Monday night on Ophelia: adoption expert Joe Soll
April 19, 2009
by The New Agenda
|Chewing the Fat with Ophelia will be guest-hosted tomorrow night by Lisa Macci, a co-founder of The New Agenda and the host of The Justice Hour on WPBR 1340 am.
Joe Soll, the author of Adoption Healing… a path to recovery and co-author of Evil Exchange, is a psychotherapist and lecturer internationally recognized as an expert in adoption related issues. He is director and co-founder of Adoption Crossroads, an international, non-profit organization consisting of over 470 adoption agencies, mental health institutions and adoption search and support groups in 8 countries, representing over 500,000 individuals whose lives have been affected by adoption.
The director and founder of the Adoption Counseling Center in New York City, Mr. Soll is also co-organizer and co-chair of the NY State Adoption Agency Task Force; a member of Matilda Cuomo’s 1993 Advisory Council on the “Adoption Option”; past executive board member of the American Adoption Congress, and a trustee of the International Soundex Reunion Registry.
Since 1989, Mr. Soll has organized and coordinated six international mental health conferences on adoption attended by mental health professionals. He has been an expert witness in court about adoption related issues and has lectured widely at adoption agencies, social work schools, mental health facilities and mental health conferences in the U.S. and Canada.
Mr. Soll was portrayed as a therapist in the NBC Made-For-TV movie “The Other Mother”, and recently played himself in the HBO Special “Reno Finds Her Mom.” and was featured in the 2000 Global Japan award winning documentary, “Adoption Therapist: Joe Soll.”
http://tv.msn.com/tv/article.a.....;GT1=28103
“Miss North Carolina USA crowned Miss USA 2009
Contestants were judged by their performance in swimsuit and evening gown modeling contests…………
The top 15 contestants worked the stage in white string bikinis designed by pop star Jessica Simpson’s swimwear line…….. ”
Maybe some group home or institution for the shallow minded could adopt some of these young women
I was stunned today to hear this very unbiased view on adoption.
it seems that for Joe Soll every pregnant woman should give birth and under any circumstances keep the child, even artificial insemination creates a deep wound to the offspring according to him…
From having talked to birth moms, waited for seven years on the adoption list and adopted a 14 months old child seven years ago, having worked with licensing agencies in the state of Illinois and Maryland, and knowing multiple families with adopted kids (8 families on my current count) I know a different side than the one talked about today. I know that the preferred situation today is the open adoption, and of course the children know from where they were adopted. some children get letters, some see their moms. with foreign adoptions we try to keep close to the respective culture. we talk on ‘adoption day” or “family day” about the joy when the child entered the adoptive family and about the sorrow the birth mother must have felt, when she decided to let somebody else raise their child. there are a multitude of circumstances when women think that they are not in the situation to raise their child (age and financial circumstances being the most common ones).
the myth Joe Soll is spreading is that adoptive parents are not going through a grief period realizing that they are infertile but quickly jump on getting somebody else’s baby and paying horrendous sums of money. the $ numbers mentioned today are not the experience of myself or any of the other adoptive families I know of. Some of us paid even for an international adoption with travel, translator, documents, lodging a small percentage of the sum he mentioned. Anybody who adopts in Illinois has to have a foster license and is required to take a certain number of courses per year to stay active. These courses one can choose from are pertinent to adoption issues, such as learning from the situation of a birth mother. What I learned there, is, that there is always the birth mother in some way part of the adoptive family and you have to think through how you can include her, starting from sending pictures, letters to the child and visits. During my waiting period I met several families and learned form their experiences of inclusion of the birth mom.
I always told my daughter that I will help her to find her birth mother.
So, yes there are two sides, and one is the pain of the birth mother giving up her baby, the pain of the adopted child wondering why she/he had to leave the first caregiver, the loss and the fear of not being good enough and the pain of the adopting parents dealing with their inability to have their child right from the start and nobody questioning their right to raise the child. and the other side, that there is joy of starting a family, the joy for the child to have their own mother/father, and the option for the birth parent to know that there are loving adoptive parents who are grateful to receive the child in a situation, when the birth parent feels this is not the right time to start their own family.
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