Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption

14. Straight Ahead

259 14 StraightAhead I have more or less decided that nothing will work for us until we build structures in society that translate into how much we care for each other. —Jean Paton, 1998 During the 1980s, Jean Paton devoted an enormous amount of time to the American Adoption Congress—leading it, criticizing its activities, and attending its annual conferences. But Paton never confined herself to a single issue or organization, and this period of her life was no different, as she also carried on her lifelong efforts to educate the public about the problems of adopted people and fought for adoption reform in numerous ways. Although there was much continuity in Paton’s ideas and actions, she was able to change her mind about long-held intellectual positions, support other adoption activists’ fresh ideas, and think up new ways to strengthen the lives of adopted persons. Although she often complained that she was slowing down, in 1980 the seventy-two-year-old Paton kept up a schedule of a person half her age. She received around 1,500 letters annually—half were inquires and half told of Orphan Voyage members’ problems—which she dutifully attempted to answer.1 She still traveled extensively. In 1980, even with summer allergies and a bad September cold that lingered into mid-October, she gave several local talks on adoption reform,including one at a daylong workshop in Grand Junction,Colorado , about the“blended family.”2 At the invitation of Illinois adoption activist Sandra Lott, she also traveled to Illinois and then Indiana, where first she met with adoption reform leaders and with CUB member Carole Anderson.3 Paton continued to fight for adoption reform creatively, on many diverse fronts. She remained convinced that an important way to improve the lives of adult adoptees was to establish permanent institutions, both practical and 260 jean paton and the struggle to reform american adoption symbolic: witness her serial creation of the Life History Center, Orphan Voyage , and the American Adoption Congress. Late in life, she explicitly stated this heretofore unarticulated belief: “I have more or less decided that nothing will work for us until we build structures in society that translate into how much we care for each other.”4 A new example of Paton’s efforts to build such structures was the Adoption Memorial, an idea that she first broached in early 1983.5 Given that Paton had just celebrated her seventy-fourth birthday in December , it is perfectly logical to conclude that the source of this idea was a sense of her own mortality.But that would be a mistake.Paton had a robust constitution and was in relatively good health. She experienced only minor ailments during her long life: an abscessed tooth, a stiff neck, an aching back (for which she had been seeing a chiropractor for over a year).6 Though her hair was turning grey, it was still not white.7 Rather, Paton had been thinking about the idea of the Adoption Memorial for some time.She could not erase from her mind all the numerous tragic events she had heard about. Paton recalled several of these to Patricia Murphy, a birth mother and former CUB coordinator in New England. There was the case of the adult adoptee who, after finding his father’s grave, “lay on it and pounded it with his fists.” Another adopted person went to the family cemetery and demonstratively “longed for a shovel.” One birth mother, who later married and had several other children, requested that she be buried with only a notebook “in which she had written the name and date of birth of that first child.” To these cases, she added the many adoptees who had committed suicide and the birth mother who swallowed poison several years before her daughter found the family.In short,Paton was“weary of wiping the tears here at my correspondence desk” as a result of reading about how often “adoptees find that their birthparents had died or even the reverse.”8 But it was the emotional dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial three months earlier, in November 1982, that prompted her to act.9 The Adoption Memorial, she wrote author Warren Siegmond, would honor“the memory of all those who died unreconciled.”10 Emulating the designer of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial, Maya Lin, whose “memorial aesthetic is the revelation of loss and reaffirmation of stability, both self and national,” Paton wanted to give recognition to people who had...