Dating the birth mother

Before you adopt a baby, you've got to sweep Mom off her feet.

By Caroline Leavitt

Sep 29, 2000 | Two years after the birth of our son, Max, my husband, Jeff, and I began yearning for another baby. Because we couldn't have any more children, we wanted to try to adopt domestically, figuring it would be easier to get a newborn that way. We spent hours imagining our life with a new baby in it and finally decided to hire an adoption lawyer.

We find a guy who is smart and funny and has adopted kids of his own. "Think of me as the matchmaker," he tells us. He will find someone for us through referrals and ads he wants us to place in newspapers across the country. There are all kinds of birth mothers, he says, all kinds of adoptive parents, too. "A cover for every pot," he jokes. To help birth mothers decide in our favor, he wants us to write a letter about ourselves, to make a family scrapbook. "Think of it like a personal ad," he urges.

He gives us samples to go by -- ads and letters from other families, all using the same convincing adjectives. Loving. Happy. To make ourselves different, we mention our professions: stay-at-home writers. "Is someone going to think it's interesting, or will they think we're flakes who couldn't find real jobs?" I wonder.

We fill our scrapbook with photos of us at the beach and in the city to show our versatility. There are pictures of our house to show we have plenty of room. There's the three of us, laughing, decked out in Halloween finery -- surely a convincing portrayal of family happiness!

We get an 800 number, we place our ad and, suddenly, I panic and call the lawyer. What am I going to say to any birth mother who calls? I want a list of questions and responses, a script! "There's no rules," the lawyer says. "Make friends. Get her to keep calling back until she picks you. We'll get the details."

We're off. And, we hope, running.

The first woman who calls is 24 and from California. After her boisterous hello, she's mute. To fill the spaces, I blurt, "Are you seeing a doctor?"

"Taken care of," she snaps.

"Can you tell me something about the father?" As soon as I say it, I know I've made a mistake. Tension crackles through the wires.

"Taken care of!"

Jeff, nearby, waves his hand. "Do you want to talk to Jeff?" I ask. She hangs up.

This scenario happens more and more often, and to my bafflement, I discover that a lot of the birth mothers don't like me. They don't like us! They object to Max. "You won't love my child as much as you do him," they claim. They hate that we live in a city, that we aren't in our 20s, that we are Jewish. They don't want to see the scrapbook or the letter we labored over. "Fake nonsense," one woman insists.

Distressed, I call the paralegal. She wants to know what I've been asking the birth mothers, how they've responded, and when I tell her, she sighs, as if I were a recalcitrant child. "You're threatening the mothers," she says. "Your goal is to make friends, not get information. You don't want them to feel that all you're interested in is their baby."

I protest. "But don't we have a right to ask questions?"

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