For most of her 100 years, Minka Disbrow tried to find out what became of the precious baby girl she gave up for adoption after being raped as a teen. She hoped, but never imagined, she’d see her Betty Jane again. The cruel act of violence bore in Disbrow an enduring love for the child. She kept a black and white photograph of the baby bundled in blankets and tucked inside a basket….

[Betty Jane's] name was now Ruth Lee. She had been raised by a Norwegian pastor and his wife and had gone on to marry and have six children including the Alabama man, a teacher and astronaut Mark Lee, a veteran of four space flights who has circled the world 517 times. She worked for nearly 20 years at Walmart — and especially enjoyed tending to the garden area.

Recall how many stand in favour of abortion in cases of rape. Betty Jane would not likely have been born today.

A new study suggests that so-called “unadoptables” — older foster children with disabilities, behavior problems or siblings — can find permanent homes, even in states such as Minnesota, which has lagged behind others in placing children.

Foster children were 1.7 times more likely to be adopted when “child-focused” recruiters helped them find new parents [...]

“It’s one more person in there that can help support the kids,” she said. [...]

She said the state is seeking to improve foster care adoptions in other ways. The University of Minnesota is unveiling a new certification program to train counselors and therapists to work with adopted children and to keep adoptive families intact.

A picnic is also scheduled in Oakdale next week to highlight the 588 foster care adoptions in Minnesota last year and to call attention to the children still awaiting permanent homes.

You can find out more about how to support adoption efforts in your area here, or check out Wendy’s Wonderful Kids.

Now, I know I’m not “adopted”, but I can perhaps imagine what kind of emotion comes with being fully adopted. I’ve held onto my father’s name, even through marriage, in part because of that sense of inheritance that bound me to him. Reading this beautifully written piece in The Guardian, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of the proud rebellious love that comes with being adopted (even if you’re not really adopted).

Shortly before I left home, my mum told me she was adopted. Although this news was a shock, adoption was not unfamiliar to me: my great-grandfather was adopted, so was my great-aunt. Now my mother’s made a third in the family.

Recently, when I told someone of this history, they gasped and said: “You’ve got no past.” The more I talk about the adoptions, the more I realise how hard it is for other people to get their heads around the idea. [...]

The more I think about the three adoptions in my own family, the more I realise that what they mean to me cuts across other people’s expectations of strain and discord. The adoptions have given me a tremendous sense of inheritance, and of luck. I feel lucky to be part of this extraordinary family.

______________________

Andrea adds: For Facebook readers, let me add here that I am not adopted. (This is Jennifer Derwey’s post.) Truly, not in any sense of the word. If I am, the likeness my mother and I share is all the more uncanny. Heading to the Czech Republic soon for my grandmother’s 90th birthday, where I expect to be called “mala Hana” for the week. (Czech for “small Hana.”)

Teenage girls and women pregnant with unwanted babies should be offered the ‘golden option’ of adoption alongside abortion or struggling on to raise the children, a Government adviser said yesterday.

The call from Martin Narey, the Coalition’s new adoption tsar, will pile fresh pressure on social workers to end three decades of hostility to adoption as a way of finding homes for children with troubled mothers.

Ministers have already tried to clear the way for thousands of children to find new families by ordering social workers and their managers to scrap race rules that have prevented white couples from adopting black children, and barred people in their 40s and older from adoption.

The suggestion by Mr Narey, a former chief executive of Barnardo’s, would mean a return to the practices of the 1970s, when mothers who could not keep their children often offered them for adoption. Since then, adoption has gone out of fashion with social workers, and the number of children adopted from state care has dropped from more than 20,000 a year to around 3,000.

In a report into the state of the adoption system, containing 19 suggestions for improvements, Mr Narey said social workers should no longer press pregnant women with personal difficulties to bring up their children.

And he suggested it was wrong to tell teenagers they would make good mothers.

‘For six months we are all over her telling her how well she is doing – and then she is on her own. What we are doing is cowardly,’ he said in the report, commissioned by The Times.

‘Adoption should be a third option to abortion or keeping the child. It is an attitude that must be allowed to grow.

‘In the U.S. mothers who give their children up for adoption believe they are giving them a great start.

‘Here it is viewed as a success if we talk them out of it..

Changing attitudes: Mr Narey said that pregnant women should follow the American example and believe that if their child is adopted it is being given a good start in life 

‘I am afraid some people just don’t like adoption. They think it is social engineering, allowing middle-class people to bring up working-class children. Where there are successes, professionals are apologetic about it, like it is some sort of tragedy.

It’s controversial to want to encourage young mothers to routinely consider adoption, but the alternative is that they routinely consider less positive options. Wouldn’t it be great if all young girls had it in the forefront of their minds that if they did get pregnant, they could always choose adoption?

Adoption is our longest-standing experience of dealing with a situation where children have been intentionally disconnected from their biological parents.

In the past, adoption records were permanently sealed. We now recognize that as being harmful to the adopted person and potentially so to the birth family, and unethical. Yet donor-conceived Canadians do not know who at least one of their biological parents is, because donors here are allowed to remain anonymous, which is no longer the case in a growing list of countries (including Britain, Australia and New Zealand among many others). That also is unethical and, if we continue with gamete donation, it must be changed.

