Long story short, my mom thinks that when MIL and FIL adopted Mr. Rilch, the agency lied to them about his ethnic background. This was in 1969, and MIL and FIL never met the bio parents. I think she’s basing this on some pretty flimsy evidence, but I’m just curious: Would an adoption agency ever choose to tell prospective parents “what they want to hear”? It’s not like a medical condition or anything, but I would still think that they’d be 100% truthful about what they do know, and if they didn’t, they’d just say they didn’t know.
There was a news story quite recently, about a woman who was trying to reverse the adoption of her son, because the agency lied about his past.
We could use more info, if possible.
Google “adoption fraud” and “lawsuit against agoption agency.” Adoption agencies are notorious for unscrupulous practices and for hiding facts from adoptive parents. Take a look at this: http://consumerlawpage.com/article/adopt.shtml
I personally know two sets of adoptive parents who had badly damaged children pawned off on them by agencies who hid the truth of the children’s backgrounds. In one case, the child was diagnosed with severe FAS. He’ll probably spend his life in institutions. The agency had to have known that the birth mother was an alcoholic who drank steadily all through her pregnancy, but they didn’t inform the adopters. In the other case, the child, who was taken away from his birth mother because he was sexual abused in her home, molested his adoptive siblings. The agency didn’t warn the adoptive parents.
Lots of people distrust agencies. When my sister-in-law found she was in infertile, she chose to adopt her cousin’s unplanned baby rather than deal with an agency. She was lucky to have had this opportunity and lucky that the law in her state allows private adoptions. She wouldn’t have adopted otherwise. Sis in-law said she’d trust a used car salesman before she’d take the word of a social worker in an adoption agency.
It strikes me that you are being a little touchingly naive.
An ethical adoption agency might not lie, but one would be foolish to assume that all adoption agencies are ethical. (Or maybe I’ve just read too many novels involving adopted children with weird experiences. . . ) Even if the agency is generally ethical, an individual employee may not be. There may be pressure to get X number of babies adopted per month. If babies of certain backgrounds adopt faster than others, it might be that someone would make it sound more likely that the baby would be from a background which would adopt faster.
Whether an adoption agency should lie or not, I don’t have a hard time imagining a situation in which an unethical employee might say what the prospective adoptive parents want to hear rather than admit to not knowing.
Companies never lie. They don’t have mouths.
Individual employees have been known to lie in all kinds of jobs and industries, I’m afraid.
Sorry for the double post, but I just remembered a somewhat relevant story. I know of a situation where a family was called in about an available baby, who may or may not have been mixed race. They received a picture, and believed the baby was biracial, but the agency ultimately decided he wasn’t, and he was placed with a white family. I don’t know what your husband believes that his background might be, but sometimes it’s hard for people to tell, when the child is a newborn.
Are such agencies operated by humans?
I would not think that there was a general trend toward lying among such agencies. OTOH, there have certainly been several “baby mill” agencies that have come to light over the years. (Not large numbers, not a common occurrence, but still troubling that any would be unethical when providing that service.) And, of course, even a non-profit or government agency (where there would not appear to be a profit motive for lying) could have an individual case worker who might choose to lie if s/he felt that some information could be a deal breaker to prevent the placement of a child s/he thought was a good match for a home.
Omega Glory’s story is probably the recent one about a child with a history of suffering and inflicting abuse who was placed with a family and they were not made aware of the history–at which point they boy abused one or more of his adoptive siblings. The agency involved was either government or not-for-profit, if I recall. (There is also the counter-claim by the agency that the woman had become attached to the boy while she fostered him and would not listen when they tried to dissuade her from adopting, so we are back to a conflict of claims without actual evidence that the agency lied.)
Obviously, my guess regarding Omega Glory’s story was pretty far off.
Mr. Rilch’s adoptive father is Italian. (His adoptive mother is German, but their name is very Italian.) Mr. Rilch says that according to the paperwork, which admittedly I have not seen, his bio-mom was/is Italian, and I think he said bio-dad was too.
