PRINTLetting go
Modern adoption confronts choice and consequence
LIANA CECIL
To deal with the anxiety of an important decision, Danielle Morris tells herself she’s making the right choice by making an adoption plan with a couple who otherwise could not have a baby.
April 26, 2007 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Danielle Morris can’t seem to get situated. Half lounging, half sitting with her legs in a matronly cross, she occasionally uncrosses them and stretches across the black suede love seat to ease her back. At one point she slides from the love seat to the floor and stays there until the pressure in her belly balances; then she returns just as gracefully to her seat. Danielle cradles her hands around the flanks of the large pale orb that bulges beneath her cotton blouse and causes her discomfort. She’s nearly fulfilled her third trimester of pregnancy and, as agreed upon when she was only eight weeks along, will soon pass that child from her womb into another woman’s waiting arms.
For a 33-year-old pregnant woman, Danielle is surprisingly fit and agile. This, combined with the warm sunlike tones of her blond hair and mild tan, radiates a healthy vigor that belies her doubts about the adoption. She’s a self-described Bohemian and a well-traveled veteran employee of a number of restaurants and bars stretching from the West Coast to the Rockies and back to the mid-Missouri area where she grew up. But all of the days devoured by her pregnancy, the personal pain that will accompany labor and the joy expected of postpartum women have left Danielle troubled about her decision to make an adoption plan.
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The prospect of a sudden change of mind at those crucial moments after delivery grows as her abdomen expands with the weight of a baby girl. “I’m scared about it,” Danielle says, her words coated in a faint rasp. “I’m afraid that something is going to overcome me, but I’ve already told myself that it can’t. It would be the stupidest decision I’d ever make.”
In her apartment Danielle, already the mother of a 4-year-old daughter, Lola, pauses briefly, as if observing a flood of all the decisions she has ever made. But she continues on the topic of her upcoming due date with exceeding vehemence: “It’s not even a possibility. What’s done is done. It’s their baby now. I have to tell myself every day.”
Opting for adoption
Danielle was at first unwilling to carry an unexpected pregnancy to its inevitable conclusion. Upon learning that she was pregnant and telling the father, whom she was no longer seeing, Danielle immediately scheduled an abortion, for which she never showed up.
She instead decided to ask acquaintances in St. Louis, who had been trying to adopt for six years, if they would adopt the child. They said yes.
Without the prospect of adoption, Danielle says: “I wouldn’t have even considered having the child. I was in no place financially or emotionally to have another.”
The Columbia division of Lutheran Family and Children’s Services ensures Danielle has support and makes the process smooth. The adoptive parents pay fees to the organization for counseling, and they also hired a lawyer to handle the necessary paperwork.
Danielle is in a shaky financial situation; she says she was laid off in the late stages of pregnancy when her employers expressed concern for her well-being. So the adoptive parents voluntarily pay for her rent and living incidentals such as phone cards and maternity clothes. Danielle says she lives on food stamps and that Medicaid helps with medical costs.
Picturing the emotional outcome
Three-D ultrasounds that reveal a tiny face and hands hang on Danielle’s refrigerator. The adoptive couple and Danielle drove to the Prenatal Imaging Center in Kansas City to have the pictures taken. “That’s a little piece of her umbilical cord,” Danielle says, pointing to a picture. “She’s sucking her lip in a little on that one.”
After seeing the images, Danielle felt depressed for a short period. “It hit me like a brick,” she says.
Because of her anxiety, Danielle has been meeting with a therapist for most of her pregnancy. LFCS, which handles all of the birth mother’s needs, contracted Sherryl Laws to be Danielle’s therapist.
Sherryl’s experience in counseling single mothers has led her to believe that in society today, it is easier for young women to have and keep babies because it is more acceptable to have sex, and single moms can get financial support through welfare. Her experience with Danielle has given her a new perspective on the difference a birth mother’s age can make in overcoming pressures to keep an unplanned baby. “Danielle is mature,” she says. “She can make the unselfish decision that the young girls can’t. I think she’s done such a good job to prepare herself.”
Thinking it through
The vast majority of the unwed mothers whom Sherryl sees do not choose adoption. Sherryl says she can only remember two clients previous to Danielle who agreed to plan an adoption, one of whom backed out after giving birth. At their counseling sessions, Sherryl and Danielle have been working on a modified form of aversion therapy, in which patients associate their situations with negative things that they hope to avoid. Although Sherryl tells Danielle to think positively about how she’s carried this baby for nine months so someone else can have her, she also encourages her to focus on the downside of child rearing at the expense of its positive side.
“I try to think about being up all night, the dirty diapers instead of the cute little hiney,” Danielle says, genuinely pleased that such a simple mental device has helped her so far. In theory, these thought processes should exercise a kind of prior restraint over Danielle’s instinct to hold on to her child. Hormones causing maternal behavior have already begun to assert control over Danielle’s body. Only days before a meeting with Sherryl, she began lactating in the presence of a woman’s wailing infant. But Danielle says that she will not nurse her baby once she is born.
The majority of birth mothers already have children at home, and that kind of aversion therapy could work for them, says Elizabeth Ehlen, an adoption counselor for the Columbia-based A Gift of Hope Adoptions agency. She calls the decision-making process a cost-benefit analysis. “We want the women to come to their own conclusions,” she says, adding that she makes sure to ask how the woman’s family might handle the situation of placing the child up for adoption. “It’s not just a woman losing a child; it’s a grandmother losing a grandchild.”
Kitty Spencer, a social worker for Love Basket Inc., a St. Louis-based adoption ministry offering adoption counseling, uses the strategy of weighing pros and cons to help women make the decision. “Women come to a point [in counseling], and they change from looking at their own needs to do what is best for their child,” Kitty says. “Their own needs become secondary.”
Opening new doors
One solace for Danielle and for many birth mothers is the promise of “open adoption,” a nonlegal binding agreement of varying degrees, decided upon by the adoptive parents that allows the birth mother some contact with the child beginning from birth.
“[An open adoption] will be good for me as a birth parent because I would wonder ‘is she OK?’” Danielle says.
Danielle looks to follow successful examples such as Donna Weber of Columbia who placed her son up for adoption a year ago. Donna says the adoptive parents occasionally bring him to see her at work, and she savors every minute that she, the “tummy mummy” as she calls herself, spends with her biological son. Donna sensed a connection with the adoptive family from the start when the adoptive parents were open about their fear she might decide to keep the baby. She told them she wouldn’t.
The informal open adoption covenant reassured Donna when she was depressed after the birth until finding closure after the boy was legally adopted.
Donna made it clear to the adoptive parents: “I said, ‘I’m not going to call you a lot.’ I wanted [the birth mother] to know that I respected the boundaries set. That’s really helped our openness.”
Similarly, Danielle expects to stay informed of the baby’s upbringing and keeps a distant hope that Lola can someday know her half-sister. In the final weeks of her pregnancy, she talked to the adoptive parents every couple days, a relationship blooming as they eagerly anticipated the birth.
Danielle insists the couple will be there in the birthing room, waiting for the first look at their child. She’s letting them be the first to hold the baby.
But because the adoptive parents don’t legally have to maintain contact, Danielle holds on to her hope that she will be allowed a small peek into the baby’s life. She comforts herself and knows she’s made the best choice.
“The fear is gone of what might happen to her,” she says. “I don’t have that worry anymore.”
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