Adoption Awareness Month

Canadian Council of Natural Mothers

• Adoption is the separation of a mother and her newborn or baby. For many mothers, this separation is traumatic and begins a lifelong journey of ever-increasing grief over the loss.
• Adoption holds the expectation that the majority of mothers who have lost newborns and babies to adoption should remain as ghosts, invisible, in the lives of their sons and daughters. The majority of provinces in Canada continue to deny natural mothers knowledge of, contact with, and accountability for what has become of their newborns and babies lost to adoption.
• Adoption gives permission to define the experience of adoption loss for natural mothers to those who control the adoption industry, the adoption process, and who benefit from adoption practices.
• Adoption prevents transparency and accountability for those who benefit from adoption until and unless natural mothers and persons who are adopted can meet again to consider and compare what has happened in their lives.
  
  
• Awareness of the lack of protection in adoption practice, public policy and law for mothers who have lost children to adoption is growing. As natural mothers connect with each other nationally and internationally, their anguish is expressed in unison against the lack of protection for the unsupported mother and her baby.
• Awareness of the lack of heritage and connection of persons adopted is growing. Persons adopted are reclaiming their right to know their origins and their families. In this, they are supported by their natural mothers and families.
• Awareness that the language of adoption negatively labels natural mothers and is used to separate them from their babies into adulthood and deny their motherhood is growing. Labels such as, "fallen" woman, "unwed" mother, "illegitimate" mother, and "birth" mother were created to diminish and deny.
• Awareness of past practices that denied many mothers a viable choice other than adoption when they required temporary help for the temporary circumstances of their pregnancy is growing.
  
• Awareness that change in adoption practices depends on ethical treatment and the importance of providing support and respect for the best interests of both the mother and her child is needed.

The Canadian Council of Natural Mothers
November 2002

© The Canadian Council of Natural Mothers. November 2002, written by Sandra Jarvie. This document is the property of the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers, www.ccnm-mothers.ca. You may copy and distribute this page provided that you copy it in its entirety.