My mom disputes this, on the grounds that she’s seen photos of Mr. Rilch when he was a kid, with light-ish hair. Not Scandinavian blond, but lighter than the brown it is now. When I pointed out that those photos were taken at the end of entire summers spent at the shore, she insisted that Italians don’t get light hair no matter how much time they spend in the sun.
He was both conceived and adopted in Pittsburgh, where the default ethnicities are Italian and Polish. So she says he’s probably Polish, and the adoption agency responded to MIL and FIL’s last name and told them the child (he was just short of 1 year) was Italian.
I dunno. It’s not like he’s looking to get made or anything. If he ever follows up on his vague plans to find bio-mom, I guess we’ll find out. (I have not shared this with him, FTR.)
Something else I just remembered…
not only is it possible that the birthmom herself wasn’t completely forward with the adoption agency, perhaps attributing the kid to a particular gent when she actually wasn’t sure, but often people’s ancestries are more mixed than they know. And often, people’s notions of which “race” or ancestry they are don’t follow the same definitions from country to country. Moroccans see themselves as “white” but they’re certainly a lot darker than, say, your average German; they’re also very likely to have the tight curls that indicate even-darker ancestors (although it may have been several centuries ago and that particular gene just doesn’t want to die off).
She is wrong. Northern Italians can be quite light- much of my family is.
Mwahahahaha!
Euhm, sorry 'bout the triple post. Your mom is just wrong. Promise. I’ve met naturally-blond Italians. My father and his siblings are naturally-blond Spaniards; cherub-blond as kids, darkening to ash-brown or straw-blond as adults. Middlebro’s hair and mine get reddish in the summer, Lilbro gets blonde highlights. He used to be one of those blonde-curls, blue-eyed kids that get called “an angel” or “so pretty he looks like a girl” by every other woman on the street (he used to hate it until he figured out how to parlay it into cookies; you could call him anything you wanted so long as there was an economic benefit involved, and this was when he was 3).
No, you’re right. The story about the people trying to undo the adoption is about a different family than the ones that were involved in the “is the baby 1/2 black or not?” scenario. I actually know some of the people involved in thes second story.
Well, okay then!
That’s fairly sketchy evidence IMO. As I understand it, northern Italians can be just as blonde as their scandinavian neighbors. Also, my husband, who is 1/2 Italian and 1/2 Puerto Rican tended toward light brown/almost blond hair when he was a child. I don’t think light hair in childhood is all that uncommon.
As a woman who surrendered a child to adoption and thirty years later come into reunion with my child, I was surprised to discover that the agency had lied to me and to the adoptive parents.
The lie they told me amounted to saying she was being adopted by a doctor who’s wife was a nurse. This was a flat out lie, with no real value. Perhaps they were trying to offer a teenager reassurance, as the years rolled by, that it was the BEST kind of home. Or perhaps they were trying to put me off the scent should I decide to search.
More to the point, they were in a position where records were all sealed. So they had little fear of discovery. How could they have known that 30 years later attitudes would change so radically? Likewise laws about access to information.
There are people in the adoption community who feel that adoption, when it’s all said and done, is all about lies. It is wrought with secrecy and deception, at the very least.
That’s ridiculously sketchy evidence. I’m a bit of a mutt, but of primarily Mediterranean descent, and I was a blonde kid, especially at the end of the summer.
My sister and I were adopted (1960’s) and they told my parents that I was British/Irish and
my sister French Canadian. Guess what my adoptive parents’ backgrounds were. Yep-my
dad was Irish and my mom French Canadian. When I finally met my birth family turns out I
was Scandinavian on my father’s side and Slovenian on my mother’s.
[rrr… FTA]
The nationality information was clearly on the original sealed adoption records which I received
when I petitioned the state of Ohio for said records when I began my birthparents search. Yet
the adoption agency just told my adoptive parents what they wanted to hear.