Birth Parent Grief in Adoption

Birth Parent Grief

Most people anticipate experiencing grief around the end of life, typically following the death of a loved one. However, fewer are familiar with grief after a healthy birth of a child, when a birth parent has made an adoption plan for their newborn. In the 1970s and earlier, social workers assured their clients that they would forget this experience and swiftly move on with their lives.^[1] During the 1980s and 1990s, as birth mothers began to publicly share their experiences, research revealed that the grief process following relinquishment was far from simple or insignificant, contrary to the beliefs held by social workers at that time. ^[2],^[3] Over the 30-year period between 1980-2010, there was a shift in the general consensus: The grief following relinquishment was now documented and confirmed.^[4]

Several factors contributed to society’s delayed understanding of birth parent grief. First, out-of-wedlock births were heavily stigmatized, leading some to a focus on facilitating adoption plans—under any means necessary.^[5] It has been estimated that one-third of infants born to unmarried Caucasian women were relinquished for adoption in 1965 compared to 20% in 1970.^[6] Additionally, adoption has often been perceived, both historically and presently, as a happy ending for all involved: a solution that resolves the birth parent’s “problem” while blessing a family in need. As Sharon Roszia and Allison Davis Maxon write in their book Seven Core Issues of Adoption and Permanency, adoption is often portrayed as “a problem solving event filled with joy.”^[7] Furthermore, social workers were hesitant to deter young apprehensive mothers from making adoption plans, opting instead to reassure them, their families, and society that “this isn’t going to hurt.” Additionally, society’s tendency to belittle and condescend to the emotions of teenagers, dismissing their love as “puppy love” and similarly minimizing their grief, further contributed to the dismissal of birth parent grief when the birth parent was a teen. Lastly, the lack of language to identify and understand adoption loss posed a significant barrier to its study and comprehension. It is not surprising that as psychology gained terminology such as “ambiguous loss” in the 1970s and “disenfranchised grief” in 1989, there was an improvement in understanding the complexities of birth parent grief. 

In today’s world, social workers acknowledge and validate birth parent loss, yet evidence-based training designed for this population is limited.^[8] The majority of adoption-specific literature tends to center on adoptees and adoptive families, who are more likely to have access to services due to their socioeconomic status. For those publications that do address the experience of birth parents, they often adopt a “one size fits all” approach. Moreover, most grief literature predominantly focuses on losses related to death, with limited coverage of reproductive loss and even less inclusion of adoption-related grief. The scarce resources available on adoption loss, particularly those concerning birth parents, typically consist of outdated nonfiction works or memoirs written by birth mothers.

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In today’s world, social workers acknowledge and validate birth parent loss, yet evidence-based training designed for this population is limited.

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The purpose of this article is to provide professionals with a framework for approaching grief work with clients, offering language suggestions, and presenting a range of intervention methods. It is worth noting that grief experiences after relinquishment are as varied and individualized as the babies themselves. Birth parent experiences are diverse, there is no single grief model that universally applies to every adoption experience, and grief is among many emotions that birth parents experience post-placement. When a birth parent grieves for their child, it does not speak to their satisfaction with their adoption decision, as both grief and confidence about the adoption can and do coexist.

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