Oh the spinning of old comments into new positive comments…

By TAO

The words might have changed but the reality didn’t…

From “you could have been aborted” to “she chose life“…

It all goes back to the same message for adoptees – “be grateful you could have been aborted”  to “be grateful your mother chose life” – side-stepping that every person alive on the planet today had a mother who chose life, and then makes the huge assumption that all mothers who surrender their babes for adoption first seriously considered abortion…

Never mind the new “she made an adoption plan” she didn’t “give up her baby“.  So did my mother when she went away for the rest of her pregnancy, and after she gave birth called up the county social worker and surrendered me for adoption.  If that was not an “adoption plan” – why the heck would she move away, give birth, and then call up the county social worker?  She was just like other mothers who went to a maternity home to have their babies and give them up (regardless if they wanted to or not) – it was an “adoption plan” that started with the decision to go to the maternity home.  Yet people will say that today mothers make an “adoption plan” unlike mothers in our day?  At the same time they don’t state that mothers then, and now, still have to relinquish their rights and surrender the babe for adoption which means they do have to give up their rights to the baby…but the prospective adoptive parents sure do count down the hours until the mother can sign “the papers“.

Sometimes, I wonder if this push for all this positive adoption speak isn’t a step back from the truth into even a deeper level of secrecy than existed in my day…and specifically for mothers, how much harder the fall when all the warm fuzzy speak dissipates into the reality that positive speak only obscured what they were doing.

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I’ll leave you with a snippet from one of the forms below from Justia (bolding mine)

“I, the undersigned, ( insert relationship to child ) of the aforesaid child, do hereby surrender the child to ( insert name of child-placing agency or Department of Human Services, as applicable ) and promise not to interfere in the management of the child in any respect whatever; and, in consideration of the benefits guaranteed by ( insert name of child-placing agency or Department of Human Services, as applicable ) in thus providing for the child, I do relinquish all right, title, and claim to the child herein named, it being my wish, intent, and purpose to relinquish absolutely all parental control over the child.”

Surrender definition: sur·ren·der (s-rndr) v. sur·ren·dered, sur·ren·der·ing, sur·ren·ders v.tr. 1. To relinquish possession or control of to another because of demand or compulsion. 2. To give up in favor of another. 3. To give up or give back (something that has been granted): surrender a contractual right. 4. To give up or abandon: surrender all hope. 5. To give over or resign (oneself) to something, as to an emotion: surrendered himself to grief. 6. Law To restore (an estate, for example), especially to give up (a lease) before expiration of the term.

Relinquish definition: tr.v. re·lin·quished, re·lin·quish·ing, re·lin·quish·es 1. To retire from; give up or abandon. 2. To put aside or desist from (something practiced, professed, or intended). 3. To let go; surrender. 4. To cease holding physically; release: relinquish a grip.