PART IV

Narrative Description

Birth Mom Missions provides a much needed (and often overlooked) service to women
who have placed their child for adoption. We offer guidance before, after and during the
adoption process to all women who ask, regardless of their choices made. Much of this
is done through phone conversations, emails, letters, and social networking
correspondence. We are dedicated to providing nonjudgmental assistance to any
woman facing an unplanned pregnancy and guidance for those who choose to become
birth mothers.

We will offer local supportive l groups (nationwide) made up of women who have been
through the same thing. We wish to provide other women in the future with the
knowledge and support that we wish we could have had from a birth mother. Someone
who knew what it was like and was totally unbiased. Someone to talk to us, inform us,
guide us, emphasize with us, and answer all our silly questions. One goal of the mission
is to someday see every pregnant woman considering adoption, have at least one birth
mother mentor.

The mission touches the lives of those adopted, adoptive parents, hopeful adoptive
parents, pregnant woman at risk, the unborn, and other parts of society in ways yet to
be seen.

Some background:
It seems that the grief which results from adoption loss more often follows a pattern
which is the exact opposite of what one might expect in the case of other losses. I have
reached certain conclusions on the grief associated with adoption loss, based on my
own experience, the experiences of the women I have encountered and the books on
grief and grief counselling which I have read. It became obvious to me that the common
models of grief counselling would not work with mothers who had lost children through
adoption. I concluded that the grief resulting from the loss of a child through adoption
was fundamentally different from other types of grief. I explored grief associated with
abortion, with stillbirth and neo-natal death and with loss of custody. Although there
were some similarities, it seemed that adoption grief was unique.

The disenfranchised grief is when the grief is connected with a loss which cannot be
openly acknowledged, publicly mourned or socially supported. In many cases of
disenfranchised grief, the relationship is not recognised, the loss is not recognised or
the griever is not recognised. The loss of a child through adoption is usually a loss
which cannot be openly acknowledged, which is why mothers often suffer in
silence...people who have experienced any type of loss often feel anger, guilt, sadness,
depression, hopelessness and numbness and that in cases of disenfranchised grief,
these feelings can persist for a very long time. The lack of recognition of their grief
often results in them holding on to it more tenaciously than they might otherwise have
done.

CONCLUSIONS: The relinquishing mother is at risk for long-term physical,

psychological, and social repercussions. Although interventions have been proposed,
little is known about their effectiveness in preventing or alleviating these repercussions."
Journal of Obstetric, Gynecological and Neonatal Nursing, 1999 Jul-Aug. pp.395-400.
We hope to help this by raising the consciousness among the community and create
services for her recovery.
-Many different groups of people fear birth parent grief for many reasons. The old adage
goes that people fear what they don't know. So, we would like to shed a little light on
why birth parent grief isn't meant to be scary to adoptive parents, adoptees or the
general public.

Another goal of Birth Mom Missions is to increase media awareness of Birth Mother's
day (set in 1990 as the day before mother's day each year)

While the organization may express a point of view or set forth recommendations on an
issue, all publications will be written with a view toward exploring the broad range of
approaches and solutions to complex public policy issues in order to ensure a full and
open-minded presentation of the facts.

We stress the birth mother aspect because we feel it is what makes us a unique
organization and allows us to truly "tell it like it is" to women just like ourselves.
Unfortunately we missed out on an older birth mom mentor, but we want to provide help
to women in the future that experience an unexpected or crisis pregnancy and choose
life.

Some of our services/member websites: