A Personal History of Birthmother Activism By Mary Anne Cohen

This will not be a scholarly presentation, as I am not a scholar but a poet. Dates and places will be approximate and names may be inadvertently left out or forgotten. This is my personal opinion as a birthmother active in reform since the mid 70s, from my unique point of view, which others may question, dispute, or add to. It is not meant to be the last word or the whole story, but it is my piece of this history which few know about, and I am honored to be here today presenting it to you. A big problem of the adoption reform movement is that it is largely ignorant of its own recent history. New groups on the internet keep appearing and re-inventing the proverbial wheel instead of learning from those who came before. This paper is an attempt to remedy that with one small corner of that history.

Birthmother activism was born out of adoptee activism, which began with adoptee Jean Paton and publication of her book “The Adopted Break Silence” in the late 1940s, and the growth of her group Orphan Voyage through the 50s, 60s and 70s. Adoptee activism exploded in the early 70s when adoptee Florence Fisher started ALMA, the Adoptee’s Liberty Movement Association, in NYC. From NY, ALMA chapters began to blossom around the country, and I, who had already been in touch with Jean Paton by mail, joined a MA Alma group where I was living at the time. I had always wanted to know what had happened to my son since surrendering him, but had no idea adoptees ever had any desire to know their birthparents. I naively thought they all went to a better life and were content not to look back. That was the whole point of surrender, to give the child everything we as unwed mothers could not offer. When I first heard Florence Fisher on a radio show, then read a magazine article about Jean Paton, I was shocked, and immediately wanted to get in touch with them and join their groups, if I could.

There were always a few birthmothers and enlightened adoptive parents who joined the early adoptee-led adoption reform groups. We were there to support adoptees in their quest for open records, and to find and reunite with our surrendered children. We also had our own separate issues that we wanted to address. Lee Campbell was another birthmother in my local group, whose surrendered son was then 11, and she had recently found out his new name and identity. I was excited and determined to find out how I could find my young son, who was then only 8 years old. If others could find the secret door, so could I.

I had written a piece for Jean Paton’s newsletter “The Log of Orphan Voyage” titled “Letter To My Sisters” asking birthmothers to get together, come out of the closet, and support adoptee rights. Lee was also in touch with Jean, and we began talking about forming our own support group for birthmothers as a sort of auxiliary to ALMA and Orphan Voyage groups. We got together with a few other birthmothers from our local groups, and in 1976 the first formal birthmother organization, Concerned United Birthparents, was born. Lee was a superb organizer and spokesperson, and really got the group going. Within a year we were picking up national membership and getting lots of media publicity, including several appearances by Lee on the popular Phil Donahue show. Lee appeared in shadow in her first TV appearance, but then came out of the closet in a big way, and gave courage to a lot of other mothers who were still hiding the “Shameful Secret” and grieving alone. Birthmother activism was out of the closet and into the streets! Lee Campbell wrote about the founding of CUB and her story in her two self- published books, “Stow Away” and “Cast Off”.

I moved back to NJ where I had grown up, and found my son with the help of the woman who had found Lee’s son, Betty Mattson. She would not accept any payment, but charged me with helping others to reunite, as my “payment” which I took seriously and did for many years. The method she used to help me only worked once in my state, but other avenues of search were opening up all over the country.

Shortly after I found my son, an underground search network sprang up, with some local connections in various states, and one mysterious searcher whose name and identity we never knew who could somehow find almost anyone anywhere. He contacted us by phone, in the days before the internet and caller ID. The down side of this was that this man charged at least two thousand dollars if he found the person, conveyed to him by a complicated network that operated on trust. Some in this network began tacking on a fee for their risk, usually a small amount, but which in one case escalated to double. The temptation of money corrupts. There were two widely publicized incidents where local searchers, not the mysterious one, were caught; an adoptee in NJ who had access to vital statistics working with brave and honest birthmother Lucy Pare was set up in a sting operation, and another in Ohio where one of the for-pay searchers was caught impersonating a social security employee, a federal crime. This woman was working for birthmother Sandy Musser who charged a hefty fee for her services, and Ms. Musser eventually went to jail; not for adoption search which is not a crime in itself, as she alleged in her book “To Prison With Love” (1995), but for fraudulently getting into federal records and refusing to name her associates. In my opinion she was not a martyr for the cause, but a businesswoman who got greedy and careless and her operative turned on her when caught. It was a shabby chapter in birthmother activism but one that must be included along with the good.

