Free The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage Page A

finalized, the agency had to make a good-faith effort to find the birth dad if he wasn't in the picture. Once he was found, the agency had to convince him to sign away his rights, which in most cases wasn't a problem. But some birth dads threw a wrench in the works.
    “Birth fathers who deny consent aren't required to raise thebaby themselves, and the child can wind up in legal limbo, not wanted by his biological parents and yet not adoptable, either. It's a real problem in most states—but not in Oregon.”
    Oregon's adoption laws were radically different from those in most other states. If a birth dad wasn't around, if he wasn't providing emotional and financial support during the pregnancy, under Oregon law he had already signed away his rights. The law in Oregon recognized that guys have orgasms and women have babies. Ignorance of pregnancy was no excuse: if a birth dad wasn't aware that the woman he'd screwed was pregnant, that was an indication he didn't have much of a relationship with her. Again, he had an orgasm, she was having a baby. Being present at the moment of conception didn't entitle a guy to much in Oregon.
    “The best-case scenario,” the lawyer told us, “is that the birth mom who picks you lives in Oregon—or, if she lives in Washington or another state, that the birth father is supportive of her decision to adopt.”
    Unfairly, if a woman decides to keep her baby, that guy who only had an orgasm could wind up making child-support payments for eighteen or twenty years. If the law in Oregon were consistent, guys should have had the option of accepting or rejecting paternity. That would have required a change in the law, which would have opened politicians to charges of being soft on deadbeat dads, so the law wasn't likely to change. My impartial advice to guys having one-night stands in Oregon would be to have them with other men.
    As a consequence of eliminating the birth-dad problem, Oregon was widely considered the best American state in which to adopt. Those high-profile adoption disruptions of the last few years (which resulted in kids being taken from the only homes they'd ever known) were the result of birth fathers surfacing after the kid had been adopted. The twin specters of Baby Richard and Baby Jessica haunt couples adopting children, which is why when you flip through adoption magazines you'll see agencies advertising themselves with this line: “We specialize in Russian, Chinese, and Oregon adoptions.”
    After the lawyer's presentation, some birth mothers were going to visit the seminar. Before they arrived, one of the agency's“adoption specialists” talked with us about the kind of women who put their children up for open adoption.
    “Adoptive parents tend to confuse women who have their children taken away from them by the state with women who make the choice to place their child for adoption,” said Jill.
    We weren't supposed to say “put their kids up for adoption,” we learned. This expression was frowned upon in adoption circles, as it comes from the practice of loading orphaned urban children onto “orphan trains” and sending them out of cities and into rural areas to be “adopted.” When an orphan train arrived at a station, the children would be placed up on a platform for farmers to look over. Children who looked like they'd make good farmhands were “adopted,” and the rest got back on the train and headed for the next station.
    “Culturally, there's a great deal of prejudice against women who place their children for adoption,” Jill continued. “Anyone who's doing an adoption should rid themselves of these prejudices, but it's especially important for people doing open adoptions to root them out, since you will be in contact with your birth mothers.”
    The couples in the room asked the same questions of Jill that Terry and I asked of Bob and Kate months ago. What if the birth mom is a drug addict? What if she wants her kid back? Won't the children be