Who Gets Baby Emma: Her Single Daddy or Her Married Adoptive Parents?

Guest Post by Laura Deurmyer for Adopt-a-tude

I bring two distinct and sometimes warring perspectives to bear on media accounts of adoptions. I am an adoptee—adopted at birth during what is known as the Baby Scoop Era. I have also been a foster parent who tried unsuccessfully to adopt a baby I loved.

If women are to have a real adoption option when confronting an unplanned pregnancy, we must take adoption questions and issues seriously as a society. We must stop treating adoption as the next human-interest story or as a tear-jerker movie of the week. 

The baby Emma Wyatt story featured in the Washington Post and the New York Times recently interested me as much for what it didn’t say as for its unmistakably fascinating facts. What set it apart and got it featured in the Post and in the Times and ultimately on Good Morning America rather than simply in a few obscure adoption blog sites, was its play on the Dr. Phil show.

The basic story—birth father who wants to raise his own child is denied that opportunity by birth mom who places the baby for adoption against his wishes—has been played out numerous times in recent years. It’s a common enough problem that there are whole websites devoted to helping unwed birth fathers retain custody of their children. Several of the players in the baby Emma story—the adoption agency, the lawyer, the state of Utah—feature in more than one of these tales.

(Note: One website that does catalog and discuss problems with adoption is poundpuplegacy.org. Although I don’t agree with much of that site’s seemingly anti-adoption bent, I have linked to it in this story because it clearly lists and explores problematic cases like baby Emma’s.)

Even in major media coverage of the story, a rational discussion of adoption policy or a thorough examination of states’ roles in voluntary placement adoption is mostly lacking. Instead, the story has devolved into the heart-wrenching tale of a father’s loss with class-warfare overtones.

Emma was born in Virginia and spirited away to Utah—a state that makes it notoriously difficult for unwed dads to asset their rights—for adoption immediately after her birth. Virginia courts have sided with the father, John Wyatt, and have ordered the little girl to be returned to him. Utah courts have thus far maintained that John Wyatt did not comply with their regulations for asserting parental rights and that the adoption should stand. 

There has been no intimation that the child would be unsafe either with her adoptive parents or with her natural father. John Wyatt works at a nightclub; he is twenty-one. The adoptive parents are established, successful college-educated mid-career professionals who are very economically stable, married, and no doubt desperately in love with this little girl after raising her for almost a year. 

Much of the news coverage of the story sides openly with John Wyatt, and I would have to agree with that. However, the idea that Emma might be better off with the more economically advantaged and martially stable adoptive parents—the state of Utah’s underlying basic argument—is implied in Lisa Belkin’s New York Times piece on her Motherlode blog, in which she asks:

Who do you think should have custody of “Baby Emma”? The stable married couple who are, as their lawyer says, “the only parents this child has ever known,” or the single 21-year-old nightclub worker who has never seen her, though he certainly has tried?

(Belkin later used comments to clarify that she too believes John Wyatt should have custody.) 

My heart goes out to John Wyatt. He has been trying, since his daughter’s birth, to be a responsible father. Had he been married to Emma’s mom, Emma would likely be with him now. 

My heart also goes out to the adoptive parents. They put their trust in the adoption agency, the lawyers and the birth mom. After having Emma in their homes and in their hearts for a year, they stand to lose a daughter. I know what that feels like—it’s like a death in the family.

Most of all, however, my heart goes out to Emma Wyatt. She deserves to know her Daddy. She deserves the chance to be Emma Wyatt. Perhaps her material future would be brighter in a home with higher net worth and two parents. But she has a birth parent who loves her, who wants her.  Ask any adoptee—that’s all most of us ever wanted—to know that our “other” parents did love us.

For the families involved in this situation, it is no-win deal. Someone will end up devastated. Baby Emma will deal with emotional issues for the rest of her life.

Adoption can be a wonderful thing; it is a gift of the heart. A choice to love. So many children need desperately for someone to choose them. Their birth parents either don’t want them, or can’t get their lives in order enough to parent them safely. 

You will never convince me that an adoptive parent can’t love an adopted child just as fiercely as a “real” parent. Having been both the child and the parent in an adoptive relationship, I know better. 

Though I have wanted to know my birth background most of my life, I have never doubted that my parents—and they are my parents—love me.  Though I knew that raising our baby girl would have had its problems—crack babies can have behavioral issues well past infancy, and we would have had to address racial identify questions sensitively and honestly—I loved her, and love her, with all my heart.

Love aside, adoption is not always the best choice. We should be talking about cases like this in order to shape our adoption expectations as a society. If states like Utah, with its majority Mormon population and overwhelming prejudice against single parenthood are allowed to compromise the rights of parents in other states, that is unacceptable. We need to talk about that.

If as a society, we believe a two-career, multi-degreed, financially successful married couple should trump a blue-collar daddy or a single mom for parental rights, in the best interest of the child, despite that single parent’s desire and ability to raise the child, that is unacceptable. We need to talk about that. 

Adoption should be easy, when the circumstances call for it. It should be virtually impossible when we are taking children away from biological parents against their will absent abuse or neglect. 

Some states are toying with the idea that they can choose not to follow federal law in selected matters; now is the time to codify exactly what we can and can’t stomach in the adoption process as a society. Otherwise, states with a hard-right theological bent might move even farther in the direction Utah has taken, with disastrous results for children and families.

Political Pretzel: Twists in the Adoption and Abortion Debate

By Fran Cronin for Adopt-a-tude

Common to all deeply personal matters is the complicated thinking that gets wound around them. At this time in our country, there are few issues as fraught with knots as the political, cultural, and religious tension of the adoption versus abortion debate.

