This is the third post in a series that examines the book, Two Little Girls: A Memoir of Adoption, by Theresa Reid



I’m always intrigued when people choose to adopt internationally mainly because they’re scared of interacting with their child’s birth parents. We have a domestic open adoption in which we consider our sons’ birth families members of our extended family (and vice versa).

In our case, there’s nothing to be scared of. The presence of our sons’ birth families has greatly enriched our family and I can’t imagine them not being part of our lives.

But I’ve interviewed several adoption social workers who assure me that the number one reason people adopt internationally is to avoid contact with birth parents. They tell me: When there’s an ocean between the adoptive family and the birth parents, the adoptive parents feel safer; more entitled to fully claim their child.

When Theresa Reid embarked on her first adoption, she was adhered to this mindset. In her memoir, Two Little Girls, she writes:

The disruption of adoption by birth parents is, despite lavish media attention to the outlying cases, quite rare and almost always avoidable. But we wanted the certainty that no anguished birth parent could inflict a catastrophic blow to our hearts. We would go far, far away and bring home a child whose birth parents could never hope to find her—and who, not incidentally, could never hope to find her birth parents.

Reid goes on to discuss the “search” and “reunion” movement—those adult adoptees who devote their lives to finding their birth parents. “We recoiled from the prospect of our child’s searching for her ‘real’ parents. What an outrage! What a nightmare! We took it personally, even in the abstract. Imagine being rejected like that after having given everything you had to parent that child.”

Reid recalls meeting a physician at a professional conference—a woman consumed with locating her birth parents. Reid writes:

I wanted to ask, “What’s the matter with you? What was wrong with your adoptive family?” I wanted a guarantee that Marc and I would not be subjected to such punishing rejection.

Now that she’s parented for several years, Reid’s views have evolved somewhat, but she admits that at the time, she and Marc “shared an illusion that surely motivates some searchers: that the reunion of birth parents and birth children would be like the reunion of passionate lovers who had been forced apart. Together again, they would be complete, whole, at perfect rest. They would need no one else, including us. We doting adoptive parents would be out in the cold, childless again.”

“Of course we wanted to protect ourselves emotionally from such heartrending betrayal,” Reid writes. “We wanted it to be impossible for our child and her birth parents to find each other.”

I’d love to hear opinions from people on both sides of the equation:

*Parents who adopted internationally because they didn’t want contact with birth parents.

*People who were adopted internationally and have no contact with their birth families.

*Parents who adopted domestically and do have contact with their child’s birth family.

*Adopted people who do have contact with their birth family.



What works for you and why? What, if anything, do you wish you’d done differently?

Other posts in this series:
Part 1: Book Review: Two Little Girls: A Memoir of Adoption by Theresa Reid.

Part 2: Reid’s desire to adopt a healthy infant.

Coming Next:

Part 4: Reid’s anxiety about accepting a referral.
Part 5: Reid’s motives for adopting a second child.

For more about Two Little Girls, visit http://theresareidbooks.com.