By Jamie York
When I was 15 years old, I needed my birth certificate for some reason and began looking for it in a small file box that my parents kept in a closet. I found the birth certificate all right, but I also found some legal papers regarding the adoption of a baby boy -- me.
It wasn't that adoption was any big deal to me; at 15, I had a good awareness of social issues and a respect for adoption as an alternative to abortion. I also had a respect for people who adopt children rather than contribute to population growth. What did bother me at the time, however, was that I was not told about it.
When I confronted my mother, she tearfully told me that she had intended to tell me when I was older. She also told me that I was a special boy because she and my father had picked me out when I was just a few weeks old. I had no doubt that my parents loved me; I had seen photographs taken when I was a baby and I remembered the love written on their faces.
A few years later, when I had my own apartment, I watched a television program about people who were searching for their birth (genetic) parents. At the end of the show, I wrote down the address of the North American Council on Adoptable Children , an organization that published a national help directory on adoption services. From that directory, I picked out the name of a non-profit adoption search agency in my birthplace -- Minneapolis, Minnesota -- and this group agreed to help me if I would just cover their expenses for them. They asked that I send them copies of the birth certificate and court decree I had found when I was 15.
This group did all of the legwork in Minneapolis and, occasionally, they would ask me to write a letter asking for the release of certain records from state agencies. About nine months after I contacted this agency, I got a letter indicating that they had found my birth mother, Elinor, in California and said she had no objection to me contacting her. In 1981, I wrote a poem about my experience:
Stray Dogs
A doctor cut the umbilical cord in Minneapolis
and the boy went south to play --
unaware of your existence for fifteen years
until he found you in a grey file,
safely tucked away
amidst the jumbled legal jargon of court proceedings.
At twenty-six
he found you in a yellow letter
from Marina Del Rey.
"Think of me as a friend," you said,
"It's not so hard --
Just try to find a person behind the words."
You told your story, his story --
of ancestors and siblings,
triumph and misfortune,
books and Indian relics:
"And I have one of those personalities that seems to
collect stray dogs when it comes to men."
I was never interested in why I was put up for adoption, but I wanted to learn something about my genetic heritage and about Elinor's family medical history. I remembered all those years I had filled out forms indicating that there was no family history of medical problems when I really didn't know for sure. Now I did.
It is interesting to note that, before the search agency located Elinor, I felt that there was a California connection. I do not believe in psychic abilities, per se, yet there was no basis in fact for this feeling and I don't know how to explain it other than intuition. Of course, there could also be some kind of genetic connection at work here, some kind of genetic telepathy. Who knows? Maybe science will figure this out someday. Carl Sagan has some interesting thoughts on this subject:
Both skepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education. I'd love to see such a domestic felicity portrayed in the media, television especially: a community of people really working the mix -- full of wonder, generously open to every notion, dismissing nothing except for good reason, but at the same time, and as second nature, demanding stringent standards of evidence -- and these standards applied with at least as much rigor to what they hold dear as to what they are tempted to reject with impunity.
After corresponding with Elinor for a while, I decided to go to California to meet her and some of her other children living in the area. That's when I discovered another parallel -- alcoholism and substance abuse -- and I wondered if my addictions over the years were the result of some genetic predisposition? Or perhaps they were simply the result of my own curiosity and circumstances. Scientific evidence supports the genetic influence on the development of alcoholism, but admits that the onset of specific symptoms and specific behaviors in individuals may be linked to physiological, social and environmental forces. In any case, Elinor, myself, and at least two of her other children were addicted to one substance or another.
Shortly after Elinor and I met face-to-face, she made a statement that really stuck with me: If I had been conceived some 15 or 20 years later, I would not be here today because she would have terminated the pregnancy with an abortion. While I felt a bit uneasy with her statement, I knew that it was an honest statement and I continued to believe in a woman's right to control her own body by obtaining a safe, legal abortion. I have paid for an abortion before and I think it was the right choice at the time, but the decision should not be taken lightly and all options -- especially adoption -- should be considered first.
There is no point in speculating about what the world would now be like in an alternate time-line if I had not been born; after all, actor Jimmy Stewart, who played George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," has already demonstrated that one person can make a difference in this world. I accept that as a given, but I also understand that the imagination can run wild in retrospect and that the human brain can come up with dozens of possible scenarios for what could have been if only we had made different decisions in our lives. If Elinor had had an abortion in 1954, life would have gone on uninterrupted for the rest of the world.
But I'm happy she didn't