Healthvues

I was channel surfing last night and came across one those “investigative” programs on TLC. It was about adoption scams - or more specifically about one woman who had been scamming couples out of money on the promise of a baby, probably one of our biggest fears as adoptive parents. We’re told to ignore these types of programs because they are usually sensationalistic, not comprehensive (don’t tell the whole story) and not representative of the adoption experience as a whole. But I actually thought this program was done pretty well and accurately portrayed what (unfortunately) can and does happen in the adoption process - that there are bad people out there who prey on the emotional vulnerability of adoptive parents. The show was formulaic in its approach: follow a couple through the process of finding a birthmother, their contact and budding relationship, their reaction when things don’t add up, the “sting” operation and confrontation of the scamming birthmother and the aftermath/fallout. Turns out this “birthmother” (she never was pregnant) had been scamming other couples and even previous husbands.

I think programs like this are detrimental in one respect because they toss out difficult subject matter - verbal hand-grenades as I like to call them - and don’t follow up with the overall facts and stats about the likelihood of this happening, how often it happens, or most important in my mind, how to avoid it happening to you. To the population who are not adoptive parents, it’s easy to become judgmental about the perceived desperation of adoptive parents and the process. But as I watched it as an adoptive parent, it reminded me of our own adoption journey and the many birthmothers and birthparents we met along the way - some scared, some good, some bad and some really bad.

Our adoption journey really began around 1999, just when the internet was emerging as a viable resource for parents and birthmothers - though some agencies were slow to catch on. We had signed up with a national agency who was comfortable doing things the way it had always been done but was getting into using the internet as a means for expanding the reach of our Dear Birthmother letters (which were web sites). Since that’s what we do for a living (visual design), we had our own ideas about what to say and how to design our own web site. We were met with some resistance from our agency (perhaps they wanted more control?), but we did it our way anyway. In the roughly 14 months our site was active, we had contact from about 20 different birthmothers from all walks of life, experience and motivations - an amount we were told by our agency was unheard of at a time when most of our peers were getting perhaps one or two contacts a year. (Guess we were doing something right!) So I’d consider us experienced when it comes to dealing with initial contact from birthmothers.

My only real complaint about the TV program was that they did not do an adequate job of presenting what adoptive parents should do or watch out for (red flags) beyond one single line of copy (”use an agency and an adoption lawyer”) right before the credits. This blog thread will attempt to do that by presenting our experiences - the good, the bad and the unfortunate (meaning “bad” but not malicious - sometimes things just don’t work out) - and what we did to deal with them, recognize them and avoid them. For the sake of clarity, I’ll categorize the type of contacts we had - the types of scammers, if you will, and even some that were definitely not scammers but who did not really have an adoption plan. I’ll reiterate that adoption DID work for us, and while it was a rocky road, it was rewarding far beyond what we had imagined.

More to come…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under Adoption scams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.