Adoption Conference :: Secret Histories, Public Policies

A conference sponsored by the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
April 29-May 2, 2010
Official Website

Keynote speakers:

Anita L. Allen, Deputy Dean for Academic Affairs, Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania Law School. Allen’s work has focused on the law and ethics of privacy and data protection, race relations and feminist philosophy. She is the author of numerous articles and several books: Privacy Law: and Society (2007); /Why Privacy Isn’t Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability ,/ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); /Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society / (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, l988) and /The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the 21st Century Moral Landscape/ (Miramax Books/distributed by Hyperion Books, 2004).

Ann Fessler is an installation artist, filmmaker, adoptee and author of /The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade . /(The Penguin Press, 2006) based on oral history interviews she conducted between 2002 and 2005 with surrendering mothers across the country. In 2008 Fessler received the Ballard Book Prize given annually to a female author who advances the dialogue about women's rights and in 2006 her book was selected by the National Book Critics Circle as one of the top 5 nonfiction books of the year. Hear Ann Fesssler on Fresh Air .

Lynn Lauber, birth mother, writer, teacher, and book collaborator, has published three books with W.W. Norton. White Girls (1990) and 21 Sugar Street (1993), both fiction, that deal with the topics of birth families and adoption. Listen to Me, Writing Life into Meaning (2003), is part memoir, part exploration of writing as self-discovery. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times and a number of anthologies. She currently teaches personal writing workshops and is writing a memoir on her experience as a birth mother.

Deann Borshay Liem is Producer, Director, Writer for the Emmy Award-nominated documentary, First Person Plural (PBS 2000), Executive Producer for Spencer Nakasako’s Kelly Loves Tony (PBS 1998) and AKA Don Bonus (PBS 1996, Emmy Award), and Co-Producer for Special Circumstances (PBS, 2009) by Marianne Teleki. A Sundance Institute Fellow and a recipient of a Rockefeller Film/Video Fellowship, Deann is the Director, Producer, Writer of the new documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee , which will be broadcast nationally on PBS in Fall 2010. She is currently Executive Director of Katahdin Productions, a non-profit documentary production company based in Berkeley and Los Angeles, California. Learn more about DeAnn Borshay Liem on PBS’s Point of View.

Other speakers include Marla Brettschneider, Naomi Cahn, Maryanne Cohen, Marley Greiner, Meredith Hall, Craig Hickman, Margaret Homans, Liberty Hultberg, B J Lifton, Kate Livingston, Karen McElmurray, Marianne Novy, Joyce Maguire Pavao, Adam Pertman, John Raible, Lisa Marie Rollins, Elizabeth Samuels, Sarah Tobias.

There will be a day of documentary films on Thursday, beginning with Sheila Ganz's film in progress Moms Living Clean. Panels later in the conference will cover topics such as: Secrecy and Policy; Lesbian/gay Secrecy Issues and Adoption; Complications of Search, Reunion and Aftermath; Transnational Adoption as Immigration Policy; Secrecy and Adoption: Historical Perspectives on the U.S., Europe, and Asia after World War II; Birthmothers: Agency and Activism; Biological Preference Critiqued and Analyzed; Secrecy and Openness: Legal Issues; Transracial Adoption in Contemporary American Literature; Adoptive Parents, Race, Difference. There will also be an evening of creative writing and performance on Friday, 4/30/10, featuring Lisa Marie Rollins; this evening and all keynotes are free and open to the public. All sessions free to MIT affiliates, and special rates are available for non-MIT students and the un/underemployed.

For more information, visit our website or contact: asac2010@mit.edu .

Sponsored by Mass Humanities; MIT Office of the Dean of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Literature Section, Program in Women's and Gender Studies; University of New Hampshire Center for the Humanities, College of Liberal Arts, Philosophy Department; Rutgers-Camden, Department of English; University of Pittsburgh Department of English

Adoption, Gay Marriage, and the Black Community

MY FRIENDS over at Jack and Jill Politics gave me the honor of front-paging a long comment on the connections between the entitled subjects. Here's what went down:

When we consider that our ancestors couldn’t have their marriages to each other honored because they were considered property and had no individual rights, and therefore, our families weren’t considered important enough to keep together when it was time for one of us to be sold to another master, one would think Black folks wouldn’t want to see anybody’s marriages go unrecognized by the state.

