Member-only story
Excuse Me, May I Raise Your Child?
How the adoption industry fails women like me and you
I’ve never been a mother, but I had a baby once.
I remember his insistent eyes, his gorgeous face, and the tenacious way he gummed my finger while I warmed a bottle of formula. Those joyfully exhausting then incalculably painful days came rushing back when I was reminded by a retailer’s email that it was “my” baby’s birthday. Except that I don’t have one because his mother decided six days after he was born that she wanted to raise her child.
She was well within the 30-day state-imposed legal limit on women changing their minds. On the day two poker-faced adoption agency social workers walked in to reclaim the boy, I wept enough tears to make my body a desert.
I want to tell you all about my experiences so anyone considering adoption does not make the same mistakes I did. But first, I have a proposition: I’d love to raise your child. You, the grandmother or auntie taking care of a child because the mother is no longer legally the parent and could not be available to her child. You, the pregnant woman looking to find a loving home for your baby. I can imagine all the reasons you want to keep kin close — but perhaps you or someone in your church or neighborhood would consider it?
