Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How Adoption's Past Informs the Present, March 2, 2005
Beautiful things don't grow in the dark, they grow in the light, so we should all be very grateful that adoption is finally emerging from the shadows. Baer assists us with this book, which is thoroughly researched and meticulously documented.
Adopted people have been searching for their families much, much longer than current adoption stories would have us believe. Baer's work is centred in California, the state in which she lives. She documents searches in the 1920s and the sympathetic portrayal by the Child Welfare League of these searches. She documents the lack of birth certificates at the time due to shoddy social work practice which prevented individuals from ever travelling abroad as one example of the difficulties those adopted faced. Baer examines official records, newspaper accounts and literature to find that in California, social workers and their organizations had never argued for closed adoption records between 1925 and 1945. The only confidentiality mentioned was confidentiality for adoptive families, to prevent them from being contacted by the original families of the children they raised. Social workers also wanted to be able to ensure their clients (mostly middle class, white prospective adoptive parents) that they were getting white children who were not feeble-minded, to use the terminology of the time.
Because of the shame of unmarried motherhood, adoption practice seemed to choose between hiding babies or hiding records. That is, until every child was recorded on a birth certificate, it was easy to transfer children with no one the wiser. Bills to seal records then appeared from the 1930s to the 1990s in the US. Newspaper articles of the time make clear that legislators enacted these laws in some cases to prevent 'unscrupulous persons' from obtaining 'access to the adoption records' and blackmailing 'the adopted parents by threatening to tell the child it was adopted.' (p. 19) Thus, sealing adoption records was a way to ensure adoptive parents could lie to the children they raise with impunity.
Baer also documents how sealed adoption records allowed 'baby farmers' like Gerogia Tann in Tennessee, Gertrude Pitkanen in Montana, and William and Lila Young in Nova Scotia to operate with impunity. In some cases, more babies died in their hands than were adopted. Baby selling and baby stealing operate more easily under closed adoption records: how can one track what happened 20 or more years later without any records? Indeed, Georgia Tann could possibly have been one of the people to support closing records in California. If someone of her ilk thought closed records are a good thing, then one has certainly to ask why. She certainly made money from her baby farming operations. How can the current push for 'Safe Havens' not lead to the same thing that these operations did: babies taken from mothers and 'given' to a safe haven to allow adoption without strings and without possibility of reunion, and large 'legal' and agency fees to those making arrangements?
Clearly, closed adoption records and the secrecy they generate do not benefit those adopted or the mothers, fathers, and family members who have lost them. Those who benefit are the baby brokers and agencies, and they benefit financially. This should tell us something about the inherent immorality of this practice and those who support it.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book is so chock full of fascinating information, I wanted to remember it all., May 3, 2006
When you read a book, do you highlight the important stuff? If you're like I am, you always keep your highlighter handy. When I read Growing in the Dark, my pages turned yellow. I realized that I was highlighting almost every single sentence of every single paragraph. That's because this book is so chock full of fascinating information, I wanted to remember it all.
Long ago, when I first timidly set foot into the adoption reform arena, a fellow adoptee/law student advised me to first read every law in my own state that concerned adoption. "After all," she told me, "These laws are about YOU." It was the best advice I have ever received.
That's why I love Ms. Baer's book so much. It takes me beyond the borders of Illinois as it chronicles the history of adoption laws throughout the country. And that's about ME too.
Ms. Baer studies her own state of California, but not in isolation. She integrates the changes in California law with the broad philosophies and social mores prevalent throughout the country.
Growing in the Dark is also a history of the consequences of adoption laws; how keeping secrets has affected adoptees. Ms. Baer reveals the shame-based consequences of secrecy laws through the eyes of psychologists, child welfare advocates, adoptive parents, birth parents, feminists, and baby sellers.
In the first chapter, we're hit squarely on the head with a most ironic and largely unknown fact - the first step in adoption was KEEPING records, not sealing them. At the turn of the 20th century the movement to register all births was intended to curb the dangerous and often fatal fate which met "foundlings" or "abandoned children." Too often, these children were abused, sold, and even killed, with no one being the wiser. With the advent of mandated birth registrations, disposing of a child unseen became much more difficult.
In the early years of the Great Depression, legislatures began to pass laws forbidding the word "illegitimate" to be used on birth certificates. Children presenting their birth certificates to enter school would no longer have to face the public humiliation of illegitimacy. Also at this time many states began sealing adoption records to everyone BUT the parties of record. The legislative intent was to keep the records away from public inspection.
In 1935, California quietly passed a law that removed that exemption; it made adoption records available only by court order. Other states were not far behind. The era of state enforced identity change had begun! Why??
At this time, private adoption agencies had much to gain by keeping records sealed. They could pretty much do as they wanted and no one would ever know. The Cradle's Eleanor Garrigue Gallagher, in her 1936 book The Adopted Child, recommended to adoptive parents that curious adoptees be told that no records existed. Shades of Georgia Tann!
The Adopted Child also counseled adoptive parents to tell their children that their birth mothers were the ones who believed that secrecy was best for their children. This subtle "twist" seems to me to have been a turning point in adoption policy. The agencies were now slyly slipping their secrecy plans into the mouths of unknowing birth mothers. No one would know what birth mothers really thought because the records were safely sealed. She who holds the secrets holds the power!
During this same time period, The Child Welfare League of America was developing its own policies. They were mostly supportive of adoptees accessing their records and learning more about their birth parents but they were also concerned enough about the stigmas inherent in adoption to recommend some degree of secrecy. They suggested, in their 1938 Guidelines, that birth records be "revised" to avoid the embarrassment of illegitimacy to the adoptee.
Somewhere along the way, the Child Welfare League of America's voice became muted. The post World War II years saw sealed records become the norm all over America.
It wasn't until the 1970s that people began challenging these laws. Organizations such as CUB, AAC, and ALMA were some of the first to advocate for change. Bastard Nation: The Adoptee Rights Organization was born in 1996 and was instrumental in bringing about the 1998 historic ballot measure, Oregon's "Measure 58," opening original birth certificates, unconditionally, to all adult adoptees.
Now grab your favorite color highlighter, settle down in your easy chair, and begin reading Growing in the Dark. You won't be able to put it down.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comments on "Growing in the Dark", July 11, 2004
I found "Growing in the Dark" articulate, easy to read, and filled with real facts concerning sealed records. I especially like the comments about the birth mother's possible embarrassment not being the fault of the adoptee and that contact can and will be made in a responsible manner. I have long felt that it is the moral, if not legal responsibliity of the birth mother to provide her own child with a record of the facts of that child's birth, a complete medical and social history, and the name of the birth father. We have become a society where no one takes responsibility. I also like the part about sealed records being a power play. One sees this immediately when one starts to ask questions of the state, agency, court, or even clerks at hospitals. It is so transparent, yet no one mentions it.
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