I continued to be active in NY ALMA for a short while, and national CUB , writing for their newsletter “The Communicator” and attending conferences. The American Adoption Congress was formed in 1979 to be an umbrella adoption reform group, and I and other CUB members joined. Sad to say, the AAC never lived up to its promise and was plagued throughout its lifetime with Board dysfunction that persisted no matter whom was on the board. I was an AAC Board member for several years in the 90s, and it was not a good experience. Intrigues, secrets, coups and plots were the norm, cooperation and respect was rare. At some time after I had left there was a scandal involving a treasurer taking large amounts of money for herself. Recently there have been huge shakeups in board positions, unexplained purges of long-term members, and lack of accountability to the membership, as well as some inappropriate choices of conference presenters. AAC has lost relevance as a vehicle for reform or respected voice of adoption triad members. It remains to be seen what will take its place.

In 1980 many of us spoke out in favor of the federal Model State Adoption Act which included a provision for open records for adopted adults, but this was defeated by the Adoption Industry lobby group The National Council For Adoption which was founded by the Edna Gladney Home in Texas and other conservative agencies to fight open records, later joined by many LDS agencies. It was headed by the late Bill Pierce who became our archenemy. We are still fighting that battle today, state by state. Although the opposition has changed, the tired old arguments like the mythical promise of “birthmother confidentiality” are still there. In fact, we were legally promised nothing at surrender, and since have collected surrender documents from all over to prove it with the help of Law Professor Elizabeth Samuels at the University of Baltimore.

Birthmothers have been active and involved in every state where open records legislation has been proposed, writing and speaking to legislators, demonstrating, testifying at hearings and committee meetings, and writing to and appearing in the media whenever there is an adoption story. This has gone on for almost 4 decades with many of us old-timers staying in the struggle, and new activists added every year, first at in-person meetings, and now on the Internet, blogosphere, Facebook , Twitter, and other social networks. Birthmother activism is vibrant and growing.

In 1980, a group of 5 New Jersey birthmothers who were members of CUB wanted to form a local support group, but did not want the red tape and constraint of being a formal CUB chapter, so we started our own group and called it Origins. We held in-person monthly meetings for many years, had several conferences, and published our national newsletter Origins which I edited from the late 80s until 2007. We held a NYC demonstration when Lisa Launders was murdered by her illegal adoptive father Joel Steinberg, and were instrumental in getting the younger child in the home, Travis, returned to his biological family largely through the heroic efforts of Origins Co-Founder Mirah Riben. This awful illegal adoption and abuse case had nationwide publicity.

We were all mothers of young children whom we had found as teens or pre-teens, so we were dealing with different emotional issues than older birthmothers, and there was a certain amount of hostility from adoptee groups and the adoption reform movement about finding minor children. In some ways we were the blind leading the blind, and made some mistakes, but there was nobody to guide us as we were the first openly searching, openly outspoken reunited birthmothers. So we stumbled along. Many of us contacted our teenage children or their families, with every imaginable good and bad result, including a woman whose 12 year old son was given back to her because the adoptive father and stepmother did not want him! A few adoptive parents welcomed contact, but most were threatened, which put some young adoptees in the middle. If I had my own contact to do over, I would do it later and differently, but that is a subject for another day. I am grateful that many years later all is well, my son and I have a great reunion and I recently became grandma to his and his wife’s two children adopted trans-racially from . This is a whole new chapter of adoption for me.

Most of us retained dual membership in CUB and Origins, and were still involved with various adoptee groups. CUB went through some changes when Lee Campbell left and Carole Anderson became president. Carole was a brilliant woman, an MSW Social worker who went back to school and got her law degree and became a partner in her firm. She became a dear friend of mine, although we sometimes clashed mightily on issues and policy, that never interfered with our personal connection or respect, Carole was a proud, tough, stubborn woman, who like so many of us found her surrendered son when he was young, and eventually had a wonderful relationship with him. Carole was president of CUB, Vice President, and editor and frequent contributor to the Communicator.

