Adoption Week e-Magazine Article

Josée Larose

With the increasing popularity and profile of adoption, particularly in America, has come more awareness of the fact that the various members of the adoption community have varying, and sometimes conflicting, rights, needs and perspectives. Something that we all agree on is the need for mutual respect. One of the ways we seek to demonstrate this respect is through the use of "respectful adoption language" (RAL). Another way is to demonstrate empathy with, and understanding of, the experience of "the other side".

As was pointed out in a recent article published on this site, there are some 6 million adopted people in the United States. There are therefore 12 million people (more or less) whose children were adopted. Worldwide, this figure is much, much larger. It is from the point of view of these 12+ million people that I am writing today.

Adoptive families understandably do not want to feel different. They dislike having their status repeatedly pointed out to them. They feel that adoption is just another way, equally valid, to form a family and that making an issue of the adoption long after the legal event has taken place is both inappropriate and potentially hurtful. This is fine as far as it goes but when it signals, as it sometimes does, a refusal to acknowledge the tremendous human losses involved in adoption, we have a problem. Like it or not, adoption is not the same as having natural families. Adoption-related losses need to be acknowledged, as does the fact that most adoptive parents, given a choice, would have preferred to give birth to their own biological children and that most natural mothers placed their child for adoption because they were unsupported and had no other viable option. Adoption therefore was a solution of last resort for a sizeable percentage of adoptive and natural parents, a far cry from being "just another valid way to form a family".

One of the most controversial elements of RAL is what to call the woman who carried the child for nine months, gave birth to the child and signed the adoption papers. Is she the child's natural mother, birth mother, biological mother, first mother, real mother? I think nobody disagrees that an adopted person's parents, in the everyday sense of the word, are those who raised him or her. However, referring to the adoptee's first parents as the man and woman who shared in the adoptee's conception minimizes and disrespects the significance of this first relationship and bond between the adoptee and his/her natural parents. RAL should not be used as a smokescreen for marginalization.

As regards the appropriate, respectful way to refer to an adoptee's first parents, the "birth" prefix, although vigorously promoted by the adoption industry and adoptive parents, is not universally felt to be respectful by those to whom it is applied. Many of us feel that referring to us as "birth mothers" reduces our motherhood to an event in time which ended at the child's birth, and our significance as that of a biological incubator carrying the child for its "real" parents. Calling us "biological mothers" reduces us to the level of unfeeling donors of genetic material. The fact is that we never stop feeling like our child's mother. No legal event can change that.

Many of us prefer "natural mother" because that is exactly what we are: the mother that nature intended for our child. No offense is intended nor should be taken. The opposite of natural mother is not unnatural mother, it is adoptive mother. Respectful language is language that respects the preferences of those being named and is a true reflection of reality. Just as we cannot tell you what to call yourselves, you cannot tell us what we should call ourselves. We are not inanimate objects to be defined by others. If we tell you that we don't like to be called "birth" or "biological" mother, please, won't you listen and prove that you are not only giving lip service to the need to show respect?

Josee Larose
Founding director – Canadian Council of Natural Mothers
http://www.nebula.on.ca/canbmothers/index.htm