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. "
