Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption

Introduction

Introduction On March 27, 2002, Jean Paton, age ninety-three, died suddenly of a heart ailment at the North Regional Medical Center in Harrison, Arkansas. A Canadian obituary described Paton’s signal contribution: “‘In the beginning was the Word,’ and the first ‘word’ of adoption reform was spoken by adoptee and social worker Jean Paton in the 1950s.”1 In her fifty-year struggle to reform American adoption, Paton, the mother of the adoption reform movement, gave adult adoptees a voice and provided them with a healthy self-image, facilitated thousands of meetings between adult adoptees and their families of origin, fought tirelessly to open sealed adoption records, and indefatigably explained the adoption experience to a wider public. To achieve these goals, Paton founded in 1953 the Life History Study Center, the first research institution dedicated to advancing the interests of adult adoptees and birth mothers and pioneered the first voluntary mutual consent adoption registry. In 1961, she established the first adoptee search organization, Orphan Voyage. Paton was also the author of two pathbreaking books, The Adopted Break Silence (1954) and Orphan Voyage (1968), as well as a newsletter, The LOG of Orphan Voyage. These publications not only kept subscribers up to date with the latest news in the world of the adopted but more importantly moved them to question their assumptions about illegitimacy, adoption, and the larger social and historical forces at work in American society. Her ceaseless activity created the preconditions for the explosive emergence of the adoption reform movement in the 1970s. When that social movement emerged, with its demand to open sealed adoption records, Paton played a prominent role in the formation of the first national organization for birth parents, Concerned United Birthparents , and was instrumental in the creation of the first national organization for adult adoptees, the American Adoption Congress. Along the way, she was joined by a new generation of outstanding adoption reformers, most prominently Florence Fisher, Mary Anne Cohen, Lee Campbell, Lorraine Dusky, 2 jean paton and the struggle to reform american adoption Betty Jean Lifton, Pam Hasegawa, Penny Partridge, Annette Baran, Reuben Pannor, Sandy Musser, Joan Wheeler, Ken Watson, and Dirck Brown, with whom she worked, advised, and quarreled. By the 1970s, Paton emerged as an influential presence on the national and international stage. She participated in national adoption reform protests and campaigned to open sealed adoption records and abolish adoption. Congressional committees sought her advice, and she corresponded with members of Congress. She was invited to participate in international debates on opening adoption records and inspired reformers spanning the English-speaking world. She received awards and tributes, but none pleased her more than the sobriquet bestowed on her, as early as 1981, as the“mother of the adoption reform movement.” To truly appreciate how Paton transformed American adoption, we must first understand what adoption was like before the early 1950s when she founded the Life History Study Center and published The Adopted Break Silence. Then, American culture contained both conservative and liberal elements, stigmatizing and valorizing the institution of adoption and triad members (birth parents , adoptees, and adoptive parents). Americans’ cultural definition of kinship stigmatized adoption as socially unacceptable. Social workers had to overcome widespread popular prejudice toward adoption,in order to convince prospective adoptive parents that taking a child into the home was not abnormal. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a broad segment of the American public believed that adoption was an unnatural action that created ersatz or second-rate families.Americans often heard physicians give their imprimatur to statements, such as“the normal biologic relationship of parent and child is more satisfactory . . . than an artificially created one.”2 Magazine articles printed variations on the theme, denigrating adoption by stating that,“though it is better to be adopted than institutionalized, no adopted relation is likely to be as good as a natural one.”3 The very language underscored the inferior nature of adoption: in popular discourse, adoptive parents were always juxtaposed with “natural” or“normal” ones.4 Discriminatory laws reinforced the notion that the adoptive relationship was inherently flawed. Jurists regularly ruled in inheritance cases, for example, that adoption violated the legal principal of consanguinity or blood ties. In practice, this meant that adopted children did not have the same inheritance rights as birth children. In other cases dealing with disputed custody rights of adopted children, both courts and legislatures favored birth parents’ appeals to restore their children to them.5 Medical science contributed to popular cultural...