From the picketer on the street corner hoisting photos of fetuses to the blogger on the net challenging the moral intentions of our pro-life politicians, a battle wages for the right of a woman to choose whether or not to carry a conception to term.

But what about the sideline issues that are not so easy to sloganize?

I have yet to read a bumper sticker that addresses which babies are put up for adoption and how many actually get adopted; or, if abortion is not the solution, the importance of better education and access to birth control. If the goal is stopping unwanted pregnancies, why is preaching abstinence touted as the best solution for sexually active teens?

Like a hard and gnarly pretzel, the issues are so intertwined and morally charged that the questions raised don’t neatly sort out. They get mashed and crumble.

Before I get too deep, I want to state my position: I am the mother of an adopted child; I’m also a woman who had an abortion in her late twenties. I am thrilled my husband and I were able to adopt our son. I also feel the abortion I had was the best choice for all the right reasons.

My husband and I decided to adopt when I was no longer able to conceive yet wanted another child. The abortion I had when I was single, careless, and certainly not in a mindset to even think about bearing or caring for a child.

As a woman, wife, and mother, I have had the good fortune to act upon what I thought was best for me. With power to control my child bearing, I have created the family I want and a family I can care for.

Sadly, most women around the world, including many women in this country, cannot say the same.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau on “2007 Poverty Thresholds,” almost 14 million children under the age of 18 live in poverty. The hardships of poverty amplify when you factor in compromised or no access to quality health care, limited access to higher education, poor housing, enhanced risk to a spectrum of abuses, a perpetuation of poverty, and little recourse to unwanted pregnancies.

When you look beyond our borders, the numbers grow more alarming. Unicef reports that between the years 2000 and 2007, poverty was responsible for the death of almost 70 million children. No corner of the world was exempt.

For the women bearing these children, their fate is no better. According to the recent Unicef report, State of the World’s Children 2009, Maternal and Newborn Health:

“Having a child remains one of the biggest health risks for women worldwide. Fifteen hundred women die every day while giving birth. That's half a million mothers every year. The difference in pregnancy risk between women in developing countries and their peers in the industrialized world is often termed the greatest health divide in the world.”

Yet women’s bodies and the babies they bear continue to be the domain of politicians. When you look at the composition of Congress, that means they’re under the thumbs of a controlling bunch of aging white guys. Just think back on that sea of stony faces, panned by cameras while the President was delivering his recent State of the Union address.

For over two decades, from the time of Reagan through the Bush years, these guys had their way with the lives of women and their children. Using the Global Gag Rule introduced by the Reagan administration in 1984, Congress mandated that no foreign organizations receiving U.S. family planning assistance had the right to use their own non-U.S. funds to provide legal abortions, counsel or refer abortions, or lobby for the legalization of abortion in their country.

For those NGOs that refused to comply, the loss was not just in hard dollars. They also forfeited valuable technical assistance as well as U.S. donated contraceptives, including condoms—both critical components of the USAID family planning program.

The rule was rescinded in 1993 by Clinton and then reinstated in 2001 by George Bush on his first business day in office.

Two days after Obama was inaugurated, he struck down the Global Gag Rule, stating, “It is time we end the politicization of this issue.” (Click here for a piece about this in The Democratic Daily.)

But the politicization of a woman’s right to choose has not ended there. Thick in the muck of our current health-care reform quagmire is the Stupak Amendment—authored by the namesake Democrat from Michigan—that requires women to buy an additional insurance rider to cover abortion.

As did the Gag Rule in the mid-80s, this two-page insertion into an almost 1,100 page (and counting) bill has ignited a debate about whether federal tax dollars should be allowed to fund abortion. However, this time the funding denial is not embedded into a foreign aid policy, but in legislation that will impact the health and well being of women and their children nationwide.

Cynical me scratches my head and asks (myself or anyone else who will listen), three questions:

1. With money so tight and the chronic cry to cut spending, how can we encourage compromised women to bear unintended pregnancies while simultaneously cutting back on the entitlements that support these needy women and children?
2. Where are the statistics that demonstrate that for every unwanted birth there is an adoptive home (not with a gay couple, of course)?
3. Why are women always legally punished for being pregnant? The last time I consulted a biology book, it took two to make a baby—and one of them was male.

On the basis of dollars and cents, parenting remains the most expensive choice.

Outside our borders, the prospects for women and children are even bleaker. When the earthquake struck Haiti, the group hardest hit was its children. Ranking number 50 in the world for highest birth rate/1000 people, Haiti is also the poorest country in the western hemisphere. There were too many children to begin with, and since the earthquake, an estimated 380,000 are now orphaned.

The high-profile case of U.S. “missionary” Laura Silsby’s effort to leave Haiti with 33 undocumented children illustrates how vulnerable children are when the only adjective that can describe their future is desperate. Haitian authorities feared the children were to be trafficked across the border and sold into either domestic or sexual services.

Columnists such as Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times have written impassioned accounts of human trafficking both domestically and abroad, primarily in Asia. While estimates from Unesco and Unicef vary, both conclude that between half to a million women and children are sold into a form of slavery all over the globe every year.

Armchair politics want us to think that the choices women make are easy and linear. We love our children, therefore every new life is sacred.

But facts on the ground continue to prove otherwise. Where is the love when a woman is forced to birth a child that’s the result of rape? What if a woman keeps bearing children knowing she cannot feed them? What if survival entails selling your daughter into the sex trade?

If we love our children and want what is best for them, then it is time to stop playing politics. Instead, it is time to take responsibility for what it means to protect and care for the new lives we choose to bring into this world.

Yes, it’s true, but not in the way all those smug male senators think: Mothers know best.