You might not know this, but there are lots of gay people who have no interest in this issue at all. While they don’t come out against it, they don’t support it and think gay people who do are just selling out to the majority culture.

Go figure.

I must admit that being involved in marriage equality wasn’t something on my plate years ago, either. Even though I was married in the eyes of God, I was perfectly fine with that and sought nothing more from the state. But as I’ve aged, my life experience as an adopted person and as an adult adoptee rights advocate raised my consciousness. You see, in most every state in the union, an adopted person who’s an adult has no right to access his original birth certificate. That is, the birth certificate the state impounded when the child was adopted and a new birth certificate was created to include the name of the adoptive parents. The birth certificate is a person’s legal DNA. I was adopted in the late 60s, during the time when everything around adoption was about shame. Adopted people know that their birth certificate is a lie — my mother did not give birth to me as my birth certificate says she did. It was important to my psychic healing to be able to see my original birth certificate after I found my birth mother, but I needed her permission to see it. A grown man needed the permission of a woman he may have never even met just to see a copy of what is rightfully his. All across the nation, grown people are treated like children by the state, like little pieces of property moved from one family to another, a move they had no say in whatsoever, and when we’re grown and we want to know where we came from, the state tells us it’s none of our business, and if we REALLY want to know, we need to get permission from some stranger we may never even want to meet or crawl before a judge on our hands and knees and beg the judge to open up our adoption file and our birth records just so we can see that piece of paper that includes our original identity, and if we’re lucky, it will help us heal.

If you can see a connection between this and our experience as Black people in this country, then you’re with me. If not, I don’t know what to tell you.

What does any of this have to do with gay marriage?

Read the rest...

Adoptee Rights On The Horizon In Maine

AUGUSTA -- Tears came to her eyes when Lee-Ann Bragdon held up photos of her father, grandmother and great-grandmother.

Bragdon, a retired dance instructor from Windsor, and her 17-year-old daughter, Bianca Badershall, talked Monday at the Statehouse to introduce a new law that allows adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates.

Starting Jan. 2, 2009, adults who were adopted in the state of Maine will have access to their original birth certificates at the state Office of Vital Records.

Maine has joined seven other states that adopted access-to-birth-certificate laws, including New Hampshire.

The 44-year-old Bragdon, an adoptee, recently found her birth father, Daniel Price, an air traffic controller in San Diego, Calif.

Bragdon said she came to the news conference to support Original Birth Certificates for Maine, a grassroots group that succeeded in getting legislators to pass the law.

She pointed to a copied, black-and-white photograph of her grandmother holding her dad as a toddler.

"See," she said nodding at her daughter in the chair next to her. "She and my dad look almost alike. When I first tried to find him, it was for medical information. My daughter was diagnosed with a pervasive developmental disorder, which is a form of autism, but when he found out about me he said it felt like the day I was born. There was an instant bond between us."

Now he calls her every Sunday and once or twice during the week and is coming to Maine in February to meet Bradgon and her family, she said.

Sen. Paula Benoit, an adoptee, co-sponsored the legislation, which Gov. John Baldacci signed June 25.

Benoit said the law restores rights that were taken away in 1953 when Maine passed a law requiring adoptees to obtain court orders in order to get access to their original birth certificates.

Read the rest...

I missed the press conference. Couldn't get myself together in time to make it to the state house, but I was there in spirit.

In less than 60 days, all adopted adults in Maine who want to see a copy of their birthright, their unaltered, original certificate of live birth, will be able to do so, joining all non-adopted persons who've always been able to enjoy this right.

I've seen mine and I can say it remains one of the biggest spiritual breakthroughs of my life.

Putting It All Together in Pittsburgh

I KNEW IT WOULD BE GOOD. When Marianne Novy invited me to be part of a panel of men who write adoption memoirs, I knew her Encountering New Worlds of Adoption: 2nd International Conference on Adoption and Culture at the University of Pittsburgh this past weekend would be a conference at which I would not only want to present, but also to stay for its entirety.

I was not disappointed.

The Cathedral of Learning (pictured - no that's not the Empire State Building) hosted English professors, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, historians, lawyers, authors, filmmakers, poets, novelists, memoirists, feminists, activists, birth parents, adoptive parents, adoptees, and others in the best conference on adoption I've attended since becoming aware of such things in 2003.