She was CUB President during the infamous “Baby Jessica” custody case, and got hate mail and even death threats for sticking up for the natural parents in that badly botched adoption custody dispute. The natural parents did eventually win and get their daughter Anna/Jessica back after several years of delays and horrible court battles. Carole and CUB were portrayed viciously in an article in the New Yorker about this case, and I don’t think she ever got over it. The whole situation was a disheartening picture of what the general public thinks of birthparents, especially the uppity activist kind.

Carole and her good friend Janet Fenton were CUB leaders through much of the 90s, and produced some brilliant position papers and other writings on birthmother issues. They were also instrumental in stopping The (1994) which could have potentially sealed records in every state. In 2013, former president Lee Campbell came back to CUB to compile the CUB archives which will be housed at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard in the Women’s History section. This is a fitting honor for the hard work and fine writing and forging of CUB philosophy by all former CUB leaders and members. All the volumes of the CUB Communicator newsletter published since 1976, and other CUB documents can be found on the CUB webpage, www.cubirthparents.org under the CUB History Channel section.

Where some of us diverged with Carole Anderson was on supporting open records for adoptees even if records were not open to birthparents. I felt adoptees were the innocent parties always, and while of course I supported birthmother search, having done it myself, I did not see legal access to records as the same for both sides. Carole felt that giving birthmothers access to the amended birth certificate and adoptee’s new identity was only fair and showed that birthmothers did not want confidentiality. I saw it as more complicated than that. We in NJ Origins always supported adoptee rights legislation, while CUB for a while did not. This has since changed, and while NJ Origins has disbanded, CUB continues to be active in supporting open records in states where legislation has been introduced.

Carole developed incurable lung cancer, and passed away at age 56 in 2003. I still miss her. CUB almost went with her, as in the last years of her life the CUB Board at that time had talked seriously about dissolving the organization, but Karen Vedder, Mimi Janes and some of the West Coast members with the help of pioneer social workers Annette Baran and Reuben Panor stepped in and revitalized it, moving the headquarters to CA. There were some tough years, but CUB is coming back up with a new Board, of which I am now Secretary, a new modern web page, and a great yearly retreat that moves back and forth between the East and West Coast, as well as the CUB Communicator which is now an electronic as well as print newsletter.

In the 90s a new and outrageously named adoptee activist group, Bastard Nation was started. Some birthmothers, including me, joined right away and have been supporting the Proud Bastards ever since. I feel that their stance of adoption legislative reform being about rights, not reunion, and keeping medical, emotional and psychological issues separate from legal issues is the right way to go. In 1998 500 birthmothers signed a newspaper ad supporting Measure 58 which passed and opened records in Oregon. In 2013 an additional change was made to Oregon law that would enable birthparents to get access to court and agency documents pertaining to their child’s adoption.

Now I would like to offer a word about birthmother literature, which is an important and permanent part of activism. The first birthmother memoir was “Birthmark” (1979) by Lorraine Dusky. Lorraine was active in NY ALMA, a writer with the determination and publishing connections to get her own story of surrendering her daughter in 1966 out to the public in a book. Lorraine is still active and has a blog, Birthmother/Firstmother Forum, and a new self-published book, “Hole In My Heart”.

The next significant book was Marsha/Mirah Riben’s “Shedding Light on The Dark Side of Adoption”,(1988) a well-researched expose of adoption abuses. . Mirah was one of the Co- founders of NJ Origins and now has a blog “Family Preservation Advocate” and is a frequent contributor to Huffington Post. She wrote a second book, “The Stork Market” (2007) about abuse and corruption in domestic and . Several adoption reform books, while primarily about adoptees, also touched on birthmother issues, including adoptee BJ Lifton’s “Lost and Found” and “Journey of the Adoptive Self”, and “Adoption Triangle “by Sorosky, Baran, and Pannor and others by many authors in subsequent years.

