents.
Frankly, I think you are projecting a lot of feels and emotions onto something that you can’t really understand at all without first hand knowledge of it. I am not saying that to criticize, but to try to drive home the point that it’s dangerous to assume that you know what something…anything…feels like, if you haven’t experienced it yourself.
I think that what most adopted children would say to this immediately is that, yes, getting pregnant was clearly a mistake, but on the other hand, there are other choices other than adoption that could have been made. Certainly, abortion is one of them, and I think most of us would be glad that wasn’t the option taken. The other is to have kept the child, but one has to assume that if a person is going to do something as difficult as giving her child up for adoption, they must have had some compelling reason to do so. I would rather be with my stable family than to face the consequences of whatever that reason might be.
As I said much earlier in the thread, it’s not about money. I would rather have my far-from-rich family who loved me than a rich one that didn’t, any day.
I don’t really see the need for moral condemnation at all. The implication is that being adopted is inherently a second-rate life, so it should only happen under dire circumstances. I disagree with this completely.
As Dangerosa says, this isn’t Sophie’s Choice. It’s not as though you are condemning a child to an inadequate life.
I think this is probably the key place where your understanding of adoption is simply limited by your lack of exposure to it. See, I have extended family too. Aunts, Uncles, cousins, grandparents. They all consider me as much a part of the family as my parents do. Having siblings who are “birth” members of the family, I can see that I am not treated differently, and it’s actually kind of amusing that they often seem to forget altogether about my specific circumstances, and make comments that I “always looked like so-and-so” or “you get that from such and such side of the family.” My own mother saw a picture of my adopted brother as an infant, sitting on her lap, and said, “you know, I look pretty good there for just having had a baby.” We had to remind her why she “snapped back” so quickly after that birth…because she didn’t have it! The point is, adopted people & families don’t sit there and dwell on it all the time…we are just a family, and the dynamics that happen in all families happen in ours, too.
Simply not the same thing. Adoptive parents don’t go out of the way to have a baby that they are not going to want.
Again, a totally different situation. It’s a tragedy for a child, IMO, to lose a family he already knows (and this is true of children who only know an adoptive family and is taken away from them). It’s the bonds of familyhood that are formed over time that are important…not the DNA.
As ThePCapeman points out, adopted children have all of those. I value the ones I have more deeply than I could ever bother worrying about some that I have never met.
I guess I see your point, but if the child does want to, I’m not sure it would be for any of the reasons you said.
Antinor, if you’ve read my posts, you can see we have a lot in common. Do you think if you had the medical history, that your curiosity would be assuaged? Do you think if you had that information, that you would definitively change your every day habits? I still think that medical info is a straw man. Perhaps not in your specific case, but in general.
Love your posts Dangerosa, you clarified a lot of points, and brought up several more good ones.
On the medical side, I think adoptions should happen with a “birth family medical history” that can be passed to the adoptive parents and their child. Basically, the same sort of medical form that you do at the doctor’s office “have any of your parents or grandparents had heart disease? Explain.” The thing to keep in mind is that birthmoms in the U.S. are often young. Birthfathers are often unavailable. So you will, quite possibly, be getting half a medical history (mom’s half) from a sixteen year old who has four living grandparents and several living greatgrandparents with no idea what her families health history is. Better than nothing.
You can get better information after twenty years have passed - assuming a search is successful. But I have a problem with adoptees having the right to find their birthparents. Birthparents often start new lives and move on, and sometimes their new family doesn’t know about the early child. There are often younger children in the birthparents home that are not at a good age for this to come out (early is best, late is ok, dropping a birth sibling on a thirteen year old is seldom a great idea)
It would depend on what that history told me as to how it would affect my life. For example, I know heart problems run on my mothers side (Mom has several heart problems including an aneurysm, maternal grandfather died of a heart attack at about age 40, along with several others). All I know from my birth dads side is that his parents died when he was young, no idea of what. I know he had a number of siblings but no other info, things like that. So I can certainly see where knowing what tends to run in both sides of the family would help
For a particular iexample, it’s thought that being prone to aneursym is hereditary. They also tend to have no symptoms and are often found while looking for something else. Knowing that my Mother has one, I can have a chest xray added to my checkups. No, it doesn’t affect my everyday but could be an important thing for me to know.
If I understand the rest of your question correctly, no, a medical history is not my only reason for wanting to meet my birth father. It is part of it and certainly could be an important part but is not all of it.
This is exactly the way it works (or worked) in New Zealand around 15 years ago when I was put in touch with my birth mother, and it does work very very well. I am adopted, and like others have already mentioned, blood is not that big of a deal. I never felt any compulsion to be in touch with my birth parents beyond idle curiosity. A full medical history would be nice, but again not essential as most genetic diseases are very rare - and nothing can be done for me, (when having children it is different though)
I recently found my Biological Family and it’s given me some information that seems to be quite relevant/useful to me.
