Adoption Agencies & Making Reparations to Adoptees

For decades, the requests arrived by phone and letter, often heavy with urgency. A teenager, longing for her poems to be delivered to a mother she’d never known. A parent with a gold ring for a daughter given up at birth. Some simply sought answers: One woman wanted to know what caused the burn scars criss-crossing her arms.

In each case, Medina Children’s Services, an adoption agency in Seattle provided no substantive response. At times, social workers and staff offered minimal information. Other times, they discouraged requests with service fees, or failed to respond at all. Instead of small solace over a broken past, adopted people longing to uncover their histories — and birth parents tormented over lost children — received only silence.

To account for these oversights and to begin addressing any possible harm, a group of volunteer auditors at the nonprofit formerly known as Medina, now called Amara, is combing through the paperwork from 50 years of adoptions finalized between 1950 and 2000.

Whose questions were never answered? Who should be told what and when and how? In some cases, will the pain of knowing outweigh the pain of not knowing? Clues lie within 3,400 fraying manila folders.

Read the full article HERE.