Adoption and Loss:

The Hidden Grief, A Review

Adoption and Loss: The Hidden Grief
By Evelyn Burns Robinson
Clova Publications, 2000

Reviewed by Jane Edwards

In a story about fathers searching for their firefighter sons in the World Trade Center rubble, Charlie LeDuff of the New York Times News Service wrote: "They say the worst thing in life is having to bury a child. Worse, the fathers of ground zero say, is not being able to find that child."

The grief from losing a child to adoption comes close. Evelyn Burns Robinson writes of this grief. Robinson came from a working class family in Scotland and joined the Mormon church as a teenager. At 19, she became pregnant as a result of rape. With little support from her family and pressure from her church, she relinquished her
son to adoption. Robinson became a teacher and a social worker, married and had other children. She moved to Adelaide, Australia where she now lives. She found her son 10 years ago, when he was 20. They have a good reunion.

Robinson's book looks beyond grief to action. She states: "there will only be an end of the pain of natural mothers when there is an end to adoption." (p. 103).

Adoption cannot be fixed. "It is time for society to realize that adoption is ethically wrong and morally indefensible." (p. 190)

Robinson's book is factual, detailed, and analytical. It is divided into three parts. The first recounts her life beginning with her childhood through her pregnancy, relinquishment, and reunion. The second is an academic review of the literature on adoption loss and reunion. The third is the case for abolishing adoption.

Robinson argues that: "[A]doption has operated to transfer children from the weak to the powerful, from the poor to the financially secure." (p. 180) Although purporting to provide families for children who have none, the real purpose of adoption is to punish women for sexual transgressions, reinforce men's traditional
role, and provide children for the infertile.

For those children who cannot be raised by the parents to whom they were born, Robinson advocates long term foster care with a continuing relationship with the natural mother and other family members. If parents are unable to provide care for their children because of poverty, deprivation or oppression then what we should be
doing is helping to alleviate those problems and not take from them and their children the only thing of value they have left. She is also in favor, on an international level, of 'supporting and assisting children in their own family,
culture and nation.' (p. 164).

Credits: Jane Edwards