Kudos: Nine Ideas for Adoption Reform

From time to time, REFORM Talk will offer our kudos to particularly insightful blog posts. This blog post was written in 1999 by a birthmother named Heather Lowe.Though written with US domestic adoption in mind, all the suggestions are completely relevant for reform today for domestic adoption and many are relevant for international adoption and surrogacy as well. Sadly, they have yet to be implemented.

We recommend that our readers fully read the post still available here.

The nine points are as follows:

1. Keep social workers with an agenda away from expectant mothers.

2. Mandate counseling for all potential birthmothers.

3. Train all hospital workers in sensitive adoption practices.

4. Keep hopeful adoptive parents out of the delivery room and away from the hospital.

5. Abolish irrevocable consent.

6. End adoption advertising.

7. Let closed adoptions dwindle like the Dark Age remnant they are.

8. Open records for adult adoptees.

9. Make open adoption agreements legally enforceable.

Some of our favorite quotes:
“Birthmothers do not give their children as gifts to needy parents; if anything they give the parents as gifts to their children”

“Yes, the prospective parents will face real pain if the birthmother decides to keep her baby. But the cold truth is that no one is going to leave that hospital without pain. The potential birthmother is expected to bear the pain, and to bear it FOREVER.”

“Adoptive families like to say their families were formed by God. If so, then why do they need marketing to get the job done? If God wants to form a family by adoption, then prospective adoptive parents need to sit back, shut up and let Him do it. ”

” Babyselling is rightfully despised in our culture, yet somehow baby soliciting is not. ”

” Adoptive parents function as the gods in the adoption triad, and like the gods of mythology they can be either benevolent or terrible. I urge both present and prospective adoptive parents to try to truly feel the enormity of birthmother and adoptee loss. Then, if you still feel the adoption is necessary and good, go ahead with it…but do it in a dignified way that honors your child-to-be and the family from which he comes. Then adoption is allowed to be a blessed event, not a disgraceful one.”