I am the daughter of Pamela Sumner and Les Leston. I am the sister of Kimberley, Rebecca, Dana and Teya. I am the wife of Tom, the mother of Bonnie, Rachel, Ruth and Lilian, and stepmother to Amelia. And I am the grandmother of Margaux, Roman, Frankie, Zana, Dorothy and Fredrick.
I am still amazed I live so close to the doctor’s house, the place where my mother laboured and lost. I imagine her sequestered in the attic — her existence hidden behind the tall macrocarpa hedge. Alone in a new country, unmarried and abandoned by her parents. A perfect candidate to provide a new baby to a childless couple.
I walk by that house most mornings. The doctor is long gone. A corrugated-iron fence replaces the hedge. But I stop for a moment and look up to those high windows. And I wave to my mother.
Notes about adoption
There is enduring power in the language we use to promote any ideology. We use words to align the myths and to hinder the truth, especially when it comes to adoption.
You may have noted I do not use the word adoptee unless I am quoting someone.
For many adopted people, the suffix -ee denotes our role as the recipient of the act of adoption. We are adopted as newborns or young children when we are without independent agency. Adoption is a life-changing and lifelong event in which we have no say.
When you use the word adoptee, you remind us of what was done to us. Irrespective of how we feel about that. I do not use the words adopted child either. How often, when reading about adoption, do you see these two words together? As a New Zealand judge said when denying a woman access to her files: ‘You are an adopted child of any age.’ This term reminds us that our status as adopted people limits our rights as adult citizens.
I have also chosen not to use the words adopted mother or adopted father. For me it makes it sound like I adopted them. The suffix -ed is derivational. By affixing it, you change the meaning of the word adopt. I use the words adopting mother or adopting father because it places the action on the people who choose to do it. When speaking of adoption, I often use the terms forced, closed or stranger adoption.
I write from the perspective of the adopted person. No one sought our consent to be removed from our mothers, heritage and cultures. Most of us lost our identity without any legal representation. There is no mechanism to reclaim our original identity.
I do not use the term birth mother. This term is reductive. It’s static and limits a mother to the action of her body. It denies the profound relationship a mother shares with her child. It obscures what happens to women who lose their children to adoption. It ignores the coercion many women suffered. It papers over the many social and financial issues pregnant women experience.
The systems and people that support adoption often ignore the impact on the mother. Mothers who lose their children to adoption can suffer deep grief. Many say it is worse than death because they don’t know if their child is alive, suffering or thriving. They often suffer lifelong depression.
Recently, for the first time, British law defined the word mother: ‘Being a “mother” is the status afforded to a person who undergoes the physical and biological process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth.’24 Let us call the woman who gives birth the mother. If parents enter a child’s life through adoption, let us call them the adopting mother and father.
Others use the words relinquish, give or gave away in describing a person lost to adoption. But to relinquish is to cease to keep or claim voluntarily. We often hear that a mother gave away her baby. People are not objects. You cannot give us away. These terms ignore the fundamental human rights of the mother and her child. Every mother of loss I’ve spoken to experienced coercion and pressure to sign away their right to parent. Some of us see that as abduction.
Positive Adoption Language (PAL) is a movement created by the pro-adoption industry as a way of normalising adoption. Natural parent is considered negative. The industry prefers the more clinical term biological. Real parent is replaced by birth parent, reducing a mother to her biological function. The word mother does not appear at all in the lists of positive language. Even reunion, with its implication of desire and longing fulfilled, is out, replaced by making contact.
Language is how we transfer ideas or concepts. It seems to me that adopter-centric language is designed to minimise or negate the loss of being relinquished. Codified, the language disables adopted people from recognising and defining their experiences, and is geared toward adopters and the industry that serves them.
No matter how you view adoption, the issue of authentic identity always arises. Adoption severs the past and creates an alternative future. Some adopted people are quite content with this alternate reality. Many are not.
Adoption seeks to bind a child to a non-biological family. Birth records must be sealed to enable this. Authorities create a new or second birth certificate. There is no opt-out clause. You have no right to undo this action or to recover your original identity.
Everyone has a birth certificate. If you are a non-adopted person, your founding document is a straightforward affair. It names your parents, their occupations, your name, date and place of birth. In most countries, there’s a small box at the bottom of the certificate. In New Zealand it states: ‘Any person who falsifies the particulars on this certificate or uses it as true, knowing it to be false, is liable to prosecution under the Crimes Act 1961.’ I have one of those
