NYHOMESTUDY BLOG

Looking for Their Children’s Birth Mothers

By MAGGIE JONES

A few months ago, in an office near Guatemala City, a woman known as a searcher spread out a large map across her coffee table. The map was dotted with about 250 tiny, hand-drawn circles, each one representing a place where the searcher had tracked down a birth mother who had placed a child for adoption. Sometimes she found a birth mother after knocking on a few doors in Guatemala City. In other cases, she traveled for three or four days to remote indigenous areas in Guatemala or farther afield to Nicaragua, Honduras or El Salvador.

I heard about the searcher, who because of the sensitivity of her work asked me to identify her by the first initial of her name, S., more than a year ago on an adoption listserve. That is when I began scouting to find my own daughter’s birth mother. One reason my husband and I chose to adopt from Guatemala more than three years ago was that we knew families who had met their children’s birth mothers at the adoption finalization and had a continuing exchange of photos and letters and, in some cases, made occasional visits to them in Guatemala.

In our situation, though, the potential for an open adoption proved to be more complicated. Before we went to Guatemala to adopt our daughter Lucia, we told our agency we hoped to meet her Guatemalan mother. But it was never clear that she was given the option of meeting us. An agency representative in Guatemala did tell us that the birth mother wanted us to send photos of Lucia. But months after we mailed them, the photos sat in the representative’s office. The birth mother had moved, and no one, it seemed, knew how to find her.

Like a growing number of parents, I was inclined toward some form of open adoption in part because of the experiences of adoptees born into closed, secretive domestic adoptions in the 1950s and ’60s, as well as those adopted internationally. Many of these adoptees say they yearn for more information about their genes and their birth families: What does my birth mother look like? Do I have biological brothers or sisters? Why was I placed for adoption? I knew too that adoptees like Lucia, whose ethnicity and skin color are different from their parents’, may crave seeing themselves reflected in blood relatives.

Some of these issues have diminished in domestic infant adoptions, where today a vast majority of adoptive and birth families have had contact with one another, according to Adam Pertman, author of “Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming America” and executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, an education, research and public-policy organization. And there is increasing evidence that openness is a good thing.

In a 20-year longitudinal study of domestic adoptions, Harold Grotevant and Ruth McRoy, professors at the University of Minnesota and University of Texas at Austin, respectively, found that birth mothers in open adoptions experienced less adoption-related grief than those in closed adoptions. And all of the adopted teenagers in the study who had continuing, in-person contact with their birth families wanted those relationships to continue.

For many reasons, though, creating openness at the outset of an international adoption is often difficult — and sometimes impossible. In part it’s because birth mothers typically face great stigma, and while there are increasingly exceptions, many adoption agencies offer little or no help for parents who want to initiate these relationships. Instead, searching for birth families 2 or 10 or even 30 years after the fact has become an imperfect alternative.

As I contemplated whether to search, I scoured listserves dedicated to adoptive parents who had searched or were considering doing so. They debated when to do it: while your child is an infant or a toddler and when a relationship with a birth mother has a chance to become a natural part of your child’s life? Or later, when your child is old enough to express whether she has any interest in finding her birth family?

Meanwhile, I knew that some adoptees argue that parents shouldn’t search at all; the decision should be left to adoptees, when they become adults. “There is so little we have control over in the process of adoption; searching is one of them,” says Susan Soon-keum Cox, vice president for public policy and external affairs at Holt International Children’s Services, who was adopted from South Korea in the 1950s. Cox was in her 30s before she searched for her birth family. As it turned out, her birth mother died just before the search, but Cox eventually met two half-brothers whom she sees when she goes to South Korea for work and corresponds with by e-mail a couple of times a year with the help of a translator. Until the search, her brothers never knew of Cox’s existence. “Imagine how that made them feel,” Cox says. “But can we have a conversation about that? Never. We are very fond of each other, but it’s polite.” Being in touch with her birth family, she says, “is a great blessing in my life, but it is also emotional. It’s not just the search, but the day after and the day after and how you navigate the complexities of the relationships.”

While Cox found her birth family after placing a single newspaper ad, searches are often much more difficult. In indigenous regions of Guatemala, for instance, after decades of government violence and discrimination, as well as increasing controversy about placing children for foreign adoption, outsiders are sometimes unwelcome and information is not easy to unearth. And if searching is difficult now, I, like many parents, feared it would only grow more so as time went on, and our fragile trail of leads ran cold. Worse, there might be no birth mother left to find: indigenous women, like Lucia’s birth mother, have shortened life expectancies because of poor health care and other problems. By doing nothing, in other words, I might be making a decision for Lucia.

That idea, along with the image of Lucia’s birth mother longing for photographs, tipped it for me last year. When Lucia hadn’t yet turned 2, my husband and I sent our paperwork to S., the searcher in Guatemala. I enclosed a packet of photographs of Lucia and a letter telling her birth mother that Lucia was safe and healthy and deeply loved. I also wrote that we would be happy to send pictures regularly — if that was something she wanted.

