No-one could have encapsulated the need of the adoption industry
to manufacture the demonization of the natural mother as the most pivotal
and necessary requirement in the promotion of, and social acceptance
of adoption, as Lawrence when she states how:
In order to bring
the issues surrounding the intermediary system into clear focus, it
is necessary to examine the myths and motives that surround the adoption
experience. Outsiders need to realize that social agencies not only
control adoption procedures, but also control the information about
the institution which is provided to the courts, the legislature and
the public.
It is the child
welfare establishment that has provided the picture of [natural] mothers
as indifferent - as mothers who abandon their unwanted children with
a wish to remain forever hidden from them. They know that this is seldom
true, but it helps to facilitate their work for the public to believe
this. Society does not dismiss the importance of the natural family
as readily as the social planners, and so it is useful to portray [surrendering]
parents as different from caring parents.
The [natural]
mother must be different, an aberration; for if it were true that she
had the same degree of love for her child as all other mothers, the
good of adoption would be overwhelmed by the tragedy of it. Adoptive
parents are somewhat relieved of guilt if they can be assured that the
[natural] parents truly did not want their child; for, under those circumstances,
it is possible to feel entitled to claim the child of others. Neither
society nor the mother who holds the child in her arms wants to confront
the agony of the mother from whose arms that same child was taken. But
that agony is real, as we have come to learn through our experience
with reunions.
