The World of Voluntary Domestic Infant Adoption- a final report
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This is an adapted transcript of my final presentation as a graduate of the Social Journalism student at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. A video of the talk can be seen in full here.
Hi, I’m Erica Anderson and I have been working in the world of voluntary domestic infant adoptions. To be really clear, this is not foster care. These are not adoptions that happen because Child Protective Services takes away someone’s child because of neglect or abuse.
I also want to be upfront that I’m not an adoptee, I have not adopted children and I’m not a birth parent. But for the last 9 months I have been filming a documentary about the adoption industry from the perspective of birth parents and first families.
I realized pretty early on that I needed to dispel some misconceptions I had about the adoption world. I also discovered that the adoption process has historically been cloaked in secrecy and that the adoption industry can be a stark example of some unconscious biases that we have about poor women in this country.
The main narrative we hear about adoption is that it is a win win situation: There are people who can’t have children and there are a whole bunch of unwanted children. But that’s not the whole or accurate story.
When I started reporting on this project, I found a very large community of people online and specifically on Facebook. The main groups consisted of adoptive parents and adoptees looking for community and guidance. Slowly I also started to find birth parents. Theirs was the quietest voice, but the most underrepresented group were women who were pregnant, considering adoption and also looking for resources to help them parent. It was in these groups that I understand the money aspect of adoption.
Adoption is a big business and not a very transparent one. It can leave pregnant women and people interested in adopting vulnerable to coercion. It’s not hard to imagine that things can go wrong when there is something that poor women have that wealthy people want, especially in a system that is under-regulated. But I was shocked when I discovered how large of a business adoption is in the United States.
According to the National Council for Adoption, there are 15,000–20,000 domestic voluntary infant adoptions every year and each adoption costs anywhere from $30,000-$60,000 — making it a half a billion dollar industry in the United States. More than half of those costs go to adoption agencies and legal fees and about 10% go to birth families, according to Adoptive Families 2016–2017 Adoption Cost & Timing Survey. To complicate matters, adoption data is also very difficult to track down. In the 1970s the federal government stopped requiring states to track and report voluntary infant adoptions in a formalized way. So any data that is collected is done by private companies and adoption agencies.
The numbers we do have show that the United States stands out as a very pro-adoption country. According to their respective governments reports, the United Kingdom, where adoptions are run through the state and there is universal healthcare, there are fewer than 400 adoptions each year. In Ireland, it’s less than 80.
Every adoption is by no means corrupt — in fact, thousands of adoptions take place every year and go smoothly. But according to families who have experienced it from the birth parents’ perspective, there is a system in place that is not educating or supporting moms and I would like to help tell their story. In an ideal world, my work would help make the process more transparent and be of illuminating for expecting parents, birth parents, adoptive parents and adoptees.
And that money is not going toward to the birth parents, it’s going to adoption agencies to cover their fees and their costs. And they need a lot of babies to make that system work. And it means that they don’t always treat the women who have those babies with a lot of respect.
This is Renee Gelin and her son, William on the day that he was born. Renee gave birth mom in Florida where the minute you give birth to your child, you can terminate your parental rights. And as soon as you sign that paperwork, you don’t get to change your mind. In New York, we have about 45 days. So each state is different to sort of adding to the complication of the adoption industry.
But Renee is consolation is that she was going to have an open adoption, meaning she would get to see her son throughout his life. But she was not told that that open adoption agreement was not legally enforceable. A year and a half into her son’s life his adoptive parents terminated the open adoption. The photo below was the last time she saw her son seven years ago.
I met Renee through Facebook, and she became an ambassador for me with this community. I found that birth/first/natural parents and women who are pregnant, don’t really want to talk to journalists, we tend to get this story wrong or lopsided. Renee was the perfect ambassador, not just because of her story but because she started an organization called Saving Our Sisters that’s helping women who are currently pregnant access resources if they want to parent.
I was able to meet a very large community and I’ve been speaking with birth parents and moms who were pregnant and considered adoption. I focused primarily on those two groups hoping to discover the differences between the way these women and the way they were treated during their pregnancy. I was interested in who decided to give up their children versus those who thought about it and then chose not to. This seemed like an opportunity to fill an information gap and help bring transparency to this process.
I also spoke with adoptees and adoptive parents, and lawyers and social workers and people who are working in this community. And they let me know that these are the main issues that they face:
Financial Instability
Isolation & Shame
Lack of Access to Resources
Biased Counseling
Lack of Oversight
Coercive Tactics
Something to consider, financial instability is the number one reason that women give up their children for adoption. And they don’t have a lot of unbiased counseling something called options counseling.The very few studies that we have say that women who choose to go through with adoption, who received actual options counseling feel much better about their decision in the long run and experience much lower levels of grief and trauma.
Community members told me about some coercive tactics that happened to birth parents who considered adoption. Below is a worksheet that an agency gives out to would potential birth mothers that drives the point home that these women are not the best option for their child and values vacations and over biological connection.
Along with this video documentary, I also launched a website called like I said, but I’ve also launched a website AdoptionUnpacked.org. When the film is finished it will be distributed here as well as other videos of profiles and explainers. I chose this direction based on the women I spoke to. They told me the reason that they shared their stories with me is was to get their stories out into the world. They didn’t want to be silent in their shame or anger anymore. They wanted their stories to help someone. They said they also wanted access to resources. So, I have worked on a crowdsourced map with members of my community. You can search state by state, county by county, to see different kinds of resources, medical care, employment services, affordable housing, and childcare services.
In addition to these desires expressed directly from the community, I also read studies and spoke to other experts to told me that videos and websites are the least common way that women are being given educational information, but they were the resources women most interested in.
The stories I chose for the videos focuses on women who have been through the adoption process. Why did they choose to parent or not, and what support were they given? Their experiences alone bring transparency to a process that can be clouded in secrecy. These stories are meant to help current birth parents, people who are pregnant, adoptive parents, hopeful adoptive parents, and adoptees.
Social Journalism
As I reflect over this last year and a half of my time here in the Social Journalism program, I’m incredibly grateful that I learned to practice journalism through a Social J lens.
My documentary could be seen as traditional journalism, but it was guidance like the Solutions Journalism mindset that shifted the way I approached my work. Social J encourages us to look at really difficult problems through the places and people that are solving them. It tells us to report with and get guidance from the people who are the ground affected most directly by the issues. It encourages us to listen not just for the stories but for the information gaps so that we can empower and amplify the work that is already being done in our communities by its members.
We learn from the people that we’re working with. They lead us to the solutions so that we’re not dictating things to them. That is really important to the work that I’m doing moving forward.
For anyone wondering, there was still a lot of traditional journalism going on. While taking the time to listen deeply, I was writing explainers, and profiles, creating a pilot of a podcast.
The Future
Once the documentary is done, I’m planning a screening and discussion series for the film. I’ll be facilitating Story Circles, a form of community engagement I learned during my internship at Capital Public Radio, which brings people together who wouldn’t normally be in the same room with one another, to have a discussion. In my case, that will be adoptees and birth parents and lawyers and social workers, and people who are interested in adoption to really help move this conversation forward.
I really feel honored that I’m a steward of these women’s stories. Its very important to them that we start changing the perception of what adoption is and widening our knowledge of it. These women want to change laws in this country and along the way to that goal, they want and hope that the general public’s view changes as well. When you hear about an adoption, they hope you don’t just think, “Wow, that’s amazing. That child was saved.” They want you to also think, “I wonder where that baby came from, and I wonder how its mother was treated.”
That is my hope too.
