This week, Lisa has been blogging about Vanessa, a two-year-old adopted child whose birth father is seeking custody. The birth mother said that the birth father was unknown when she placed Vanessa for adoption as a newborn. Vanessa’s birth father, whose parental rights were not legally terminated due to the birth mother not disclosing his paternity, is now seeking custody.

According to Lisa’s blog, the birth father has a criminal record and does not have custody of his other four biological children. A judge’s ridiculous decision was to place the child into foster care until the custody issue was sorted out, but Lisa reported on her follow up blog entry that an emergency court order was granted that will keep Vanessa in her current adoptive home until the custody issue is resolved.

Lisa’s position is that the child should stay in her adoptive home permanently because the birth father is bad news. John posted a couple of comments stating that, whether the birth father is a “creep” or not, he is still the child’s father and has legal rights. I posted my opinion in the comments on both blog entries, but I would like to elaborate further here.

Patricia Dischler is the author of "Because I Loved You: A Birthmother's View of Open Adoption", a speaker, child care professional and birthmother. Read more from Patricia here.

Continued from here…

Some birthmothers have tight, supportive families, some have families that pressure them to keep their child, some have families that pressure them to place their child, some have no family at all. Some adoptive parents want to adopt to bring a new dimension to their families, some have been trying to get pregnant for years and are coming from a place of pain and have very low thresholds for any more, some have families that support adoption, some don't, some embrace openness, some feel forced into it, some are so scared of it they don't know if they can even try. Some adoptees are brought up knowing all about their adoption, some are told when they are preschoolers, some are told when they are in high school, some are never told and find out by accident. Some counselors support open adoption, some do not. Some adoptive parents receive great counseling and guidance, some never receive any. Some birthmothers receive great counseling and are helped to look closely at both options in order to ensure there will be no regrets, some are only pushed towards adoption, some receive no counseling at all. We all have a story to tell. We often make assumptions about how others think and feel even within our own stories. Let's change that.

I recently posted a blog about an Indian family who travelled to Holland in an effort to retrieve the child they claimed had been stolen from them. They asked the Dutch court to insist on a DNA test, but their request was turned down. The adoptive parents would not meet with the couple from India; the child stayed with his adoptive parents.

One of our readers living in Israel sent me information about an adoption case in Israel that ended differently, perhaps tragically so. An Israeli couple adopted a little girl named Bruna from Brazil in 1988. At that time there were many children adopted from Brazil by Israeli couples. Not unlike most Israeli families, life revolved around their daughter – they loved and adored her. Then when Bruna was two years old, her birthparents Rosilda and Luis arrived in Israel claiming that she had been kidnapped and no one had ever given permission for the adoption.

Where did this poor couple from Brazil get the funds to travel to Israel and petition the high court to return their daughter? A British TV crew who learned about this incident decided to fund their appeal. They also rented the whole floor in an expensive hotel in Tel Aviv for journalists around the world. It was a media circus.

In the July/August 2010 issue of “Smithsonian” magazine I came across a short article on Chris Eyre the movie director of several well known films such as “Smoke Signals” (1998) and “Skins” (2002). “Smoke Signals” won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival: the Sundance Film Festival Filmmakers Trophy and the Audience Award. Chris was of Cheyenne-Arapaho decent and was born in Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Oregon. As an infant he was adopted by a white couple and grew up in Portland, Oregon.

Chris describes his first days of life -

 I’m always inspired by the rebirth of the seasons. After I was born to my biological mother, Rose, of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, I was reborn within days to my adopted parents, Barb and Earl, in a white middle-class home in Klamath Falls, Oregon. As a dark-skinned 5-year-old, I would ask my mom what I was going to be when I grew up. “Anything you want!” she said. (Smithsonian July/August 2010)