1.An extremely high percentage of my Male forebears experience a moderate heart attack around the age of 60. This could be diet related, but it’s good to know i have to watch what I eat.
- I am not going to go bald. I am however well on my way to going white at 24. This is, apparently, par for the course.
There’s other, more trivial, bits of medical history. Those are the 2 that stand out. For me discovereing my biological family has been a positive experience that has helped my understand where i come from, and a lot of why I am the way I am. YMMV
Not necessarily.
My four older brothers had/have Duchene’s Dystrophy and the youngest was 19 when he was diagnosed. The oldest was 30ish.
FTR, I am adopted.
I think the records should be updated every five years medically speaking, just for a peace of mind for the adopted child. Face to face stuff is an entirely different enchilda all together.
For the life of me, I cannot remember the complete title of a recently released book on the subject of adoption. It was utterly fascinating and depressing at the same time. It was about the girls who gave their children up for adoption in the 50’s-70’s and the societal pressure of shame at that time for unwed moms
The moms of these teenager all sounded exactly the same, obsessed with what everyone thought about your social standings and the shame brought upon the family twaddle. Most of these girls were sent away to give birth ( without any knowedge or help about child birth and then pretty much forced to sign the paper work. The stuff written on the adoption papers about the parents was filled in by the social worker, and pretty much was a load of lies because of the rigid moral standards at the time.)
The title was something like Adoption and the girls who gave up their babies.
If you want another facinating book that will make you cry, read “I Wish You a Beautiful Life.” Its letters written by birthmothers to their children in one of the mothers home in Korea.
Some statistics to help the discussion, from the Arizona Confidential Intermediary Program, administered by the Arizona Supreme Court:
When the sought party (parent or child) is located:
• Consent to exchange identifying information — 50.0%
• Party deceased — 7.0%
• Consent to exchange non-identifying information — 4.0%
• Consent to exchange information denied — 8.0%
• Parental relationship denied — 1.0%
Total: 70%
• Party not located — 9.0%
• Program closure for administrative reasons — 10.0%
• Client withdrawal — 4.0%
• No Arizona adoption on record — 2.0%
Closed cases report July 1993—May 2003.
I suspect many adoptees have a daydream that their birth parents are rich and famous which is seldom the case.Their real ones are the ones who raised them . Reasons for knowing their family tree,to prevent accidental incest maybe ?and being able to find bone marrow donors if they contract Leukeimia.
Hehe. I readily admit that when I was a kid it was a fun pasttime (Especially when I was mad at my dad) to think to myself ‘My REAL dad would never…’ whatever it was my dad had done to piss me off. Or to sometimes imagine that he had come into a great fortune that would someday be all mine etc etc. That was all childhood fantasy though.
My reasons for wanting to meet my birth father have nothing to do with those things, I know a little about the life and financial situation he was in when mom got pregnant and have little reason to think it has greatly changed. But that isn’t at all the point.
Yeah, that kind of thing tends to end around the early teen years. Anyway, non-adopted kids have that fantasy, too, I think. (“I’ll bet I’m really adopted, and my REAL parents would never…”)
I wonder if your interest has something to do with the fact that your mother is your birth mother, so you have less of an abstract idea of what it is like to have birth parents than many adoptees, who have no contact with birth relatives at all. Just a theory. What do you think?
It’s certainly possible. As I said in my first entry in this thread, I realize my situation is rather different than many adopted kids. As you say, I live with my birth mother and know I have a father out there that doesn’t know about me.
Right. It’s interesting to me, because I think (although, of course, I don’t know for sure, not being in your situation), that having even a little bit of information might make it much more of a tantilizing prospect to learn more. And, having grown up with your birth mother, it might seem like something was missing not to know the “other half” of yourself. As an example, I of course don’t look like anyone in my family. But if I had one birth parent, I would see which features seemed to come from that person, and then I would be thinking that they other ones must come from the other side. It might make it pretty intriguing to see for myself.
It is intriguing to think about, no question. Do I have half siblings, aunts, uncles, do they look like me, or my kids? On the other hand I just have visions of introducing myself, and all of a sudden getting 0300 phone calls to bail some sobbing sorta relative out of jail. Yes, I know that’s cynical. Or how about noone in the family knows anything, and I am now a dirty secret, that is going to upend a whole bunch of people’s lives? I think that is unfair to foster on innocent bystanders. Like I said, I think I have done just fine for 37 years, let sleeping dogs lie. (If I could just spy…)