The session on Men Write Adoption Memoirs was held on Friday afternoon. Chaired by Faith Adiele, a 1986 Harvard graduate who also happened to be a friend of my best friend Gail, the session was packed. Faith dubbed it "the man show" as women made up the vast majority of conference attendees. She got a laugh. As did all the readers, prompting Jean Strauss, who presented on the opening plenary panel Adotpion Memoirs Classic and New, to ask us whether or not we concsciously infused our narratives with humor.

"What struck me," she said, "was that you all say the same things we [women] say, but you make it funny."

Laughter is the best medicine. Was it Reader's Digest that coined that gem?

Adoption and the attendant issues are serious business. But there is humor in everything, if you let yourself see it.

Ralph Savarese, Peter McCullough, Ned Balbo, and I responded that whatever effort there was to infuse our work with humor was largely unintentional. Peter, an academic writer who read from a manuscript-in-progress, said that he used humor to tell his personal story because he wanted to make space for an audience he didn't think would be all that interested in the solopsism of autobriographical writing. Still, I think his delivery is what garnered most of the laughs. Having taught at Oxford for some time now, his acquired British accent and wit made many of his metaphors even more funny than they might have been on paper alone. Ralph dismissed with the "conceit of remembered dialogue" and read primarily from his 9-year-old autistic son's own words that his son had typed on his computer. Ralph was able to infuse humor into a story of torture and redemption. No small task. Ned read with the quiet deliberation of a literary poet, but still managed to draw a few laughs.

I've never considered myself funny. But bringing the characters of my life to life in a way that I hadn't in a long time got lots of laughs. My people are hilarious. What with all their downright uptight religious dogma. At some point you just can't take it all so seriously. And this reading told me that I might need to perform again sometime in the near future. Perhaps it will inspire me to finish adapting parts of my book into a performance piece that tells the story of my reunion from the perspective of eight people in my adoptive and biological families. Attending the conference with her mother was a little girl who couldn't have been any more than 7 or 8-years-old. At the closing dinner, she told me that I was one of her favorite speakers.

Children don't say such things unless they mean them. I took her compliment seriously. Perhaps my semi-retirement from performance will come to a semi-end sometime in the near future.

I can't possibly write about all the great sessions I attended in one entry. But conferences are, ultimately, about meeting and connecting with people. I'd like to think I made friends with Susan, Emily H, Lorrain, Jean, Emily P, Janet, Carol, Shayla, Cindy, Marianne and her husband, and a few others whose names escape me at the moment. But if by some chance you're reading this and I haven't named you, you know who you are. The conversations I had with you all on shuttles to and from the airport, at the hotel lounge, around the dinner table, between sessions in the labyrinthian cathedral stairwells and halls, walking to restaurants, and at the final lunch are fresh in my mind.

I thank Marianne for a wonderful, fulfilling experience and I hope to attend the 3rd International Conference on Adoption and Culture whenever, wherever it may be.

The Adoption Show

VOICES ENDING THE MYTH...

Sunday July 29, 2007 8:30 PM (EST)
http://www.adoptionshow.com/

Click on a media player or "listen to show" on the home page

Join friends and guests in The Adoption Show chat room after the show!

MAINE VICTORY FOR ADOPTEES!

CATHERINE ROBISHAW & BOBBI BEAVERS
Cathy and Bobbi are part of the OBC for ME team (Original Birth Certificates Maine)
http://www.obcforme.org/

Cathy an adoptee, and Bobbi a reunited mom, talk about the lobbying efforts by OBC for ME that passed legislation allowing adult adoptees in the state of ME to access their original birth certificates beginning January 1, 2009.

BARBARA BISANTZ RAYMOND
Barbara Bisantz Raymond is an adjunct professor, adoptive mother, and writer. She will talk about her recently published book: Georgia Tann - The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller who Corrupted Adoption.

Barbara has received two awards for feature writing from Women in Communications, and was an author of a child care section that won the National Magazine Award for Public Service. She contributed to The Handbook of Magazine Article Writing , and has written for The New York Times, USA Today, Working Mother, Parents, Writer's Digest , Reader's Digest , Good Housekeeping, Redbook, McCall's, and Ladies' Home Journal. She lives in New York City.

***Barbara's op-ed regarding adoptee access to their original birth certificates will appear in The New York Times on Sunday, July 29.

