Interview with Jessica DelBalzo

In the September 11th article
‘Unrelated Thoughts’ I covered what I see as
the darker side of adoption. At the end of the article, I’d mentioned that
I’d ordered the book ‘Unlearning Adoption.’ After reading the book and finding
myself agreeing with the underlying arguments, I contacted the author via email
and had the following conversation:

Adoption in the media has almost overwhelmingly focused on celebrity
adoption stories, especially recently with Angelina Jolie, Madonna,
Rosie O’Donnell. What seems to be overlooked is the reduction of a
child to a commodity. Could you perhaps touch on this topic, and do
you feel that adoption is devaluing human life?

Absolutely. The entire adoption industry
is centered around profiteering — finding
babies for couples who want them rather
than finding homes for children who truly
cannot be cared for by their families.
Celebrity adoptions seem to highlight
this issue rather well. We have people
like Madonna and Angelina sweeping through
foreign nations and bringing home children
the way the rest of us might bring home a
t-shirt or a snowglobe. At home in the
United States, we have Rosie O’Donnell
proclaiming that god places some children
in the “wrong tummy,” and rectifies that
problem with adoption. There’s no respect
for the child if there’s no respect for
where he came from, you know?

I’ve personally experienced the effect that adoption has on the adoptee.
You cite The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier in your book, where she
charts pre-verbal trauma and it’s long-term effects on adoptees, and I also
know that adoptees make up something like 30% of institutionalized
cases despite being only 3% of the total population in the states.
What are some of the psychological traumas associated with adoption,
and not just for the adoptee but also for the mother of the child?

For adopted people, it’s issues like
identity disorders, feelings of abandonment,
loss, grief, attachment disorders,
inability to trust, and various signs
that indicate “acting out,” especially
during the adolescent years — juvenile
crime and drug and alcohol abuse most
prominently. For natural parents whose
children have been taken for adoption,
lasting grief, regret, a tremendous sense
of loss, and depression are common. More
severe psychological consequences like
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder have also
been identified in a large number of
exiled mothers. Unexplained secondary
infertility has also shown itself to be
more common for these mothers than it is
for the general population. Losing a
parent, or losing a child, to adoption
is such a severe thing that it often
seems to influence areas of the person’s
life that are completely unrelated to
adoption like romantic relationships,
relationships with subsequent children,
and dealings with authority figures.

I know you discuss legal guardianship, and while that doesn’t offset
the trauma of being placed in a new family, it does substantially
change the issues around birth records being sealed and identity
being erased. Could you explain a little bit more
about the alternatives to adoption that you’ve proposed with the
expectant mothers you talk with?

First of all, I absolutely agree that
guardianship doesn’t do as much to
alleviate the loss of one’s parents
as it does to keep things right and
ethical from a legal point of view.
Stopping truly unwanted births and
focusing on family preservation are
the two most important things we can
do to protect children from adoption.

In the past ten years, I’ve had a lot
of opportunities to work with expectant
parents, and I’ve found that more
often than not, simply confirming for
them that they can do a great job of
parenting and can give their children
what they really need is the single
most important thing that can be done
for these women (and men — I think
most people would be surprised at how
many fathers come to us for support).
The first course of action is always
to find out if the expectant mom or dad
wants to raise her baby. In ten years,
I’ve talked to only one woman who wasn’t
really sure how she felt — every other
parent-to-be wanted her baby but was
concerned about how she would meet her
child’s needs. I’ve offered tips on
saving money — things like breastfeeding
and cloth diapering can save, literally,
thousands of dollars. I referral people
to sources of financial support in their
communities; I strongly believe that
accepting welfare money is nothing to
be ashamed of and is a much better
option that surrendering a child to adoption.

If a mother truly did not want to raise
her child, I would encourage her to
delay making any final decisions until
after the child was born. So many
mothers report how strongly their
feelings shifted after seeing and
holding their babies for the very
first time. Beyond that, I would ask
her to consider the baby’s father, his
family, and her own family as potential
guardians for the baby, only seeking
out strangers if those options were not
at all viable. Still more, I would
advise her to arrange legal guardianship
for her child rather than adoption.
So far, it’s never come to that.

You mention several other countries who’ve never had closed adoption records,
who in fact have completely different approaches to adoption than
here in the US. Could you explain what some of these other models
are, and perhaps how we could benefit by learning from these other
approaches?

I’m not at all religious — and that’s
an understatement — but the Islamic
adoption model is really ideal. It’s
basically a guardianship arrangement.
The child doesn’t forfeit his or her
identity, there are no falsified birth
records, and there are no pretenses
about who his or her real family is.
That’s really what any ethical society
should be leaning toward for children
who cannot be raised with their own parents.
Parts of Australia seem to be taking
a similar approach (though international
adoptions are still widely accepted there,
which is disappointing and seems
indicitive of prejudice), taking the
money out of adoption, focusing on family
preservation, and drastically reducing
the number of domestic adoptions which
take place each year. They seem to have
learned from their sordid adoption history
— a history which is very similar to
the United States’ Baby Scoop Era.

In the forward to ‘Unlearning Adoption: A Guide to Family Preservation
and Protection’ you pin-point a moment of clarity you had during a Law
elective as a pivotal realization that brought about both this book
and the formation of Adoption: Legalized Lies. Could you explain some
of what this organization does and what insight this moment brought
about?

To give a little background: the law
elective I was taking in high school
involved a lot of class debates about
legal and social issues. One of those
was a debate on abortion, which included
several students who proposed that adoption
was always better than abortion because
so many people would be happy to raise
the babies who would have otherwise been
aborted. Hearing that set off a bunch of
red flags in my head. Could someone really
give birth to and surrender a baby, and
then go on with her life as if it was no
big deal? Were these children really
okay being raised by strangers? I started
doing some research on my own and found
out that adoption was not a cut-and-dried
solution for unwanted pregnancy. In fact,
it was actually quite harmful to both
parents and their children.

That summer, I founded Adoption: Legalized
Lies which had and continues to have
several purposes. Our primary focus
is on education — letting the public
know that adoption is not a beneficial
or necessary institution, and encouraging
public and political support for family
preservation. We also work with
expectant parents who are considering
adoption, letting them know what they
and their children will likely face
if they are separated and offering
them resources that will help them
stay together. For most of these
women, hearing about the consequences
of adoption only reinforces what they
already felt in their guts.
Additionally, we support and assist
parents who are involved in contested
adoption cases as much as we can, and
we also support one another — being
anti-adoption makes you somewhat of
an outcast in society, at least for
now!

For more:

Adoption: Legalized Lies
Unlearning Adoption