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10. Organizing the Movement
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178 10 Organizing the Movement Somehow letters from the mothers always tend to make me cry, much more than the adoptees. —Jean Paton, 1976 Orphans are not group people. —Jean Paton, 1978 Although the East Coast news media, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, generally ignored the adoption reform movement, the hometown paper of Arthur Sorosky, Annette Baran, and Reuben Pannor, the Los Angeles Times, frequently ran feature articles and TV movie reviews on the subject .1 The Los Angeles Times was also the first paper to feature, as news, what would become a staple of mass-circulation magazines and,later,TV talk shows: the search and reunion of adult adoptees with their natal parents. The testimony of social scientists supported these dramatic, reality shows. Both adult adoptees and birth parents were portrayed as having to overcome enormous obstacles that were always being thrown in their way.2 The combination of drama, self-help, and demand for individual rights in adoptee autobiographies and search and reunion news stories was tailor-made for mass-circulation magazines. Even before Florence Fisher and ALMA burst on the scene, mass-circulation magazines sensed the potential market and occasionally ran stories about adopted persons searching for their birth parents. In 1971, for example, Seventeen dramatically recounted an adopted girl’s difficult odyssey in an unsuccessful search for her birth mother.3 But beginning in 1974 and continuing through and beyond the decade, mass-circulation magazines such as McCall’s, Parents Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Seventeen, and Good House- Organizing the Movement 179 keeping provided its readership with articles entitled “Who Are My Real Parents ?,”“The Adopted Child Has the Right to Know Everything,”“Search for a Stranger,” and“We’re a Family Again.” Thematically, they dramatized the plight of adult adoptees who were prevented from discovering their family heritage, championed the right of adult adoptees to view their adoption files, and featured successful search and reunions. Many of these stories showcased Fisher and ALMA or Sorosky and his associates’ research results, giving only a short paragraph to Paton and Orphan Voyage.4 Despite the brevity of the mentions of Paton and her organization, the mass media’s coverage of the adoption reform movement produced hundreds of requests for aid. A single article in the June 1974 issue of Cosmopolitan, recounting an adopted woman’s long and difficult but ultimately successful reunion with her birth mother, resulted in Paton’s being flooded with over 500 letters and quite a few phone calls, about a third of them from mothers who had relinquished their babies for adoption two to ten years earlier.5 The heartwrenching letters put Paton“through the wringer.”6 The cruel way these mothers had been treated continued to astonish and wound her.7 Envisioning a world of semi-open adoption, Paton asked adoption researcher Arthur Sorosky why these women couldn’t be sent verified reports of their children’s condition in the years after they were adopted. Facts such as these, she believed, were what birth mothers most wanted. Paton could not think of any “civilized reason for withholding ” such information.8 Paton was unique among adoption reform activists in the 1950s and 1960s to defend natal mothers against the stigmatization of society. Paton’s support for them came out of her holistic understanding of the importance of kinship and heredity within the adoption triad, her social work experience, her reunion with her own natal mother,and her natural empathy for the oppressed and marginalized . In the 1970s, birth mothers’troubles were never far from her mind. In 1971, she fired off a letter to New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, congratulating him for vetoing a bill enacted by the legislature, which would have limited the time from six months to thirty days after which a mother could no longer revoke her agreement to let her child be adopted.9 In 1974, on trips to Michigan and Wisconsin, Paton met with birth mothers who had joined adult adoptee search groups. She assured one correspondent that they suffered grievously from the separation of their children and offered her a diagnosis. Their pain stemmed “not so much from a bewilderment of identity but a grief which can well up from a very deep place.”10 Paton’s concern for natal parents was increased by her awareness that there was “considerable hostility in the adoptee population to natural parents (often they do not realize it) and natural mothers sense it [3.235...