"I would really like to hear from any birth mothers or pregnant women considering adoption, who are working/have worked with LDS-linked adoption agencies, or are considering/have considered LDS adoptive parents for their baby."

Contact: F.Cannell@lse.ac.uk if you can provide her with the birth mother's point of view in LDS adoptions. Fenella Cannell from the U.K. emailed me and asked if I would post this request for her. She is an anthropologist and needs some feedback from birth mothers who relinquished through LDS or pregnant women considering placing through LDS.

For more about Fenella, read her comment after this post. I goggled her out of curiosity and found that she has written several books and is referenced in several others. An interesting side note: the University that she teaches at in the United Kingdom offers a nursery. I wonder how many colleges in the United States offer nurseries?

As long as I am mentioning written papers about adoption, I will point out a few others that I feel might be beneficial and help understand the birth mother experience. Yes, folks, although a few people have asked why I concentrate so much on talking about birth mothers, that IS my area of expertise. Expert, I am not, but I do know many birth mothers and have talked to them in detail over the past few years.

The Evan B. Donaldson ("EBD")Safeguarding the Rights and Well-Beings of Birthparents in Adoption is one of the latest research papers to discuss how adoption affects birth parents. It has been heralded by many as a welcome addition to the body of works assessing the affect of adoption on birth parents.

It has also received its share of criticism by some predictable critics.
There are still many people unwilling to acknowledge the possible affects of adoption on birth parents. Their reasons run the gamut, but there are several tried and true predictable responses and criticisms to any research. The authors of reports are accused of being biased, the numbers of those polled about a report are said to be too small, etc.

When someone has a strongly held belief, they can be bulldog-like in their positions. (Mea culpa!) For those who refuse to believe adoption harms birthparent, they will dismiss any reports that do not support their beliefs. There are a million and one ways to dismiss any study. In Jenna's post Do you Take This Birth Mother one commenters' remarks are a perfect example of dismissing views that differ from yours.

Research on the affects of adoption is more popular than it was in the past, but, we still have a long way to go. We need more definitive works to quell the critics who refuse to believe what seems obvious to many of us. The Evan B. Donaldson report is a welcome addition, and I hope it is followed by more well composed research papers and studies.

Further Reading:

Today I am Famous

More Jenna in the News

Jenna Gets Serious - The Birthparent Study - Part 1

The Birthparent Study - Part 2

Effects of Adoption on Adoptees and Birth Parents

Psychological and Emotional Effects of the Closed System


Photo by Jan Baker