Adoption-Friendly Language or Honest Adoption Language
The Goal is RespectContributed by Guest Author Sandra Falconer Pace, educator and Director of the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers. Her son searched for and found her, and they have been reunited since 1995. (Copyright (c) 2003, all rights reserved.) A common term to describe a mother who has lost her child to adoption is 'birth mother' or 'birthmother.' The old term was 'natural mother.' Some adoptive parents objected to their children's first or original mothers being referred to as 'natural' because they felt that this made them its opposite, 'unnatural.' So, a movement called 'adoption-friendly' language has grown up to give a positive slant to all aspects of adoption. Adoptive parents felt that their families were not viewed as positively as natural families and that, by changing the language, they could change this view of adoption as a 'second choice' for family creation. Social workers eagerly followed this trend by spreading the terminology broadly. This movement was quickly allied to politically correct language to make it legitimate. Neither adoptive parents nor social workers consulted particularly with the people they were naming about how the term 'birthmother' made
them feel.
Let's go back to where politically correct language arose, however. It arose as the right of a people to name themselves. For example, we once referred to the Eskimo people, but now we use their own term for themselves, the Inuit. Instead of the Ojibway people, we talk about the Anashinabe. We refer to African-American people and Hispanic people because those are the terms that they have chosen for themselves. It is respectful to use the terms people themselves choose. When talking about people with challenges, we use the term 'people' first, to indicate their essential humanity, and then we use the descriptions we need to indicate who we mean: 'people with brown hair' or 'people in wheelchairs' or 'mothers who've lost children to adoption.' Out of respect, we place their humanity above their description.
Mothers who have lost children to adoption are coming to feel that the term 'birthmother' attempts to limit their role to the birth of their children. However, even the dictionary says simply that a mother is a female who has given birth to a child. We never tell a mother whose child is stillborn or dies that she's
not a mother just because she can no longer raise her child. And these days, progressive adoptions are open and the children know always that they have two mothers who play different roles in their lives. Even for those children adopted under the old secrecy laws, as adults more and more of them seek and find their first mothers, re-building the relationships that began in the nine months they grew in their mothers' wombs.
It is important to note that parents who had lost children to adoption did not refer to adoptive parents as anything but
adoptive parents. It was adoptive parents who highlighted the opposition between
natural and
unnatural. The dictionary defines the opposite of natural in terms of parenting as
adoptive, not
unnatural. One begins to wonder at the insecurity of the adoptive parents who have such difficulty referring to their children's first parents and who can only see themselves in opposition to those whose children they have taken. Why are
natural and
adoptive seen as
opposite terms? Both sets of parents are important to an adopted child. Why are these terms not seen as complementary?
So what do we do with this dilemma of what to name the first parents of a child later lost to adoption?
© Sandra Falconer Pace
Home
Comments
Why are we remiss in allowing for ALL points of view? If we only allowed ones that favored aparents, that too would be biased, no?
Adoption education is about all points of view and from all sides of the adoption triad. Doesn't mean anyone or even this site agrees with everything posted.
Posted by: Crick at 08/06/2009 12:19 PM
This article is ridiculous and offensive. I am an adoptive parent and I am a real mother. A mother is not just the one who gave birth. According to this article I'm not a mother, which is a lie. Sometimes birth mothers are just in bad circumstances, but sometimes they make very bad choices and choose other things over their child and the child is given in adoption. The adoptive parents are the real parents in either case. They are raising the child and providing for his/her needs. This writer is just feeling bad for themselves that they had to give up their child. She tries to sound like a victim and that adoptive parents stole her child. This is ridiculous. She acts like the only reason she had to give up her child is because someone else couldn't have one. That's bull! People don't just give up their kids. She had her own reasons. Most likely she made choices in her life that resulted in the need to give up her child. It may have been against her will or her last choice, but she still has a lot of responsibility. She is the one, after all, that got pregnant. Rape would be the only case where the birth mother would actually be a victim and even in that case, she has some choice as to whether she keeps the child. This website is remiss in posting this biased and inappropriate article.
Posted by: psbrown at 08/05/2009 01:57 PM
I just can't believe that I'm reading something so one-sided and biased. Writing it might have been good therapy, and I do believe that it represents the point of view for a group of hurting and historically disrespected women in the writer's specific situation, but it's like the writer thinks that every single adoption in the world follows the same pattern that hers did.
Somehow, the writer just breezes past all the adoptions that happen because the child's parents are dead (note: I'm a "double-orphan", in the modern phrase) or in prison (my father died shortly after he was sentenced to 38 years in maximum-security prison for child abuse), like they never happened. Maybe they just aren't "real" adoptions in her mind, just like the adoptive parents aren't the "real" parents.
Based on this, I can only suppose the author also thinks that the guy who disappeared when the baby was only a few months old, and stayed gone for the next 20 years, and never paid a dime in child support or even sent a Christmas card -- but who now wants to escort "his" daughter down the aisle for her wedding -- should always be considered the "real father", and that her mother's second husband, who raised her with kindness, wisdom and loving care, is "only" a stepfather, and can never be considered better than second-best, a consolation prize for those separated from the drunk jerk that provided the biological beginning to their existence. But since her article doesn't even mention the father of her first child, perhaps she never thought fathers were important anyway.
I've learned something in this article, but overall I'm disgusted.
Posted by: Really at 05/18/2009 12:39 PM
Hey....I appreciate you
Posted by: stevemaan at 03/07/2008 01:57 AM
"[I]Other mothers prefer to follow politically correct language, and refer to themselves as a mother who has lost a child to adoption."
"...'making an adoption plan' is really 'convincing a mother to lose her child.'"
"we're talking about convincing a mother that she should lose her child because someone else can't have a child and wants to take hers to raise. These are not prospective adoptive parents; they are people who want to become parents by taking someone else's child."[/I]
These are quotes from the article. I would argue that 'making an adoption plan' is what a birth mother when she has become pregnant and is not able or willing to parent her child.
Adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents are not "taking someone else's child". They are [I]providing a loving home and future to a child whose birth parents are uable or unwilling to parent him.[/I] Certainly, they are enriching their own family in the process. Does that make them child stealers? Would the author prefer that these children lanquish in foster care and orphanages?
My child's birth parents did not make an adoption plan and they did not 'lose their children [I]to adoption'[/I]. Yes, they lost their children; [I]because they severely abused and neglected them![/I]
I agree, absolutely, that relinquishing one's child... either by choice (even if due to poverty, or circumstances beyond her control,) or involuntarily (due to the birth parent's abuse and neglect of the child)...is a loss of unimaginable magnitude. It is a loss that will be grieved for the birth parent's entire life, I am sure. [B]But surely no reasonable person can blame the adoption process or adoptive parents because birth parents (for whatever reason) are not parenting the children born to them.[/B]
Posted by: forevermom at 02/16/2008 09:21 PM
View all comments (18)
Add Your Comments!
We want to know what you think. Your comments are important to us and the other readers. You are what makes this site special.