[This completes a series of three posts on the ostensibly "pro-life" adoption industry and its impact on society (discouraging both abortion and contraception), and on adoptive children and birth mothers (opposition to measures that could encourage mothers to keep their children rather than "relinquish" them.) I hadn't really meant to post anything at all, let alone three. And while I've never fathered a child out of wedlock, I'm not adopted, nor have I been personally involved in any aspect of at-birth adoption, the poignancy of this post seemed like a nice way to complete a series I hadn't really meant to begin in the first place. --fl]

Speaking of the "pro-life" adoption industry and how it calculatedly disregards the needs of birth mothers or the adoptive children themselves, BD of The Daily Bastardette points out how the industry also screws child/father contact as well

In Memory of Jack Jennings Reese, My Father

Image via BD at The Daily Bastardette My father Jack Jennings Reese died Tuesday night. He was 83. I was never supposed to know his name. I was never supposed to know him. That's what adoption means.

Jack's name was not on my original birth certificate. My "non-ID" from Toledo Crittenden helpfully informed me that my father was a man. Oh, and that he had blue eyes, was a high school drop-out, working class, and Protestant. (That last part is a stretch. I don't think he was an atheist, but he had no quarter with organized religion. He refused to be baptized.) He must have been from Akron, since that's where my mother lived.

I got that information in 1980. Not until 1996, however, did I learn in a letter from my mother, Jack's initials: JR. As in Ewing. That small slice of information was treasured. It meant, as it can only mean to the adopted, that I wasn't dropped out of a UFO or born in a cabbage patch. I wasn't an immaculate conception. I already knew I had a mother, of course, but now I had a father. In Akron. Or someplace. It turned out to be Buffalo.

...

I learned later from Jack that he and [her birth-mother's husband] Bob had known each other, but not well. Both were truck drivers. Bob knew all about Jack--and me--but Jack had no idea that his old girlfriend had married Bob or that I even existed. Bob wasn't about to tell him.

One day, according to Jack, my mother just wasn't around any more. When he rang her up, her father, who never liked him, told him she went out of town to "care for a sick aunt." Really! And he believed it. He was 17. She was nearly 24! Shortly after her disappearance Jack turned 18, joined the Army, and went to post-war China with General George Marshall

Source: The Daily Bastardette

For most of recorded history men have largely been written out of the "out-of-wedlock" pregnancy equation. It's generally assumed that men are irresponsible and disinterested. And I'm sure sometimes that's true. But "young" and "poor" don't always translate as "irresponsible and disinterested." But in my (again, limited) experience, the birth fathers of children who were taken away for adoption have been no less interested in what became of their children than their birth-mother partners were. And no less happy or completed if and when contact with their children is reestablished.

And even when it's not? As with BD even when it's not important to the father himself it's often quite important to the child him or herself.

This isn't a paean to "father's rights," though with consideration for the obvious exigencies of women's choice I think it would be a good idea to bolster both father's rights and responsibilities. Instead it's a reminder that, for better or worse, fathers matter to their children. Even, as in this case, when father and child have never met. So if this is a paean at all it's one to children's rights. Even (gasp!) adopted children.