Birth-Rights
I'm curious... from a birth-parent's perspective, during the Search and Reunion process, would you want to be told your child was abused by his/her adoptive family?
As a parent, what would you do if you learned the child you relinquished was abused or abandoned by the adoptive parents?
Since Adoption is a legal course of action, (based on a child's need for safe protection), what laws are there written about a foster/adopted child's right to live in a safe environment where he/she will have guarded protection from child predators?
Finally, if an adopted child is murdered or commits suicide, should the birth-parent's be notified?
Comments
What to tell?
I'm curious... from a birth-parent's perspective, during the Search and Reunion process, would you want to be told your child was abused by his/her adoptive family?
I'd rather know the truth than know nothing or a lie.
As a parent, what would you do if you learned the child you relinquished was abused or abandoned by the adoptive parents?
Hope and pray for healing, and that in sharing the pain it might lessen. Hope that there might be a freedom, an unloading, in the telling. Someone else is now carrying it with you. It's natural for mothers to carry -- to carry and nurture a child through gestation, through holding, through sharing of pain.
There is nothing we could do about the adoptive parents. Only the adopted person has the prerogative to share what they will about them...what they did...how they were...there is often an attachment or a loyalty which belongs to them (the adoptee) and I would never want to take away, what he did have. Natural mothers - don't mess with an adoptee's love for their a-parents, even if the a-parents messed with the love they had towards you, and how destructive that meddling has been. No, face it, nothing is ever fair in adoption. But no true mother would want to cause more destruction, more tug-of-war splits in your psyche than what you have already lived through.
In telling the truth, timing is helpful, but a mother will likely know even before the telling. There are other ways of knowing things, seeing things, feeling things, besides words. I knew from the beginning.
A Mother Knows...
I believe a Mother Knows without being told a thing... and as a mom, and an adult-child, that maternal truth breaks my heart.
How does a natural mother react to the news that the baby she entrusted to the hands of strangers was in-fact, abused by the people her baby calls "mom and dad"? (Is it fair to call this Estranged Abuse?)
Are there support-groups and networks for these types of cases? What is being done for abused and neglected children caught in the cross-hairs of Social Services... and for the moms who would never have allowed such torment be given her baby? Foster-care and adoption was established so no child would be hurt and abused by neglect and violence. What in the world has happened to our standards of living?