For all the talk we do about how there is no information on birth fathers or their plight, perhaps we aren't looking in the right places. Gary Clapton has released five studies in the past ten years on the birth father experience. The most recent of which just hit the wires today. I downloaded it with interest and I can't keep my eyes off of it.

This study, entitled The Experiences and Needs of Birth Fathers in Adoption: What We Know and Some Practice Implications calls out the fact that not much is known about birth fathers and challenges readers to look past stereotypes. To do that, he presents information that we're not used to hearing. He quotes a study on birth mothers in which 50 percent of the mothers interviewed said they had been abandoned by the father of the child. In his survey, only one admitted to fleeing while ten of the thirty said that they were unwillingly sent away. Two sides to every coin, indeed! Is it perception? Is it a need for one side to look like the better side?

All the same, the study really hits home when Clapton begins discussing how these fathers felt, emotionally, at various parts of the pregnancy and placement plan. It brings their plight into human understanding and consciousness. It makes them human to even those who think that they might not be.

The combination of much of what happened made pregnancy and birth events an extraordinary time for most of these young men. For instance there was the emotional turmoil of the unplanned pregnancy and decision making in response to this; for some, exclusion during the pregnancy, the birth or during the adoption process and consequent feelings of emasculation or disempowerment; and the onset of feelings of fatherhood. In addition there is the response to the physical reality of seeing or holding a child of theirs and knowing what was to come: disenfranchisement from the decision-making process regarding the baby’s future. Loss was found to feature sharply for a majority — loss of the relationship, loss of the prospects of an envisaged family life and denial of contact with their child.

Some will find it shocking to realize that birth fathers experience, basically, the same things that mothers feel regarding grief and loss. I was careful in my series on the Core Issues in Adoption to use the term birth parent instead of just birth mother when speaking about the issues unless talking about something unique to the birth mother. (For example, intimacy issues that are further hindered for mothers because of stretch marks.) This is because I was aware in some part of my mind that the losses that birth parents experience are universal, not gender bound. This study only brings that into further light and demands that people start to look at it and speak about it in such a manner.

Knowing that these birth fathers experience the same grief and loss isn't where this study stops. Clapton lets us listen to their words and thus look into their hearts as they describe how they coped in the immediate aftermath and how the grief has affected their lives.

There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him. I feel as if there is something inside me that has been ripped out and I feel empty and nothing is going to fill that and I feel that I’ve been robbed of his childhood. Seeing him grow up and all his teething, taking him to parks and all that sort of thing, football games. (136)

We hear about the emptiness, repeatedly, from birth mothers who have spoken up and spoken out about their journeys. Society often views the birth father as an ambivalent, emotionless part of the triad. The words of these fathers proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the stereotypes lingering for birth fathers are way off mark.

At the end of the study, we are offered up challenges to those who work with this subject on a daily basis (agencies, social workers, etc) and encouraged to change the collective mindset. In fact, if the agencies involved in a case I previously mentioned had read the following suggestion, perhaps things would have gone differently.

There is a need for practitioners to challenge their personal assumptions about fathers as a whole (Ferguson and Hogan 2004), but also young fathers. Research among young fathers is beginning to tell us that in many cases there is a strong commitment to parent their children which may go unacknowledged or denied by others including professionals (Speak, Cameron, and Gilroy 1997; Mordaunt 2005).

Birth fathers are important. Society recognizes the importance that fathers are important in the life of their child. All in all, the adoption triad simply does not exist without the presence of birth fathers. Acknowledging their importance to the existence of the child and their rights within can only help strengthen the ethics behind the adoption.

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For More on Birth Father Issues and Topics, read:

1. When the System Fails Biological Fathers by Jenna Hatfield.

2. What About Birth Dads? by Jan Baker.

3. Munchkin's Birth Father: His Grief, Guilt and Sorrow by Jenna Hatfield.

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Article reference and download can be found here. Photo credit.