Q. & A. with Joanne Wolf Small, M. S. W.

What is the significance of the title of your book?

I wanted to tell it like it is.

Won't people see it as anti-adoption?

They would be wrong! I am not anti-adoption. I think, though, that the stigma underlying the mystique silences many voices.

But you are an adoptee and you have not kept silent. How is that?

I chose to speak out. I feel no personal sense of shame. I identify myself as an adopted person much as I identify myself by my religion or gender. Growing up as an adoptee, a Jew and a female, however, has sensitized me to social injustices.

I can give both my birth and adoptive heritage credit for my activism. My adoptive parents were quiet but sure role models, and although I never had the chance to meet him, I know that my birth father was a union leader.

What do you say to people who believe you should be grateful that you were adopted, not aborted?

I remain personally grateful to Joe and Anne Wolf because they were wonderful parents. My brother and I were fortunate. My adoptive parents made it clear that they believed they were equally fortunate.

You wrote that while growing up, your experience with adoption was essentially a positive one. Once you became an adult, did that change?

It did not. What surprised and even shocked me, though, was to discover how others viewed adoption. For instance, searching for information about my beginnings seemed perfectly normal to me. At first I was taken aback by people asking, “Why would you want to do that?”

I also found my graduate studies in social work eye opening. There was little to no empirical research underlying adoption policies and practice. Instead, empirically unverified theoretical formulations based on individual perceptions, biases, and beliefs led child welfare to develop blood blind foster and child welfare policies.

What do you mean by blood blind?

In my opinion child welfare held an unwholesome disregard and lack of respect for a child's bloodlines— their lineage, their ancestry. Policies and practices implemented to suppress and repress this vital information remain in effect in DC and 45 out of 50 states

Any other eye openers?

Actually there were many. Imagine studying child welfare, especially adoption, and finding few if any references to adopted adults. There I was, an adopted adult, taking a child welfare class, and hearing no reference to adopted adults—only babies and children. It was as if there was a total disconnect between adopted children and the adults they become. That adoption was a life-long experience was new—even foreign to child welfare.

You say you were searching for information about your beginnings. Weren't you really looking for your birthmother?

I actually began a search for my birthfather. I figured that my birthmother would have married, and changed her name. I wrote to the adoption agency. I found that the information they sent me was astonishingly and disappointingly vague. They wrote, “Your mother was a Jewess, five feet five inches tall, with dark, curly hair.” Does that sound like a complete genealogy to you?

My husband recalls sitting at the dinner table one evening with our four children, and suddenly realizing that they also had no vital information regarding their ancestry.

You acknowledge that you had a need to know your beginnings. Do you grant your birthmother a need for privacy?

I demand the same right that she has. The right to obtain a copy of my original birth certificate in the same manner granted her, and all other non-adopted persons. At the same time she is entitled to the same rights to privacy as I am, and no more!

When did you decide to get involved in adoption reform?

As soon as I realized there was inequality. But I cut my teeth on another kind of prejudice and discrimination, so you could say I got a head start when I was only three or four. My parents were researching resorts for our upcoming summer vacation. I kept hearing the word “restricted.” I asked what it meant. My mother explained that Jewish people could not stay in certain resorts because they were Jewish. So they had to find one that admitted Jewish people. I simply rejected the notion behind the discrimination then and there. It just did not make sense to me. Telling me that I can't have my original birth certificate, the same as everyone else, because I am adopted is no different to me.

So to me this it is and always has been a matter of equal rights and social justice. I see my activism as Tikkun Olem. That roughly translates to healing the world, or as I see it working toward social justice.

Throughout your book you refer to an “adoption industry.” That seems a harsh characterization of adoption. Isn't adoption about babies, love, and caring?

Sure it is—but that is not all. The fact is, adoption is an industry that involves millions of people and billions of dollars—and myriad agencies, babies, infertile couples, single parents, pediatricians, attorneys, lobbyists, legislators, clergy, social workers and psychotherapists, engaged in an alliance that at its base, involves trafficking in human beings.

But adoption still involves taking a child into one's home and family, and raising it as one's own. Isn't providing a child with a home a noble thing to do?

I think that point of view is damaging—even unhealthy. There is an inherent imbalance in that. It suggests that the child should be grateful for “having been taken in,” more by benefactors, than parents. It saddles the child with a need to pay back the favor.

I would hope that anyone deciding to adopt does so primarily because they want to parent a child. It seems unlikely that non-adoptive parents would see their providing a home for their children as noble. I raised four children, and I don't think I ever did.

Your book is a series of essays. I understand at least one publisher advised you to drop the essay format, considering it a less desirable format. What was your thinking?

I disagreed. An essay informs and elucidates. It presents and supports a concept. I was also advised to put all of the references together at the back of the book. It mattered to me, though, that readers have easy access to my resources. So I insisted they follow each essay. I was also encouraged to combine authors and subjects into a single index. I insisted they be separate.

 

© 2007 by Joanne Wolf Small. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.