Adoptive parents were once advised by “professionals” – as the parents of donor-conceived children have been and still often are – not to tell their children of their origins; they were told that secrecy was best.

At the time, I disagreed. I thought forcing parents to reveal their identities would deter already apprehensive parents from going through with adoption on both ends of the process. However, a recent experience may change my mind.

A few weeks ago, I was watching NBC’s ancestry reality show called “Who Do You Think You Are?”, which is essentially a very long advert for the website Ancestry.com. I had used this website years ago, but never found much. The show prompted me to give the site another chance. For me, the search entry has always been the same, looking for my biological father. I knew his name but not how to spell it, had his photograph but no year of birth, had his birth country but not his current location. The search on the site? Well, it turned up a matching name with the correct spelling, his year of birth and a matching country of origin.

I think I was a little shocked at first. It was funny, how something I had put so much time and energy into years ago was suddenly so easy. I found more about him through a Google search, his location, more recent photos, details about his life. This wasn’t particularly impacting, I had put to rest my expectations of finding this person years ago. What was shocking was the difference it seemed to suddenly make in me. And it was sudden. One minute I couldn’t have told you where my biological father was or if he was still alive and the next, I could. The effect was instant. There was a confidence perhaps that wasn’t there before. I won’t say something was “missing”, because that implies desiring it to return, but something that was not present before was now present.

We are the stories we tell ourselves, so do I think all children have a right to know their story? I don’t know if it’s a “right”, but I will say…it is, in an inexplicably intimate way, better to know than not know.

Carrying your baby to full-term and then giving it away is preferable to terminating the pregnancy for some women, but there’s no ‘easy option’. Here, three mothers tell KATE HOLMQUIST about putting their babies up for adoption.

[...]

THE RAPE VICTIM WHO RELINQUISHED HER BABY

Four years ago, 27-year-old Toni was raped on a holiday abroad. Having been made pregnant by her rapist, she says she spent a lot of her pregnancy in denial about the consequences, yet at the same time never considered an abortion. “From the second I found out I was pregnant, I knew I was in no position to be a single parent and I would not have considered a termination. I always believed everything happens for a reason. I think the child has a right to live.”

The options can range from open, semi-open (which Toni eventually chose), and closed. This article gives great insight into what can sometimes be a confusing process.

One more such story, here.

I’d like to meet the mothers and see how they are doing in life. But given privacy laws and the decision of the people I know not to seek out their biological moms, this is more difficult.

(h/t)

Our family’s adoption was far from perfect, although for the moment it seems to have ended better than Hansen’s. Of course, we still don’t know how it really ends. Even if my adopted daughter turns out fine, there are the other children to consider — my three-year-old biological son may spend years on the couch because my adopted daughter displaced him; either my older son or my older daughter could seek the love and affection they lost this past year in a cult or a series of destructive one-night stands. We won’t know until we know (and we’ll never know what might have been different).

With the publicity surrounding his return, Hansen’s adopted son will surely be taken in by some Russian family, and no matter what’s said about it publicly, that will not be a smooth sail down the Nile. Probably none of it will work out as anyone would have intended — in fact, by definition, it already hasn’t. A perfect world would be one in which every child could be well cared for by the mother he or she was born to. That’s not what we’ve got. A “successful” adoption story is one in which you can tell yourself that it worked out better than the alternative. That has to be enough.

It sounds like a script for a B-grade horror movie: a childless 30-something American woman decides to adopt a seven-year-old orphan boy from halfway around the world.  Overnight, the boy’s world changes completely:  from the gloom of a Russian orphanage, he is transported to the bucolic “horse country” of Tennessee.  At first all seems well, but as time goes on the boy begins to display disturbing behaviour, spitting, hissing and kicking his new mother, threatening to kill family members, reacting violently when denied a new toy, attempting to beat a relative with a statue when asked to correct his math homework.

Finally, when the child not only threatens to burn down his house but draws pictures of the conflagration, the adoptive mother hatches a desperate plan.  She puts the boy on a plane back to Russia with a note saying that he has severe psychological problems, she was lied to by the orphanage, and that she had

“…given my best to this child [but was] sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child. As he is a Russian national, I am returning him to your guardianship and would like the adoption disannulled.”

Were this a movie, that would be the final frame; the haunted face of a purported psychopathic child staring out the face of the airplane, while his adoptive mother and her family sob with both guilt and relief.  But this isn’t a fantasy – it’s the real story of Russian orphan Artyom Savelyev and his American adoptive mother, Torry Hansen.  And this drama didn’t end at the airport: it has spawned an international diplomatic incident, a freeze on American adoption of Russian children, and an investigation into the adoptive mother and her family.

Words fail me. I gather adoption is not always easy, and I’m sure international adoptions are several orders of magnitude harder. Especially when the child has been mistreated – or “mistreated” according to posh North American standards. But good grief – “I no longer wish to parent this child”? That’s enough to kick an orphan, a 7-year-old orphan, back to Russia?