I read a lot of blog posts. I enjoy blog hopping, especially with different adoption blogs. I don’t always agree with what I read, so it’s nice to see the other side of people’s opinions, especially from people somewhere else in the adoption triad.
I read one the other day that I just can’t seem to shake out of my head. It was from a birthmother who had placed a child for adoption a number of years earlier. Her adoption was a closed adoption and she sort of “moved on” after placement, I guess. I don’t really know. Something brought her interest back into the adoption world and when she went blog hopping, just like I like to do, she encountered the term “birthmother” for the first time. I’m not really sure how she’d avoided hearing that term through so many years, but she didn’t like it at all. She drew out a long equation of what the term truly meant to her, summing it up in the end that birthmother is just a term synonymous with… “breeder”.
Dear birthmother, if you walk into our home, one of the first things you’ll see is something our son’s birthmother made for us that says, “Not flesh of my flesh, nor bone of my bone, but still miraculously my own.” It’s not something she made up, but the fact that our son’s birthmom made it for us is evidence that she loves us. It’s proof that she doesn’t think that we view her as just a breeder. It’s clear she knows differently.
Take a few more steps and you’re into the bedroom where our little boy and little girl share a room, and you’ll see just three pictures displayed. Right on the wall for everyone to see is a nice big picture of Jesus, a picture we will always want our children to stare at as they wake up and as they go to sleep. Not far away from that picture is a picture of our son’s birthmom. And not far away from that… a picture of our daughter’s birthmom. Both of those pictures are also faces that we want our children to see as they get up and go down for their naps.
Those pictures mean more to us than being a means of bringing us children. If that were the case, we’d have pictures of our caseworkers right next to them. If that were the case, we’d have pictures of the judge who made the adoption final. No, those women are more to us than that. Those women are the epitome of the type of selflessness we want to instill in our children. They’re examples of the type of heavenly love radiated by the Man in the other picture on their bedroom wall.
No, birthmothers does not equal breeders. Birthmothers equals selflessness. Birthmothers equals hope. Birthmothers equals love.
By Russell Elkins, author of Open Adoption, Open Heart
I relinquished my newborn son back at the end of the Baby Scoop Era, a time when we were all referred to as natural mothers on all legal paperwork. I do not like the term birthmother because it has been used against me more times than I care to count by a few adoptive parents who simply want me to shut up and go back under my rock. (Ain’t gonna’ happen, folks.)
The term birthmother, which Concerned United Birthparents (CUB) coined back in the late 1970’s to placate the adoption industry which hated the term natural mother, was hijacked by the industry. I quit using it to describe myself sometime back in the 1990’s.
People in the general public believe in stereotypes — it’s a lot easier to summarily dismiss someone you feel uncomfortable about if you just think of them in stereotypical terms. And “birthmother” defintely has some strong negative stereotypes associated with it nowadays.
I’m not sure what the right term is. Terms come and go. I was interviewing a teenager for a newspaper column the other day and he told me he was queer. What the heck, QUEER! That is not a word I would ever call someone but it is the new youth word for bisexual (or so my editor told me). I am sometimes at a loss for what the correct term is. Original mother, other mother, mommy Jenny…….
Very good point. I often think the same thing with the word “retarded”, which used to actually be a nice way of referring to someone with special needs. I wish people could go back to using that term rather than “mentally disabled”, but it all has to do with how people feel about it. So, I try to let the love for our children’s birth parents show when I talk about them so people couldn’t possibly think “birthmother” is anything but a term to cherish in my mind.
I wasn’t aware of the connotation “birthmother” had, so thank you for the education. I recently experienced feedback when someone told me “you do not ‘place’ a child into adoption, you place a plate on a table.” So I asked this person that the prior term was to “give up a child into adoption” and that over time, that was frowned upon so the latest term was “to place a child into adoption.” I asked her for her recommendation on what term we should be using that would be appropriate and I never received a response. Can you help?