Fast Track to Betrayal

Author: Terri Enbourge

If there were ever three words that should not be used in the same sentence, they are these: “Fast Track Adoption.”

Yet this is what Susan Burns, Psy.D, named her new book which helps those looking to adopt avoid things that can drag the process out. Unfortunately, the fast track avoids some important factors, including the enormous loss and accompanying grief associated with adoption.

Every reputable study into adoption indicates that mothers and children suffer lifelong consequences as a result of adoption separation. This is one reason why pioneers in the field of adoption, like Annette Baran, MSW, LCSW, became proponents of “open” adoption, which originally sought to honor the mother and child bond by necessitating lifetime contact between them.

However, in her speech, “Hoisted by Our Own Petard,” Baran eventually concluded that the initial intention toward so-called open adoption has been thwarted by an industry that profits enormously by focusing on gaining healthy newborns for high paying adults, rather than finding parents for children in need.

Said Baran, “… the idea of Open Adoption had great potential for increasing their business for getting more newborn babies for infertile couples... They recognize that to offer pregnant women contact after relinquishment and placement is a convincing ploy to get them to give up newborn babies more readily. Who was to say that the offer was really a lifetime offer-that open meant staying open? Suddenly there was a whole Open Adoption market of newborn babies operating out there and we didn’t have a clue as to how it all came to be in place. We were still talking a lot of theory-everybody else was using the phrase Open Adoption, only it sounded different somehow. It sounded skewed, a bit sleazy, a bit coercive.”

To many people longing to parent an infant, the promise of open adoption has become no more than a lure to temporarily vulnerable expectant mothers who would not otherwise consider adoption. This method of attracting such mothers (and their babies) is openly encouraged by facilitators and authors (who are often adoptive parents, themselves). In addition to books that teach potential adopters the finer points of creating a “Dear Birthmother” letter, entire seminars are devoted to helping would-be adopters make an expectant mother comfortable with the idea of their raising her child. With the enormity of adoption grief viewed merely as a byproduct of gaining a healthy child by these folks, the lifelong consequences of speedy adoption are easily overlooked.

Days before her recent suicide, Cindy Jordan wrote to friends expressing her pain and longing for photos and videos promised to her during her pregnancy by those who would become her daughter's adoptive parents. Susan Burns, Psy.D, had not kept the promises she’d made to Cindy on the fast track to adopting her child.

Cindy’s grief was compounded when she accidentally saw Ms. Burns’s new book. In it, she read the advice to prospective adopters provided by the woman she had once trusted -- advice on how to gain the confidence of a vulnerable mother. When Cindy took her life last week, a week before her daughter’s birthday, “The Fast Track to Adoption” was selling like hotcakes.

There should be nothing “fast” about an adoption. If it is to occur at all, every step of the process should be weighed heavily and every aspect considered deeply. Seminars and books should focus on adoption loss and the additional grief caused to mothers and children when the promise of lifetime contact goes unfulfilled. The voices of mothers like Cindy, squelched by adoption-money driven media outlets, must be heard. Ms. Jordan was not the first mother to end her life in the wake of a promised open adoption closing.

Post adoption contact agreements (which are completely unenforceable under current law) must be made legally binding. Contact between potential adopters and expectant mothers is coercive and must not occur prior to or immediately after birth. The exchange of big money between agencies, facilitators, lawyers, and those who seek to adopt must end. Only when adoption truly focuses on the needs of children - including their need to know their first mother -- rather than the needs of high-paying adults, will it be anything but inhumane.  

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