Carol Schaefer’s memoir “The Other Mother” (1991) was widely read and turned into a popular made for TV movie. It portrayed the experience of a mother sent to a maternity home in the 60s and later reunited with her adult son , and is still one of the best memoirs of the birthmother experience. With the explosion of self-publishing, quite a few sincere but ill-written adoption memoirs came out. I have found most of them unreadable and some embarrassing. There is a difference in writing for therapy, which can benefit anyone, and writing for the public which takes talent, skill, and a good editor.

One of the better recent birthmother memoirs is “Shameless” by Marilyn Churley (2014) a member of Ontario, ’s Parliament who was\instrumental in getting open records legislation passed there. Birthmother and English professor Janet Ellerby wrote a memoir, “Following The Tambourine Man”(2007) which was well received, and followed that with “Embroidering the Scarlet A” (2015) which traces the treatment of unwed mothers and illegitimate children in literature and film from the 19th century up until the present day. Both are valuable contributions to birthmother literature and history.

Researcher and feminist historian Rickie Solinger made an important contribution to academic literature with her groundbreaking book on single pregnancy before abortion was legalized in the US. She had never knowingly met a birthmother when she wrote “Wake Up Little Suzie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Row V.Wade”(1992). Solinger detailed the different routes that unwed White mothers and Black mothers were sent down in the years before 1973 in her carefully researched and well documented book. She painted an accurate portrait of the experience of most birthmother activists who had surrendered in the 60s. She quickly became a featured speaker at adoption reform conferences, and got to know many of the women who previously had just been stories and statistics to her.

Ms Solinger went on to write “Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the U.S.” (2002) This book featured interviews with many CUB leaders and members, but I felt it was skewed toward a radical feminist, pro-abortion slant that was not really there for many of us early activists, who initially just wanted to find and reconnect with our kids, and tell the world what had happened to us,. We did not all think of ourselves as feminists, although some like Carole Anderson did. Ms. Solinger’s political agenda took precedence in this book, as well as her anti-adoption and pro-abortion stance, but I still find her works valuable and an aid to our cause.

By far the best book to tell the story of mothers who surrendered in the 60s is “The Girls Who Went Away” (2006) by adoptee Ann Fessler. Ms. Fessler interviewed a cross section of birthmothers, and told their stories individually, skillfully edited without much editorial comment. The stories speak for themselves and are riveting and heartbreaking. Ms. Fessler has also done several art installations and performance art pieces using this material, which are haunting to experience. She truly captures what it was like to be an unwed mother back in the day. Her book should be read by everyone who wants to understand the birthmother experience, and why so many of us have become activists. Her latest project, an award winning documentary film “A Girl Like Her” covers some of the same territory in a more visual manner.

Another book, a personal favorite of mine although not widely read in adoption reform circles is the memoir “Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother's Journey” (2006) by Karen Salyer McElmurray. This is a beautifully written, nuanced, complex and harrowing story of a girl growing up in a terribly abusive home, and surrendering her child to save him from a similar fate. This book shows the fluid and shifting nature of memory, and the endless ambiguity that surrounds adoption, which is often missing from memoirs that are trying to make an ideological point,

The book, “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee” and subsequent movie “Philomena”(2013) starring Judi Dench shed light on the cruel tragedy of many Irish birthmothers at the hands of the Catholic Church. It is the sad true story of an Irish birthmother who was a victim of the Irish Catholic Church’s infamous adoption system that sent thousands of Irish babies to America, which included mother/baby homes and the infamous Magdalene Laundries where some women were incarcerated their whole lives and buried in unmarked graves. This injustice has been tirelessly exposed by Mari Steed, who was born in Ireland and sent to America as child, and who also became a birthmother herself. She is reunited with mother, daughter, and many Irish relatives and works with Irish adoption reform groups to change the laws there.