_________________________________

Contact The Adoption Show
theadoptionshow@gmail.com

My Father Was an Anonymous Sperm Donor

IN “My Father Was an Anonymous Sperm Donor” 18-year old Katrina Clark writes about growing up as a self-described “freak” and the search for her donor:

I was angry at the idea that where donor conception is con-cerned, everyone focuses on the “parents”—the adults who can make choices about their own lives. The recipient gets sympathy for wanting to have a child. The donor gets a guarantee of anonymity and absolution from any responsibility for the offspring of his “donation.” As long as these adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?

Not so. The children born of these transactions are people, too. Those of us in the first documented generation of donor babies—conceived in the late 1980s and early 90s, when sperm banks became more common and donor insemination began to flourish—are coming of age, and we have something to say.

I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn’t ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It’s hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won’t matter to the “products” of the cryobanks’ service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.

We offspring are recognizing the right that was stripped from us at birth—the right to know who both our parents are.

And we’re ready to reclaim it.

...I really, truly would never have a dad. I finally understood what it meant to be donor-conceived, and I hated it.

...Those of us created with donated sperm won’t stay bubbly babies forever. We’re all going to grow into adults and form opinions about the decision to bring us into the world in a way that deprives us of the basic right to know where we came from, what our history is and who both our parents are.

Read more at Bastardette.

Letter to a Wisconsin Bureaucrat

June 2001

Thank you once again for your prompt attention to these matters. I received a copy of my original birth certificate via fax this morning and look forward to it in the mail.



Your letter states that my search request is now complete. No, it is not. I still want a clean copy of all the documents about me in my adoption file. I trust that you will coordinate this with Children’s Service Society of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

In putting together that clean copy, I would also like you to consider the following. Please share this treatise with all the “powers” that be in your neck of the woods.

With all due consideration to your lawyer and your policies, there is no legislation currently on the books in Wisconsin that supports the policy that the Division of Children and Family Services adheres to regarding the deletion of certain information in my adoption file.

First, my birth father is not “alleged.” Simply because my birth mother was not married when she had me does not mean that I am “illegitimate,” nor does it mean that she does not know who my birth father is. Simply because the judge did not bother to ask her under oath who my father was and thereby “adjudicate” him as my birth father does not mean that Frank East is not the man who made love to my birth mother and got her pregnant on Valentine’s Day 1967 on the campus at Oakwood College. Just this past father’s day, I met my birth father, held him, laughed with him, took pictures with him, and I look just like him. I am, indisputably, his progeny. A simple medical test would refute his “alleged” status to the State and the Courts who remain limited by social mores that, as far as I'm concerned, have been outdated for centuries. It is unfortunate that Frank East's name does not appear on my original birth certificate, written in long hand. Unfortunately, this cannot be amended. It would be more unfortunate if his name were deleted from the clean copy of my adoption records as well, especially since Dania, Florida, which is where he also currently resides, was left in full view on the document the first time I received it.

I will challenge such a deletion should I receive my records without it.

I will also challenge the deletion of the names of social workers, foster parents, and any other “indirect” participants in this historical account of my genesis. After all, that is what it is: history. My history. Not yours, nor your assistant’s, nor anyone else’s currently employed by the State of Wisconsin or the affiliated agency, Children’s Service Society of Wisconsin.

There is no language whatsoever in the Wisconsin Statutes calling for these deletions. The law is very clear on what it does include, and very clear on what it does not. I know the names of my birth father and social workers, and my adoptive mother believes she remembers the name of my foster parents, who, given that they were already grandparents in 1967, are possibly still alive, but more than probably dead. Who’s being protected by your policies thirty-three-plus years after the fact? Are you afraid that I am going to bring suit against Miss Gates, Miss Culver or any of the other social workers that handled my case, or bring suit against their heirs or estates, because they did not handle some aspect of my adoption correctly? Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? I cannot imagine the need for protecting their “privacy.” Even though they worked for private agencies, their names should not be deleted from my records.

As for my foster parents, I pose the same question. Is the State afraid that I would bring suit against them and/or their heirs and estates for some lack of care during the sixteen months that I was in their stead? If nothing else, I might like to locate them or their daughters who baby-sat for me in order to thank them from the bottom of my heart for taking such good care of me during the transition from birth mother to my parents. How can your policies disregard this possibility and remain so inhumane?

