Frustrating Adoption Conversation

I had an interesting talk with my mother tonight about a daughter of her friend who is considering giving her child up for adoption. I know my mother's friend well and have met this daughter before. This is from when my mother lived in another state, by the way.

I'm going to be brutally honest about my assessment of the situation. I try very hard not to hold any stereotypes about women who give up their children for adoption because I know there are so many different kinds of women and reasons and situations. This particular situation, and again I have to be brutally honest, does not reflect well on the woman.

The woman (I'll call her V) had a baby a year and half ago and is pregnant again. She's very irresponsible and my mother calls her "the most selfish person I've met in my life". The father of both children is a meth dealer. She's not on meth, or if she is, has hidden it so far. Her own mother had five children, worked hard all her life, and has taken a firm stance towards her own daughter. She tells her that V can move in permanently as long as she gets a job, any job... which V won't do. V just relies on friends and her mother and floats around with her baby.

V didn't get an abortion because "it's against her morals". I think there is some fundamentalist influence on the family, but not a huge amount. Her mother has some James Dobson books. The father is kind of a nonentity and doesn't do much of anything except sit at home and complain; her mother pretty much carries the whole family.

V is thinking about giving one or both children up for adoption. My mother said she thought this was a good idea.

I told her I thought it was an absolutely terrible idea. The idea that children are always automatically better off adopted is a strange white Christian subgroup phenomenon. My mother is not involved in that, but must have picked up the attitude from V's mother. To me, adoption should be the absolute last-ditch resort for a biological mother. I believe that V's wanting to relinquish is motivated out of pure selfishness and irresponsibility. She wants attention. She doesn't want to work for it. She really is not that bad off.

You know, I have an in-law relative who had a baby with a crack dealer and she's doing just fine! (Calling him a crack dealer is really a compliment, since he's more properly a failed crack dealer. Yes, he lost money selling crack. I've read this is quite common if you're, say, working the mean streets of Baltimore. But he lost money selling crack in small-town Georgia, which is truly, deeply stupid and pathetic, as well as a sad commentary on the math taught in our public school system.) Anyway, today she's a responsible single mother and her child is loved and thriving.

V could turn herself around. She has support. She's nowhere near rock bottom. She just wants to keep drifting. If she's really in bad trouble (and especially if she's on meth) and worried about bringing harm to her children, then I do believe she should seriously consider adoption. At least she lives in a state with an enforceable open adoption agreement.

I told my mother all my thoughts on this, stressing that I thought it was a very bad idea, that V probably did not understand the consequences, and that the family may have been exposed to certain messages that relinquishing a child was just a really positive and cool thing to do... I told her to pass it on to her friend.

I find it very frustrating to counsel dysfunctional adults, and am probably terrible at it, which is why I avoid doing it whenever possible.