Blog Post 4 (option 1)

For the past few weeks we have been learning so much about adoptions that took place before the 1980s that were very closed off, and the impact that those situations had on the people involved in those adoptions. Because of this it was interesting to her Mishon talk about the history of adoptions that Catholic Charities has done in Minnesota since the earlier 1900s. She mentioned how essentially all the adoptions done before the later part of the 1900s were very closed off and left many people on both sides wondering about their biological relatives. For this reason it was nice to hear how in recent years this has not been the case, and that most of the adoptions she handles are at least semi-open, if not completely open. This is something that we have been talking about in class as something that many of us feel is a good direction for adoption to be moving in.

Mishon also discussed the process that individuals go through and the counseling that they receive prior to deciding to place their child up for adoption. She explained how the counselors at Catholic Charities never push adoption on a person, and that they want to make sure that adoption is a choice that they themselves are making, and not something they are deciding because someone else is telling them to do so. I feel like this approach to the adoption process is nearly opposite to the process that the birthmothers from the 60s and 70s, from the class readings, went through. From those readings it always seemed as though those women had no other choice, and were sometimes sent away to give their children up with no information about their child, where it was, or who its adoptive parents were. The author of one of our class reading outright says that women who gave up their babies during this time had not say in what happened, “Here I argue that adoption is rarely about a mother’s choice; it is instead about the abject choicelessness of some resourceless women,” (67, Claiming Rights in the Era of Choice). These women had nothing that people in their same situation today would have. Organizations like Catholic Charities are giving these women both choices and resources. It is reassuring that times have changed in that respect.

-- Mary