I will challenge such a deletion should I receive my records without them.

I have been more than saddened and pained by the treatment I received from the bureaucrats and social workers that handled my adoption search and follow-up requests. It should come as no surprise that I had to complete the search myself. How lucky for me that I had the time, determination, and resources to do so. I feel for those who must leave their search entirely in the hands of the State of Wisconsin. (I’m sure there are some happy reunion stories the State can be responsible for and some compassionate workers who bend the “rules” in order to bring joy and a sense of completion to people's lives, but in my experience searching over the last five years, they seem to be rarer than the rarest gems. I certainly hope that you continue to be one of them.)

I am annoyed that my original request for non-identifying medical and social history included many more deletions than required by Wisconsin law. In fact, I was unable to meet my biological grandfather before he died in 1998 precisely because of this broad, presumptuous, archaic, paranoid, and erroneous interpretation of the Wisconsin Statutes that govern the adoption search program.

The social workers have told so many of us that the law requires that our pasts remain full of secrets and lies when in fact the law requires no such thing.

This madness must end.

Wisconsin bureaucrats treat adult adoptees as second-class citizens who have no right to know anything about their genesis, and this must change even if I die trying to change it.

I look forward to receiving a true clean copy of my adoption file. No more secrets and cover-ups and fear and paranoia. I’m all done with that. Your policies are not founded in ethics, morality, or the law. Furthermore, they protect no one, and they need to be reviewed and changed sooner rather than later.

I can only imagine that the disgruntled, disappointed, depressed or suicidal adult adoptee who does not possess the tenacity or the resources may never complete their search when they have to negotiate within a system populated by bureaucrats and social workers who seem to “get off” on their petty little power trips, controlling what information can and cannot be disclosed when they have absolutely no regard for the law. These bureaucrats and social workers do not know what they are talking about, and they should all be relieved of their duties unless or until they become aware of the law and are able to treat each adoptee as an individual being.

You apologized for my experience and stated that you do not know what happened. Simply put, my request was not read. I submitted my birth mother's notarized letter along with a request to receive a clean copy of my adoption file, and I was given a form-letter response, as though I were someone initiating a new search. If I had already located and met my birth mother, then why on earth would I be interested in a document describing the entire search program to me and requesting up-front money for the state to begin searching? Presumably, the bureaucrats were too lazy to read my letter and too lacking of compassion to see the human being behind the letter.

The paternalistic, arrogant, and erroneous instructions and form letters that searchers are given should be criminalized, and I will spend the rest of my life bringing these travesties into the light so that all of us, including those of us who are adopted, can experience the inalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness-principles which have been infused into the articles of the United States Constitution. Will we need to go all the way to the Supreme Court?

I look forward to your cooperation in these important matters and I feel sure that I will soon possess an accurate collection of documents regarding my genesis, my history, my life.

Prologue

Upon reading the letter, a judge in Wisconsin ordered that a true, clean copy of everything in my adoption file be sent to me. I received it in August 2001.

tags: adoption, adoptee, birth mother, birthmother, birth father

Exhaling..

Since I last wrote, my book has arrived unblemished from the printer. Yes! It is a beautiful production, if I do say so myself, and now it's time to promote it.

Finding my birth family and the aftermath, which is what Fumbling Toward Divinity: The Adoption Scriptures is all about was an overwhelming, extraordinary, transformative experience that I could not have ever imagined. All my life, I wanted to look the woman who gave birth to me in the eye. Thankfully, I got that opportunity. I have a sister, also adopted, who has located her birth mother, but her birth mother has refused to allow her to see her. My sister is devastated. I'm angered. I share my story in the hopes that if only one birth mother who has previously disallowed her offspring to see her or know who she is reads my book and changes her mind, I will have achieved more than I could hope for.

To me, such a thing is a basic human right.

Is it always possible to get this information? Absolutely not. If a baby is found in a dumpster (or adopted from a legal (travesty of travesties) Safe Haven program) and raised by loving parents, that child will probably never know their biological roots.

I can't imagine what that must be like.

But when you know the information is out there and you still can't get it because the state claims its interest in protecting a person's privacy is more important than facilitating your healing, it can make you feel deep down inside like you're still the rejected child who's not worty of inner peace.

All the therapy in the world can't take the place of looking your birth mother in the eye.