By Heather Massey

On January 6, 2025, Congressman Rob Wittman (VA-01) announced the re-introduction of his Adoption Information Act. According to a press release, this act “…would require family planning services to provide information on nearby adoption centers to anyone receiving their services. A family planning services’s eligibility to receive federal grants or contracts through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would be contingent upon providing this information.”
An adoptee, Congressman Wittman also shared his perspective about adoption:
“A lot of people say they would not be where they are today without their parents—for me, that is the absolute truth….When I was eight months old, my mom and dad adopted me. My birth mother’s decision to choose adoption gave me more opportunities than she felt she could provide, and my parents’ decision to adopt instilled in me a passion for public service and a desire to give back. That’s why I’m proud to reintroduce my Adoption Information Act so that all mothers know what options are available to them. This legislation is a simple step that can make a world of a difference.”
In addition to being a constituent of Congressman Wittman, I’m also an adoptee who believes the Adoption Information Act would cause more harm than good.
I was born in 1969 and adopted nine months later. I was part of the Baby Scoop Era, the period between 1945 and 1973 when infants born to single white mothers were plentiful as were couples desperate to adopt. About four million babies were placed for adoption during that period.
My parents’ infertility prompted them to adopt. They told me my first mother was a nineteen-year-old college student when she became pregnant with me. She relinquished me because she couldn’t afford to raise me. My parents emphasized that my birth mother had chosen relinquishment for my best interest—an act of love.
Sound familiar? That’s because my story is eerily like Congressman Wittman’s adoption narrative.
My adoption was closed, which meant the state forbade contact between my birth families and me. I always wanted to meet my first mother, but reunification with her seemed forever out of reach.
Until it wasn’t. In 2022, my first mother reached out to the agency that arranged my adoption. Soon after, the agency informed me that a letter from her was waiting for me. Excited beyond belief, I couldn’t read it fast enough.
Then we had a glorious reunion.
As we became acquainted, I learned some shocking details about my relinquishment. One part of my adoption narrative was technically true: my first mother had no money or resources to raise me by herself. However, her parents certainly had enough money for the job. Furthermore, my first mother would have kept me if not for their lack of support.
Ironically, I was adopted by a couple whose socioeconomic status resembled that of my maternal grandparents. My adoptive father was a professor at a college in the same city where my biological grandfather lived (they worked three miles apart, no less). My adoptive mother juggled employment and being a stay-at-home parent, just like my biological grandmother.

Click on image to read more.

By Kris Neff

You will change her name, you will give her a new birthday; erase her past.
You will smile at me, full of promises you don’t intend to keep.
You will tell me I’m brave; tell me I’m selfless, deny my grief, refuse my tears.
You will amend her identity, and replace mine with yours.
You will tell me I’m brave, tell me I’m courageous, while you hold your breath, your need to ensure there will be no reunion between us.
You will tell her I couldn’t give her all that she needed. Tell us, both, now we can have the lives we deserve.
You will tell me I’m brave, tell me I’m selfless.
But It will be you that others will perceive to be selfless; allowing me little glimpses; allowing me just a taste, never allowing me to quench my thirst.
You will see me in her, in her eyes; and her smile.
You will hear my voice every time she speaks.
She will never stop wondering.
I will never stop searching.
You will never find peace.
Eventually you will tell me I’m bitter; and need to let go.
With the swipe of a pen you will make her who you want her to be.
Not allowing her to be who she was; who she is.
Don’t forget about me, or your promises and your hope you took back.
Don’t forget that her smile is my smile too.
Remember it was my face that her eyes saw first.
It was me she was crying for as she was handed to you.
And her first breath of air was a breath of mine too.
You will hope I stay brave. Pray I stay selfless. While you deny my grief and refuse my tears.

Gina Cameron was always aware that something in her family wasn’t quite right. Her relationship with her father was volatile—strained and lacking in warmth and closeness. Her mother was critical, controlling, and went to great lengths to point out the ways in which the mother and daughter were different. But Cameron had no idea that for 63 years her mother had been keeping a profoundly disturbing secret.

It wasn’t until Cameron was in her sixties and her mother had died that the secret tumbled out. At a family reunion, her cousin Dan inadvertently dropped a truth bomb in a casual conversation, commenting that Cameron and her sister had different fathers. Her family had always been aware, he said, and had been told not to tell her, but he was certain that by that time she’d have known. She was blindsided by this revelation that, in turn, triggered a childhood memory: an aunt saying, “Louie isn’t Genie’s father.” When she later confronted her mother about what she’d overheard, her mother not only insisted it wasn’t true, she also accused her of being ungrateful, shameful, impertinent. She was ignored for days by her parents and stuffed this experience deep down, only to have it resurface five decades later.

Rattled by her conversation with Dan, Cameron arranged a meeting with her father’s niece Ellen, and got a lead for another piece of the puzzle of her origins while strolling together on the High Line in New York. Ellen called her sister Karen, who in turn phoned Cameron and recalled that they two had met when Cameron was three years old—when Louie had met her mother. And again, a memory arose from deep within her—from the time her father, in a letter, disowned her when she was 42 years old. “You’ve been a thorn in my side since you were three years old,” he wrote. She was sick, he’d said, selfish, hurtful.

Looking back after all those years, it all began to make sense. “Scenes from my past crowded my waking hours,” she writes. “The revelation about my paternity was a new frame for the puzzling, troubled undercurrents I’d always felt in my childhood home. For that, I was grateful.”
Grateful for a reason why she’d been seen as the family’s problem, why she’d been branded bad, a compulsive liar, a stubborn and willful child, why she’d been locked in a closet as a punishment as a child, locked in her room when her parents went out, and locked in a hotel room during a family vacation. That gratitude found expression when, at a family visit, her cousin, Carol, asked if Cameron had felt that she’d been treated differently as a child—something she and other relatives had clearly observed. When Cameron acknowledged those feelings, Carol took her hand and said, “Now you know you weren’t crazy to feel that.”

“I bathed in her words and gesture—a simple acknowledgement of my perceptions, believed as fact, no judgment. Seen, and accepted, I felt more and more at home.”

The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to take shape, but there was no one involved who was still alive and could confirm all the details of what had happened or answer a burning question: Who was her father?

Click on image to read more.

For many of us, DNA test results have delivered news that’s made nothing in our world seem normal. Our families may not be our families. The truths we’ve known may not be truths at all. We’ve been upside-down, turned around, and left looking for some kind of foothold—a way to ground ourselves in this new unreality. Then came a virus and a quarantine that have made everyone’s lives anything but normal. On top of that, an unprecedented political climate along with civil unrest have been both globally and personally destabilizing. If that weren’t enough, bring on the holidays, which for some in the best of times are difficult, stressful, and grief-inducing. But this year, even those who typically find the season joyful may experience sadness, disappointment, and grief.

If you experience anxiety, it’s likely been magnified in (or by) 2020. If you’ve experienced trauma, the fear and isolation caused by the pandemic may be retraumatizing. If you’ve been alone in quarantine or can’t spend the holidays with the people you love, your loneliness may seem overwhelming. Even if you’ve been holding your own, the common sorrow—the empathy and compassion fatigue for all who are struggling—may be depleting you. This state of life as we know it now may be getting on your last nerve.