The politics of adoption in birthmother activism have resulted in wide splits between diverging camps and ideologies unknown in the early days. Since the growth of the Internet, support lists, web pages, online groups and blogs have proliferated. The variety and vehemence of these groups and blogs is bewildering. I was briefly on a couple of support lists where we were forbidden to mention any kind of activism, as this might be too much for the fragile souls there to deal with. They only wanted to be about “healing”. This seemed weird and artificial to me. We use to consider activism an aid to healing, not a hindrance.

Other groups are militantly political and anti-adoption, wanting adoption not reformed but abolished. While this is understandable given the cruel treatment many of us got as unwed mothers, it is a dead end that shuts down dialogue and work for realistic reform goals and leads to a black and white, “Us vs. Them” attitude. A group was formed in in the 90s that coincidentally took the name Origins, but had no connection to our NJ group. They quickly became vocally anti-adoption and set the standard for other groups of that kind, with a hard-line stand that adoption was always wrong. There is also an Origins Canada group that is still affiliated with the Aussies, and an Origins USA group that has broken ties with them, being less ideological and more willing to dialogue with other groups, although still a bit more radical than CUB. The OUSA group was focused on family preservation and preventing adoption abuses, which are many, and providing support to mothers who have surrendered. This group no longer seems active. Internet groups and lists tend to be insular and come and go as splits occur and leaders and members lose interest.

Another very small splinter group had formed that was only for mothers who surrendered during what they call the “Baby Scoop Era”, or “The Era of Mass Surrenders”; post-war and pre- legalized abortion. Younger mothers who surrendered after this time were not welcome. They made a sharp divide between mothers of their era whom they feel all had no choice at all, and those who came later and had more options therefor are more culpable for their actions. This group was called “Senior Mothers”. It was active for several years but seems to have faded into oblivion as it never drew many supporters and was abandoned by its founders. Groups that divide activists rather than bring them together seldom succeed.

On the other side of the coin on the Internet are younger birthmothers, many in open , some cheerfully working as spokeswomen for adoption agencies, often religiously affiliated ones of the Fundamentalist variety, some sincerely satisfied with their choice of adoption, and some unhappy because their supposed open adoptions were closed by dishonest adoptive parents. In most places open adoption agreements are not enforceable if either party wants to back out, so this is a real concern, and unscrupulous adoption agencies and promoters use the promise of open adoption to lure in naïve expectant mothers to surrender with no intention of keeping the adoption open once it is finalized. This has soured some activist mothers on the whole concept of open adoption which they view as a scam to obtain surrenders and babies.

Younger birthmothers seem to be somewhat polarized and caught between extremes of promotion of adoption as the “unselfish” choice, and great disillusionment and pain which they did not expect, especially in adoptions that were supposed to be open. Brenda Romanchik, a birthmother who has been in a successful open adoption for over 25 years, is one of the few who have a balanced and compassionate view of what works and what does not in open adoption, and the very real loss and sorrow that is present even in the best open adoption situations.

A new development is the “Saving Our Sisters” internet and Facebook group which seeks to assist pregnant and new mothers in keeping their babies and getting out of pre-birth commitments to adoption agencies. How this will work out with the problems of untrained volunteers dealing with strangers on the internet and monitoring and distributing donations, plus possible legal complications, remains to be seen.

The language debates within the birthmother activism movement about positive or negative adoption language are comparable to the worst of academic political correctness. While I believe any person should be able to use the terms they feel comfortable with to describe themselves, calling out the language police on others is a hindrance, not a help to real dialogue. Adoptive parents started trying to prescribe “correct” terminology, with “positive adoption language” like “make an adoption plan” rather than “surrender”. Some birthmothers countered with their mirror-image negative adoption language. The innocent term “birthmother” which was popularized as one word by Lee Campbell when CUB was founded, as an alternative to “natural mother” or “biological mother” is now looked on by some as an unspeakable, unprintable curse word and insult by anti-adoption birthmothers who refer to it coyly as “the B-word” and say it is a trigger to PTSD in mothers who surrendered. They believe there will be terrible consequences if the dreaded word is uttered, much like the name of the evil wizard Voldemort( He Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken) in the Harry Potter series. The word and its users were even banned from one adoption conference.

