Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / June 2007

http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2007/Massey_News/issue-08/stories/07-08-07.html

Adoption gets celebrity treatment, stigma remains

The author of an in-depth study on relationships between adoptive
children and their birth families says stigma about the subject
persists, despite the recent wave of high-profile celebrity adoptions.

“Adoption has recently received considerable media attention, which
can be attributed to the trend of American celebrities such as
Madonna, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt choosing to adopt children to
assemble a family, ” says Julee Browning, in a new introduction to her
Social Anthropology Masters Thesis.

Completed two years ago, a revised version of the study has just been
published as a monograph by the School of Social and Cultural Studies
in Auckland.

It’s the first study to explore relationships between adoptive
children and their parents who have been reunited for at least ten
years beyond the so-called “honeymoon period” of initial reunion.

She interviewed 20 adults who were adopted under the closed system,
which prevailed until 1985 when records were opened. New Zealand was
the first country among those with similar adoption laws to do so.

In New Zealand between 1940 and 1990, 108,899 adoptions were
facilitated, most based on the “closed adoption system”.

Her study, titled Blood Ties With Strangers: Navigating the Course of
the Adoptive Reunion over the Long Term, found that there was no clear
or predictable pathway to the way relationships developed between
adoptees and birth families. None of those she interviewed had regrets
about reunions, which often brought mixed blessings – desired
knowledge of biological origins on one hand yet an often unsatisfying
feeling of not really belonging.

“There was talk of fitting or not fitting. Of whether they feel like a
family member or not. A birth mother might say ‘this is my daughter’,
‘she’s one of the family’ etc, but the behaviour might contradict
that. Some were thrilled at being introduced as a son or daughter and
others cringed. There is a constant navigation.”

Since completing her study, Ms Browning has observed – anecdotally at
least − that ongoing stigma towards adopted people continues and is
reflected in offhand comments about behaviour resulting from being
adopted.

She links this to what she describes as the continued “pathologising”
of adoption by experts, such as American Nancy Verrier (author of The
Primal Wound), who was the key speaker at a 2005 conference run by the
Canterbury Adoption Awareness and Education Trust in Christchurch.

“Verrier told the conference that most people who had been adopted
felt abandoned and this experience had repercussions for future
relationships: a lifelong experience of grief for both adoptee and
birth mother. Separating babies and their mothers is an unnatural
process that leaves a void in both mother and child. “A newborn baby,”
she said, “would not choose to be separated from their mother.”

However, it should be noted that as a psychotherapist Verrier’s
comments are based on the experiences of those who have presented to
her for therapy and this is not necessarily representative of the
population of adopted people or birth mothers,” Ms Browning writes.

“Verrier claims that the primal experience for the adopted child is
abandonment, a form of post-traumatic stress disorder characterised by
depression, anxiety, helplessness, numbness and a loss of control,
which leads her pessimistically to conclude that adoptees will live
out the rest of their lives with a perpetual feeling of being a
victim, of being powerless, of being helpless to help oneself.”

Ms Browning says there is no statistical basis for such theories, and
that “there is no way to know whether all people who have been adopted
experience relating and relationship difficulties more than the norm
for their population.”

“One young woman attending the adoption conference posed this question
to Nancy Verrier: ‘This is all new information for me and I’m just
wondering, I don’t feel any of this stuff, am I in denial?’”

An adoptee herself, Ms Browning concedes that her interest in the
subject goes beyond dry academic study.

Although wary of drawing attention to her own adoptive status,
preferring her study to be judged on its own terms, she acknowledges
the importance of having met her birth parents and knowing who she
came from. In line with other research, her study found that having
this information was vital, and a core experience for adoptive people.

“Even if it doesn’t work out and the relationship doesn’t continue,
people have no regrets for having that information – who do I look
like, why do I have these tendencies.”

“The common feature throughout the participants’ comments was one of
ambivalence and in some instances, emotional strain.

“Because long-term adoption reunion is a new phenomenon there is no
ideal relationship model which the parties involved can emulate and
thus, those involved experience very little societal understanding or
support,” she writes.

“Despite the challenges, the highs and lows of the relationship, both
parties in long-term reunion persist, often with a ‘handle with care’
ethos.

“But this fragile relationship is seen as worth pursuing and the
participants, both those happy with their relationships and those not
so happy with certain aspects, all agree that there have been no
regrets and the relationship is what it is, whether that be satisfying
or not so satisfying.”

Other issues canvassed in her study included whether birth parents had
any moral obligation to include adoptive children with whom they’d
been reunited long term in their wills – not something they are
legally bound to do.

Dr Graeme MacRae, social anthropology lecturer at Massey’s Auckland
School of Social and Cultural Studies and supervisor for Ms Browning’s
work, said the publication of the monograph would make one of New
Zealand’s hidden histories more widely available.