My hope, in part, was to gather bits of Lucia’s first chapter of life: photographs (in addition to the two tiny photos we have of her birth mother — one an ID picture and another from the DNA test she and Lucia underwent for the adoption), some medical history, perhaps insight into her Guatemalan mother’s and father’s personalities, as well as the circumstances around Lucia’s adoption. My other motivation for searching was to try to create a pathway for continuing contact, so that Lucia could have the option of a relationship later on. In all of this, I was making an educated guess, based on earlier generations of adoptees, that Lucia would, in fact, be curious. But it was also entirely possible she wouldn’t want to know. It was possible she would wish I had left the information unturned.

In some cases, searching not only doesn’t answer questions; it also raises ones that parents and children aren’t prepared for. That’s what happened to a New Jersey mother named Cece. For the past few years, Cece’s 11-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, has periodically released Mylar balloons into the sky to China with messages to her birth mother. “I love you,” one of them read, “and I want you to know I’m happy. My parents love me.” But one evening two years ago, Elizabeth emerged from an adoption therapy group telling her mother that many of the kids there — most of whom were adopted in the United States —
had met their birth mothers. She desperately wanted to meet hers, too; she begged her mother to search. Through a network of contacts, Cece, who asked me to use her and her daughter’s middle names, found someone in China to place an ad, with Elizabeth’s birth date and a baby photo, in the newspaper of the province where Elizabeth was abandoned. “I had this image we would have this wonderful relationship, and if they needed help, of course we would,” Cece says. Instead, a man came forward claiming to be her birth father and explaining that he had had an affair with the birth mother, resulting in Elizabeth.
The birth mother, he said, died less than a year earlier. Then the story grew more tangled. After the man agreed to a DNA test, the results showed that he was not the father. Upset by the news, he stopped responding to Cece’s searcher. Was he a fraud hoping to extract money from Cece? Or had the birth mother had another lover? Or was there a different story altogether?

Cece eventually came to feel that she was glad she searched, in part because her willingness to do it seemed to comfort Elizabeth. But immediately after the DNA results, when Cece was struggling with what to tell her daughter, she wondered whether scouting for Elizabeth’s origins was a bad decision. “I wished I had never done it,” she told me at the time, “and we could be happily sending balloons up and feeling hopeful and good.”

In an essay called “Walking Down the Village Path,” which has circulated on adoption Web sites, Jane Liedtke, the founder and C.E.O. of Our Chinese Daughters Foundation, warns that even nosing around for details of a child’s roots — whether it’s visiting an orphanage or the spot where a child was abandoned — can uncover information that parents never anticipated or wanted. “It’s not another sightseeing stop on an itinerary,” Liedtke writes. “This is not a walk for curiosity seekers. This is not an entitlement as an adoptive parent. . . . This is a life we’re talking about — your child’s life.” As Jane Brown, an adoption social worker in Scottsdale, Ariz., puts it, once you open the box, “you can’t always seal it back up.”

While my husband and I wanted as open an adoption as possible, some parents are drawn to international adoption for the opposite reason. Not only is an “unknown” birth mother unlikely to reclaim her child across oceans (in fact, disruptions of U.S. adoptions are also rare once the adoption is legally finalized), but she can also seem like less of an emotional danger — as if physical distance creates psychological distance.

But in the last decade — in addition to search services for adult adoptees — an industry has sprung up catering to adoptive parents who do want contact. Virtually every country from which children have been adopted has at least a couple of searchers and in some cases more than a dozen, with fees ranging from a few hundred dollars to $2,000 or more per search. In Guatemala alone, more than 350 parent-driven searches have taken place since the late 1990s, and parents have initiated at least 2,000 searches in former Soviet bloc countries.

Even in China, the country where it is probably hardest to search because children are typically anonymously abandoned, there is talk in the adoption community of starting a voluntary DNA database of children adopted from China. The database would, among other things, help connect adopted birth siblings to one another and perhaps one day link children to their birth parents.

But do birth mothers want to be found? Though many parents told me adoption agencies discouraged them from looking for birth parents, saying, among other things, that they could put birth mothers at risk, searchers I spoke to in India, Guatemala and Russia offered a different perspective. Tony Carruthers and his five colleagues have performed more than 600 searches in Russia. He says that they never initiate contact with the birth mother by phone or letter. (He had heard about two cases when search letters read by birth mothers’ family members — who didn’t know of the adoption — resulted in the woman’s being beaten or thrown out of the house.) “We have never compromised a birth mother,” he says. And in S.’s eight years and 261 successful cases, she knew of
only one time a birth mother was harmed; her husband mistook the searcher for someone connected to her ex-boyfriend and beat her.

When S. does show up bearing news and photographs of a child a mother hasn’t seen in 2 or 8 or 20 years, she says, women have varying responses — shame, happiness, pain and, often, relief. “Many say there hasn’t been a day they haven’t thought about their child,” she says. Only 8 out of the 261 birth families S. has found wanted no further contact with adoptive parents, usually because the birth mother’s family or new husband didn’t know an adoption had taken place.

When Marcy, a Chicago-area mother, hired S. to search three years ago, she had no idea how her son’s birth mother would react. Like many adoptive parents, Marcy wanted to meet the woman at the time of the adoption. But despite requests to her agency and to the Guatemalan lawyer assigned to the case, the two women were never connected.

Meanwhile, the birth mother, Alma, had been wondering what had become of her son, or even whether he was alive. For years, rumors have circulated in Guatemala that some adopted children are harvested for organs, and a neighbor told Alma that her son was probably dead.