This animosity towards the term “birthmother” came about because some social workers in the 50s started using it instead of “natural mother”’ despite the fact that being called a “natural mother” did not mean you were treated one bit better as an unwed mother in the 50s and 60s. There is a great volume of cherry-picked research and speculation about this on anti-adoption sites. Adoptive parents are always referred to as “adopters”, because in their ideology adoptive parents are not parents at all, and in some cases are called the even more pejorative “Adoptoraptors”. In the eyes of anti-adoption activists, only giving birth makes a mother, and everyone has only one mother, the biological one. Biological essentialism is a cardinal belief in anti-adoption circles. Others raising children are mere adopters, caretakers or guardians, but never parents. Anti-adoption activists ignore the reality of adoptive parents as the psychological parents of adoptees and see only biology as defining parenting. Needless to say this attitude is rejected by most people in the general public and does not win friends for adoption reform. There are anti-adoption adoptees who are just as vehement as the birthmothers who embrace this philosophy, but they are not the subject of this paper.

There is a whole insider anti-adoption vocabulary; children are never “placed” or even “surrendered” or “relinquished” but rather “lost” to adoption, or better yet, “kidnapped” or “stolen”. Birthmothers can be “first mothers” “natural mothers” “exiled mothers”, “mothers of loss”, or the favorite, always and only just “mothers”; of which you only get one so everyone knows who you are talking about, the biological mother. There are numerous almost cult-like elements to some of the online anti-adoption groups, where everyone’s story has to be basically the same, and no divergence from the party line is tolerated. Another self-defeating theme in these groups is that no mother ever recovers or is healed from adoption trauma, even those with wonderful ongoing reunions, and every adoptee suffers from the Primal Wound whether they know it or not. Anyone not hewing to the party line and telling the same story is seen as “in denial’, “drinking the Kool-Aid” “in the Fog” or as a tool of the adoption industry. Surrendering mothers who felt they did have a choice, were not coerced, and still chose to surrender are vilified as selfish and uncaring for having made the “wrong” decision no matter what their circumstances were.

As you can see, Birthmother activism today is a very mixed and scattered bag. No matter how scattered, confused and contentious, some of us keep on, supporting adoptees in their efforts in Bastard Nation, AAC and other adoptee rights groups, speaking out against compromised and flawed legislation, against “Safe Haven” baby dump laws, and speaking up for children and vulnerable young mothers at risk. Some are active in family preservation, trying to help Moms who want to keep and raise their babies to get the help they need. Some are supporting better access to contraception and sex education to reduce unplanned pregnancies and protect young people from the awful dilemma we were faced with. Some are involved in ongoing peer counseling for mothers and adoptees in reunion, as we see more and more what a complicated and life-long task and journey post-reunion relationships can be,

Some are getting involved in international adoption reform, and reaching out to surrendering mothers around the world, not just in the US, Canada, and Western Europe. Mothers in other countries like Korea are organizing their own groups, as well as some of the South and Central American Countries that were a source of International adoption for many years. What was once just a White Western phenomenon is going worldwide as exploited mothers everywhere begin to find their voice, along with adult international adoptees who are speaking out and organizing around issues in their country of origin as well as adoption practices in Western countries. Mothers in Australia have gotten an apology from their government for past adoption practices. Mothers in the USA are working for enforceable open adoption laws and regulation of adoption practices and longer time periods for surrenders to be final and new mothers to change their minds. Despite continued abuse by some segments of the adoption industry world-wide, we are beginning to be heard, and will not be silenced again.

For me, birthmother activism needs to focus outward, on what we can change and improve, not on the past, or our sorrow, or our loss and pain. Nothing can change that, and dwelling on it only leaves us in a downward spiral of self-pity and resentment. This is where many birthmothers get stuck and their activism dies or turns to the hopeless and insular anti-adoption philosophy. We need to dialogue respectfully with adoptees, adoptive parents, and adoption professionals to achieve common goals. It is important for us to see what we have gained in our individual lives in reunions, even when that is not all we wanted or dreamed, and what we have accomplished in the short 40 years we have been a visible activist movement. We have a lot to be proud of, and a lot of hard work still to do.