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Originally Posted By Kateri

The first thing that struck me about your post is that you mentioned going to a birthmother's board planning to make a contact. Although, as a birthmother, I am always happy to try and help a beginning adoptive parent understand adoption better, it is always bothersome when someone comes in not to understand the other side of the situation, but with the ulterior motive of meeting someone and getting chosen.

Another thing is that you have to accept that your happiness is going to grow out of another family's pain. And this pain can manifest in many "nasty" ways. Many women do get very angry after placing a child for adoption. And rightly so, I believe. Many were and are still coerced by parents or professionals, and made to feel like they had no business even thinking about keeping their child, and the decision was totally out of their hands. Others (like me) were not coerced, but we still grieve, and anger is sometimes a part of all that. And if you've ever grieved, you know that it can get very ugly.

I know there are birthmothers out there who's views and anger against adoption seem very extreme, even to me. But try to remember, these are mostly women who placed many years ago in closed, coerced adoptions. This is the anger of women whose children have been *taken* from them, forcibly or by grinding down and manipulation. These aren't the voices of women who made their own decisions, this decision, the decision that concerned the fate of their own children, was taken out of their own hands. If this happened to you, wouldn't you be just a little angry?

You may think that this never would have happened to someone like you. If you allow yourself to put yourself on a pedestal like this, you will never be able to understand you child's birthmom. Unplanned pregnancy happens to many different kinds of people. It happens to people who are *not* promiscuous, who don't have any diseases, who don't have drug problems, and who were using birth control responsibly. Condoms break, and even the pill isn't effective on everyone. And I think it's also true, for the most part, that the shadowy character most prospective adoptive parents fear would probably have had an abortion.

My advice to you in pursuing open adoption is to educate yourself. I don't mean just reading the articles on adoption.com, I mean reading things from different sources, different perspectives, different experiences. There are three sides to an adoption, you should know them all inside and out.

There happens to be an excellent board (not here) for all members of the adoption triad to debate their views. it has a good mix of people. I can email you the URL if you like.

I'm sorry I couldn't really reassure you. Birthmothers are not all like the one woman you read on the birthparents BB. Birthmothers today have a few more options, if they go out of their way to look for them. It is a lot more common these days for women to be placing their child for adoption because *they* think it's the right thing to do, not because that's what everyone esle thinks. But you are headed for some rocky roads ahead. This is not going to be a ride over the rainbow with a baby at the end. You are not going to find a woman who feels that your baby is in "the wrong tummy" (to quote the horrifically ignorant Rosie O'Donnell) and she is pregnant just for you. She is not a vessel for your happiness, and should not be thought of as such. You are going to find a woman, most likely young, who didn't go the easy way out and have an abortion, who is only doing best she can with what she has, and hating every step of it, because she loves her baby. In her life, she is going to endure misunderstanding and cold judgement from the people around her because of what she did. People *say* wonderful things about birthparents, but then they turn around and treat them like loose cannons, as if their birthparenthood has tainted them. The parents of her child, *you*, should not be part of that misunderstanding.

If you feel like you can't deal with all of this, you probably aren't ready for open adoption right now. If you really believe in the concept, counseling and reading will probably help. Perhaps I've been a little hard on you but the things I've talked about all will come up in one way or another.

best of luck in whatever you choose,
--Kateri