Adopting a Snowflake

[Munchkin03]

Originally Posted by 33girl

My cousin is adopted. It was through the family doctor and supposedly (this is what someone started to tell my mom in the grocery store one day, but she put her hands over her ears and said LALALALALALA) the mother was a teenage daughter from a prominent family in town. He has never had any interest in knowing who his bio parents were - I'm probably more curious about it than he is, just by virtue of writing this post. I know that there were some other cases where people wanted to keep adoptions closed, but they had to tell the kids because of the fear that they'd end up dating their half-siblings.

Have the information on file, but you don't have to look at it if you don't want to. I almost think that things have swung too far the other way nowadays, and there's a pressure to keep things open even if one or several of the parties (birth parents, adoptive parents, child) would really rather not.

The operative phrase here is "through the family doctor." In smallish towns, there might be a lot of information (either confirmed or hearsay) about the birthparents. In locations where girls went out of town to have the baby, the information is very, very scant.

My HS Spanish teacher was very open about having given her daughter up for adoption--it was one of those old-style closed adoption where she gave birth and never saw the baby again. The girl reached out to her when she turned 18; they weren't been able to find the birth father at all.

Originally Posted by carnation

A lot of adoptions go like this: "here's an apparently healthy kid, do you want to adopt him/her?" And people are so desperate for a baby that they don't ask any questions.

Joan Didion's new book is coming out next month...she says that she and her husband got a call from their doctor (with whom they had been tentatively discussing adoption but hadn't made any decisions) saying that he had a healthy white newborn and if they wanted her. They weren't prepared at all and decided to just go on and do it.