Quasimodo wrote:AmyJo wrote:Compare that with my birth child who was taken from me at birth by the LDS church. I was forcibly taken by automobile within one week, with a massive headache caused by the unscrupulous doctor for injuring my spinal cord from the child birth, to sign away my rights while lying flat on my back in agonizing pain on the way there and back again to the LDS foster family who helped organize the adoption. It wasn't really my will, I was coerced as a young woman in the 1970's still in high school, to give up my child. No one tried to assist me with keeping him, only to relinquish my child. It wasn't really a free will choice at all, but one made by those around me in authority. That being the Mormon church I'd been born into and had placed my trust in up to then.
They basically stole my baby away. In 2005 I was able to find him through a social worker in Idaho, who matched our vital records. Salt Lake City was no help at all and went to extreme measures to make sure he could not find me. After his mission he wrote to them, where I had placed a letter for him in case of that very event he should try to find me. They did not release my letter to him, or even a medical history. Here he was at that time: a 30 year old returned missionary, former Marine and adoptee who had never been given any information on his ancestry including his medical history by either the LDS church who facilitated the adoption or his adoptive family. They deliberately withheld vital information from him in attempt to manipulate him into believing he had only one family, instead of a birth family.
He had become an atheist by the time I found him, and developed a drug and alcohol problem. He was angry at his adoptive mom. They hadn't spoken in a long time. But whoa! As soon as I found him, she became outraged at the idea that his birth mother could do such a thing. Never mind his adoptive dad had died, and his only adopted sibling also died previously. His adopted mom had remarried and had five stepchildren by then. She still refused to let her grown adopted son have anything to do with me. This, according to his extended family. His grandmother on his adoptive father's side had really wanted him and I to meet. So had his late adoptive dad. They were his favorite relatives in that entire adoptive family. But his adoptive mother threatened him with disinheritance if he continued to associate with me. His grandmother told me she would get very angry with her if she found out the grandmother was communicating with me.
So we still haven't met to this day, after we got off to a good start because of her manipulativeness. His half-siblings didn't get to meet him because of her and her clannish Mormon family. He's still messed up real good from drugs, alcohol, and his adoptive mom whom one of his extended relatives told me he couldn't stand. But out of loyalty to her and her bribes of instant wealth when she dies, he buckled to her pressure.
The social worker who helped match me to my birth son told me 99.999% of her referrals in Idaho were not from any other religion *other than* the *Mormon* one. She said from her experience the LDS church goes to great lengths to erase the birth families and any traces of the adoptees heritage or lineage permanently from their records/charts and files.
It's a travesty considering the emotional trauma an adoptee will have for their lifetime from being separated from their birth families. It's an emotional wound that never does heal. Finding their ancestry, meeting their relatives for the first time, getting acquainted with their birth families of origin is very healing for both them and the birth families.
The Mormon church commits baby snatching in the name of God with its back-handed adoption practices.
That is very sad. I'm so sorry that happened to you and your son. Thanks for sharing, AmyJo!
If you haven't seen the movie "Philomena", you should (a true story). It will break your heart, though. It's a similar story to your own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomena_(film)I really don't understand the philosophy behind hiding the identity of birth parents and their children. It seems to be an unnecessary cruelty. Most certainly when the children are old enough to make those decisions for themselves.
Thanks Quasimodo.
It's hard for the birth parent as well as the adoptee when it wasn't really my decision all along to make. It was rather made for me on the pretense that I chose that to happen. Nothing could be further from the truth. Or the withholding of vital information to help me make a better informed decision, or for that of the birth children who are subjected to the cruelty of the LDS baby mill adoption factory, particularly leading up to the 70's as when my child was born.
His adoptive parents as the LDS Social Services officials know of his medical history and his ethnicity of his birth father. He went through life up until I found him not knowing either. He didn't learn his birth father was Hispanic until after I initiated contact and provided him a brief family history - as much as I knew as it was limited of his paternal lineage. But he was always half-Hispanic. The adoptive LDS family and his local church officials taunted him during his growing up years that he was perhaps an albino because of his black curly hair, and light colored eyes, and moderate complexion. He was sent on his mission to Jamaica on the pretense that he was half-Negro, so he would relate well to black Jamaicans. The Mormon social services and his adoptive parents had full access to his parentage to know he was always half-Hispanic, and basically withheld that vital information from him.
He was confused. A man without an anchor or a history. The only history he was given was contrived and made up. I was furious when I found that out! He is also fully Jewish through my maternal side of the family. He had Mormon royalty in his birth family all the way back to Joseph Smith. No, he isn't descended from Smith or Brigham Young that I know of (thank God for that!) But some of our ancestors were with Smith and followed Young to Utah and helped pioneer that part of the west. They are part of the Mormon pioneer heritage. He was denied any of this information and more, including vital medical history that could be life saving.
I'm so disgusted with the adoption system, and his adoptive mother I don't know where to begin. It may be that after I'm deceased and his adoptive mother is, he may reach out to his half-brother and half-sister through my lineage. By then his adoptive mom won't be around to get angry at him. Hopefully he'll get help for his chemical addictions and substance abuse, and mental health issues surrounding his adoption by then. It is a life long journey for adoptees. The adoptive parents who don't or won't let their adoptive children search out and connect with their birth families does them a great disservice. Studies have borne this out time and again.
When my son was a child of eight years old we ran into each other in the doorway of the Deseret Industries in Boise, Idaho. I was in college at the time visiting a friend who used to work there. I was leaving the DI, and he was entering with a group of his probably cousins. He was a tall little boy, even then. With curly black hair and light brown eyes that when the sun shined on them they were translucent looking up at me. He looked up at my face like he was searching for someone. Like the little lost boy that he was. His cousins he was with that day were a bunch of disheveled little blonde kids that he stuck out like a sore thumb even then.
I wondered that day as our eyes met and I made my way to my car, could that be, was that my birth son? He had been born on the other side of the state of Idaho. I had moved to Boise to attend college, but wasn't from there. I had no information at that time where he was or where he'd been placed.
After finding him I learned that indeed he'd been placed in a LDS family on the outskirts of Boise. They were dairy farmers. He was brought up to be a hired hand, from early childhood. He worked like a slave according to a former in-law who shared with me history of his childhood. He told me himself he stood out like the ugly duckling among his family because he not only didn't look like any of them. They were oceans apart intellectually. His grandmother had sent me a picture of him when he was that age with those very light eyes against his freckled face and dark curly hair. I immediately recognized him as the little boy in the doorway of the DI way back in 1984. God does indeed work in mysterious ways to bring a mother and her son full circle!
He is a poet/singer like I am. No one else in his adoptive family were either. He went to the same film school my mom attended at age 20, when he was 30 (when I found him.) He and my other son both work/ed in the movie industry in Hollywood.
He had a Jewish girlfriend when we met, before he knew he was fully Jewish! That was awesome to find out. So many parallels and yet he hasn't met his half-siblings yet. Maybe someday they will, that is my mother's wish for them.
