Dear Birthmother; Thank You for Our Baby Book

I would recommend this book for three classes of readers:

1) Those interested in an historical perspective on the switch from closed adoptions to open adoptions as the norm for adoption agencies in the United States

2) Those who want to understand the myths that often cloud the adoption process for adoptive parents and their children, and want to discover recommended practices for countering those myths

3) Those hoping to read a great number of loving, vulnerable, and emotionally charged letters between adoptive parents and birth parents

The book does a great job on all three fronts, the only drawback being that it is sometimes a bit choppy, as it has to switch back and forth between informative text, critical analysis, and personal letters. I'm not sure what the authors could have done to avert this, as all three formats are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the issues. Unfortunately, the different formats were a bit distracting at times, and made the pacing of the book very uneven.

This book was written in 1982, so some of the facts are a bit out of date, but the core message is still very relevant: there are many myths in the adoption world (for example, "birth mothers forget about their babies") and these myths just don't hold water when put up against the real experiences of those involved. These myths are tenacious and are still given license in today's world to varying degrees, so this book is a great resource for discovering how to counter these myths for the long-term benefit of children who were adopted. I particularly liked the section that asserted that "adopted" is a verb and not an adjective, so one says a child "was adopted" to underscore the event in the child's life, and one avoids saying a child "is adopted" which confines the child's identity as static instead of dynamic like any other member of their family.

The letters included in the book were incredibly raw and were left unedited by the authors, except for length or for name changes to protect privacy. While reading the letters, I found myself not just crying, but occasionally weeping because of the heartbreak and vulnerability being shared therein; the topic is just so emotionally charged, it is not a good go-to book for parks or subway reading, unless you don't mind the curious stares!

The authors worked with an agency that was on the cutting edge of adoption changes in the 70's and 80's. Historically, maybe 90% of adoptions in the U.S. back in 1978 were closed adoptions, where adoptive parents and birth parents never had contact with one another. In today's world, the ratio is reversed, with maybe 90% of adoptions being open, so the two sets of parents have some form of contact, usually in the form of letters exchanged through the original adoption agency. The passionate argument of this book is that that is the way it should be, but they had no way to know if their message would be taken to heart. They back up their argument with methodical reasoning, anecdotal experiences, and impassioned testimony from the parents themselves. This book, and by association the agency described in the book, was partly responsible for a lot of these changes in thinking. It is kind of a thrill knowing how progressive these early trailblazers were now that we can look at it in hindsight. If you read between the lines, you can tell that there was a lot of resistance to their ideas in the beginning stages of this transition. Toward the end of the book, they bring out the real showstopper - adoptive parents and birth parents are sometimes meeting each other, with their children! Although this practice is somewhat common now, it is interesting to notice how they saved that idea for the very end because (they admit) they were afraid no one would read the book if readers knew that this was where the discussion was leading!

I definitely recommended this book for those interested in the emotional aspects of adoption, and for those who want to see ways that healthy communication can be established between birth parents and adoptive parents for the sake of mutual understanding and for the benefit of the child.