Death is the great existential act that only the dying person can experience. However, those of us left behind also suffer the acuteness of death as it impacts on us in myriad ways.

And, death is connected to hierarchies of relationships from acquaintances, to friends, to extended family, to grandparents, parents, and sometimes every our children.

There is also a commensurate hierarchy of grief experienced with death with the most sever grief experienced with the loss of a child. Even then, fathers experience their grief differently than mothers who carried the child in their own body for 9 months before giving birth to it.

That is why the bond between mother and child is the closest bond two human beings can experience. How much more the mother's grief than anyone elses when a child is taken away by death.

Yet, there is one class of mothers to whom their grief is magnified. That group is birth mothers who were coerced into relinquishing their child into the barbaric institution of the Closed Records System of Adoption.

In fact, their grief begins at relinquishment and is carried for life. How much more so when their child dies an early death whether by illness, disease, or suicide.

Emile Durkheim wrote that suicide is the result only when an individual reaches a state of non-belonging, normlessness, and anomie; that is, a state of social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values, personal unrest, alienation, and uncertainty.

We must all, but especially birth mothers, question how a child relinquished to adoption wherin adoptive parents are expected to be screened and deemed able to provide a safe, secure, and healthy home can come to embody Drukheim's definition.

There are no words of condolence that can remediate this system of adoption; much less the death of a child placed with adoptive parents within this system.

As a society we must do everything possible to recreate a system of justice and integrity that confirms every mother's right to parent their own children.That is our ethical, moral, and human responsibility to the most vulnerable members of our society; our children.

Mirah, the "American Way of Adoption" failed you and your daughter just as it failed my own birth mother who never recovered from that experience.

My prayers for both you and your daughter at this time in your lives.

All who are touched by the Adoption Triad must proclame the mantra of the Shoah: Never Again! You cannot do business this way in my name!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY in heaven. I hope to be reunited with you in eternity and tell you just how sorry I am.

No words to describe sorry and grief and apologies. God bless you and your daughter.

 TWENTY-SEVEN

Twenty-seven years ago today
1995-02-27
You went away…
Left for heaven
 
Adoption took you
from your mother
Promise of a better life
with another
‘Twas adoption killed you
With lies and strife
 
Today marks 27 years
Life cut short at twenty-seven
While I am left with endless tears
Since your soul ascended

M.R. 2/27/22

ALICIA BETH HIRSCH: DEATH by ADOPTION
1967-1995

Alicia Hirsch was born to me on July 15, 1967. I was a young widow at a time in history called the Baby Scoop Era when there were no supports for single mothers. I was pressured by parents and social workers to let her be adopted. I was told that because there were so many babies at that time, if she wasn't adopted by 6 mos old she would become "unadoptable." I fought to keep her for six months but in the end, they wore me down adn I had no suppo®t in sight. I was assured it was the best, most loving choice and that I'd forget and "get on" with my life.

I never forgot. I co-founded the original Origins for mother who lost children to adoption and began to hear horror stories of adopted children abused and abandoned. I worried that she had stayed in foster care and was never adopted. I needed to know she was safe and well cared for.

When she was 12, I contacted her adoptive parents. I discovered then that she was not placed with her adoptive family – parents of two biological sons who wanted “a girl” - until she was a year old and calling her foster mother Mommy. Her adopters refused photos of her as a baby and refused her medical history.

I met her twice in her teens and then tragically lost touch.

Alicia ended her life at the age of 27. I found out then that adoptees are four time more likely to attempt suicide than non-adoptees. I’ve also learned that adoptees of all ages are overrepresented in all mental health and substance abuse facilities. Separation from the sounds, smells and motion that fetuses become accustomed to in the womb can result in irreparable neurologic damage – no matter how soon after birth they are adopted and no matter how loving their adopters are. But no one tells this to mothers considering adoption because there is huge demand – currently 36 to one - for babies to adopt and “desperate” couples and individuals are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for each baby. It’s a mega-billion-dollar industry. She was a highly sought commodity.

I never forgot. I never will.

I have three grown children and three grandchildren and I never forgot. neither did her loving foster family.

She is remembered here and on Facebook and forever in my heart.