I COULD WRITE AN ESSAY on adoption, the harm the policy we had here in Australia did to those women who gave their babies to strangers, to those babies who found themselves in a different place from their kin, to adopting parents who believed they were given a blank slate to write on. We were cheated, all of us, when we were told taking a baby from a mother had no effect.
Australia is one of the few countries that decided in the 1960s to make adoption secret. In other places, parents could have an ongoing relationship with their children. In Australia this was not an option, because social policy makers felt it was important there be a clean break. Mothers were not encouraged to spend time with their newborn children. Everything was secret. When state legislatures were moving to change their adoption acts so that children and parents could have access to information and each other, some people objected very strongly.
But I am in the frame when it comes to adoption so I am probably not a person to write in this area. Having said that, I have no hard and fast views about adoption itself. Would I want a child to spend a life in foster care, or be adopted into a family where they might thrive? Would I want a child to grow up in an institution, or with parents who love them?
My complaint would not be with adoption. My complaint would be against any system that offers no alternative to women who find themselves pregnant.
The system we had in place for adoption when I gave my baby to strangers is the same kind of system every woman comes up against today when she has a baby, the system of maternity care. Our choices are limited. This is an area I feel very comfortable writing about, the ways we control what happens to women’s bodies.
I worked on a review of maternity services in Queensland in 2005. I read the submissions from women, some of whom had had the most horrendous experiences of birth as a result of their care. Women whose babies died were cared for in the same ward as women whose babies lived. They’d hear babies cry all night, watch new mothers breastfeed them. They’d have to explain over and over again to the staff who asked them when they were due or how their baby was that yes, they’d already had a baby, but their baby had died. When I asked the midwives in the hospital why these women couldn’t be cared for in another place, they said, ‘They’ve had a baby. They have to be in a ward where there are midwives, not nurses.’
‘Couldn’t the midwives go to them?’
‘I suppose so, but that’s not very practical.’
Women were bullied by obstetricians because they did or didn’t want a particular kind of pain relief during labour. One woman had an episiotomy the midwife described as a ‘hindquarter resection’ because the obstetrician was in a bad mood with the woman; she had a birth plan. As a matter of routine, women had their babies taken from them and placed in nurseries where they were fed formula when the women wanted more than anything to breastfeed. Or women were treated as pariahs by midwives because they had decided not to breastfeed. Women were punished and abused and neglected because they wanted something, anything; to hold their babies straight after birth, to bury their placenta under a full moon, to save their cord blood, to cry.
I did not connect what happened to these women in 2005 with what happened to me in the 1980s. But it is drawn from the same wellspring, that cruelty to the most vulnerable in order to impose your own belief system—by force if necessary, by hindquarter resection.
Centacare, the Catholic agency through which I gave my child away to strangers, still advertises adoption services for women. I can’t imagine a girl like me going down that path today, but if she did I would tell her to go back, spend some time with her baby, reconsider. If she then decided she wanted to relinquish her parenting rights, then of course she should be able to. But according to my friend Mary, very few do when given a chance to weigh up both options. At any rate, I would be unable to tell her what the pros of giving her baby to strangers are. Someone else would have to do that. I no longer know what the pros of giving a baby to strangers are.
The energy that led to church and state adoptions, that led to a position where it was always better to give a baby to a married childless couple than let a single mother raise a child, is the I–thou attitude of righteous people everywhere. It is as healthy now as it was when I gave baby Ruth to strangers. It is particularly rampant when it meets up with women’s health and vulnerability around the birth of children, or when it finds itself responsible for any kind of care of vulnerable people. There are midwives and doctors and carers out there who still know best what women and children want and need.
I have a friend who has just had her first baby. She is in the throes of wonder about this miracle that has come into her life. She is vulnerable, soft and needs encouragement, as we all do at that time. My friend visited a health clinic and was told by the child health nurse that her breastfed baby had failed to regain birth weight. ‘What are you doing with her?’ the nurse said. My friend tried to tell her and was interrupted mid-sentence. ‘Goodness me. Wake her every two hours and make her feed. Come back Friday and if she hasn’t improved, we’ll start some formula.’ She destroyed my friend’s confidence as a mother for a little while and she was wrong, wrong in heart and wrong in fact.
At some stage during my work with Stace, I had a rebirthing session with a woman from Ocean Shores. It does not seem strange to be saying this, as if I have rebirthing sessions with women from Ocean Shores every other week; I do not, incidentally. She helped me immensely, the woman from Ocean Shores, partly because of how resistant I was to her and her beliefs, her assumptions.
I spent two hours regressed on a couch. Beforehand I wondered how I’d fill the time, but it ended in seconds, before I had finished. My body shook. My teeth chattered. This is fear, I would have said to the woman if I could have got the words out, fear like you’ve never known.
Afterwards, she said she was sure there was anaesthetic at my birth, or at baby Ruth’s birth, or even Otis’s. I was never sure who we were rebirthing. There was anaesthetic because she became drowsy. The anaesthetic was leaking out of me, she said.
Her own birth was traumatic, she said, because she believed she had murdered her mother.
‘Did your mother die?’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But I thought she did.’
‘Wow,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.
Over time, I have begun to place what happened to me in its context. But what I took away from my rebirthing session with the woman from Ocean Shores was nothing to do with birth, and nothing to do with baby Ruth, which surprised me. I took that picture of myself at ten, standing beside the pool. It came back to me that day at Ocean Shores and it has been with me since. I am fierce with life in that picture; that’s the point. I am here, she is saying. I am here.