Moms who give children up need more help, study finds

Everybody knows the kind of woman who surrenders a baby for adoption: She's a teenager, an unmarried high school dropout, anxious to forget and move on.

It turns out everybody is wrong.

A landmark study released Sunday by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute offers a surprising new portrayal of a more mature woman whose interests deserve greater protection.

Today, a woman who places her child up for adoption is more apt to be in her 20s, living on her own, and often raising other children, according to Donaldson researchers. Most birth mothers have graduated from high school, many have college educations, and some may even be in graduate school. A few are married.

And far from surrendering her baby and never looking back, the mother typically wants regular updates and periodic contact with her child - and is likely to suffer chronic grief if she fails to achieve it.

"The notion that women could ever part with a child they created and just forget about it is nonsense," said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Donaldson Institute in New York.

The report, "Safeguarding the Rights and Well-Being of Birthparents in the Adoption Process," calls for new laws to guarantee birth parents the ability to make uncoerced decisions and to permit them contact with their children after adoptions.

The study arrives as U.S. adoptions reach a historic high - an estimated 135,000 a year - that make the issues surrounding the welfare of birth parents more pressing.

"We probably regulate interstate commerce more than we do child placement," said project director Susan Smith, the study's author.

Women who surrender children often do so without benefit of counseling or legal advice, Smith found. The Internet adds a new complication by permitting pregnant women and prospective parents to connect across great distances, often via unlicensed, third-party "facilitators."

Paid matchmakers may persuade an expectant mother to move to another state, away from friends or family who might encourage her to keep the child. They may also arrange for inflated payment of her living expenses to increase the odds that she will feel obligated to turn over her baby.

Adoption practitioners must avoid even unintentional pressures, the report said. For example, they should help an expectant mother understand that accepting expense money, or becoming emotionally close to prospective parents, does not require her to go through with the adoption.

Many states maintain "putative father registries" for men who think they may be fathers and wish to maintain parental rights. But most men don't know the registries exist, so they may never receive notification of adoption proceedings. The institute recommends more aggressive protection of fathers' rights, including requiring mothers to identify them.

Adoption in the United States has never been more prevalent - or more complex. The scenario most people envision when they hear the word "adoption - a mother handing her baby to parents with whom she has no familial relation - has become rare. These adoptions now number only about 13,000 or 14,000 a year.

Historically, the report said, an unwed teenager hid her pregnancy, even from her siblings, and lived in a maternity home for months before her due date. Once she gave birth and returned home to her parents, the adopted child became a shameful secret.

Today, the study found, only about 25 percent of birth mothers are younger than 20 and an estimated 90 percent meet the adoptive parents. Most want an "open" adoption that may include face-to-face visits with the child.

"Contrary to the stereotypes that have been created about them," the study said, "almost no women choosing adoption today seek anonymity."

Sometimes, the open arrangement ends because the birth parent can't overcome mental illness or substance abuse. Sometimes the parents on both sides find out they just don't like one another.

One local adult adoptee said she would encourage both sides to maintain a relationship, for the child's sake.

If adoptive parents "can allow the birth parent to just be around a little bit, and have some connection, the child will have high-quality mental health," said Anne Milner, 53.

Milner was adopted as a baby, and although her parents were honest with her, the lack of information and connection with her biological parents caused "pain that went on my whole life."

Adoptive parents may worry that by allowing contact they will enter into a competition, that their child will be less their own. But Milner, who eventually met her birth parents, said that fear is groundless.

"Your parents are the people who raise you," she said. "My birth father wanted me to call him Dad. I couldn't call him Dad. He wasn't Dad. Dad was the man who raised me."

And the Donaldson Institute's Pertman, author of the book "Adoption Nation and father to two adopted children, said the call for greater birth-parent rights should not be intimidating.

"When we treat everyone concerned with respect," he said, "it improves our families."

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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.