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In my last post, Adoption: Separating Reality from Fantasy, I talked about how the portrayal of adoption on television and in movies was very different from reality. In this post, I would like to focus specifically on the portrayal of birthmothers.
Just last week, Desperate Housewives covered this topic with teenager Danielle, who placed her baby with her mother, Bree (the baby’s grandmother), to raise as her own child. (Bree has been faking her pregnancy, so her friends will not know that she adopted the baby.) Danielle talked about how she “hated” the baby growing inside of her because it cost her eight months of fun. Then, after she had the baby, she seemed much more conflicted about her feelings toward him and chose to go through with the adoption, saying that it was best for the baby. Be sure to check out Kelly’s fabulous post on this episode at Desperate Housewives.
In a prior season of Desperate Housewives, a birthmother extorted money from Gabrielle and Carlos to place the baby with them.
On the show Friends, Chandler and Monica adopted twins. The birthmother did not know she was pregnant with twins, and she was portrayed as very ditsy.
I have seen several television shows and made-for-TV movies in which a main character searches for her birth family. The results of what the adoptee finds are all over the map. Sometimes the birthmother is a wonderful woman, but in most cases, the birthmother is either self-centered or mentally ill.
If I were a birthmother, I would not be too impressed with how birthmothers are portrayed on television. I rarely see the portrayal of a woman who loves her baby enough to give the child a “better” life that she is unable to provide for whatever reason. Instead, birthmothers often seem to be portrayed as “dumb blondes” who are attractive but not intelligent enough to love their babies enough to raise them. Alternatively, birthmothers are shown as women who are too self-absorbed to parent a child.
Why does the media continue to foster these misperceptions of what a birthmother is really like? I suspect it is because the writers themselves have a hard time understanding how a woman can choose to let another woman raise her child. Instead of seeing the love that drives the decision to place a baby for adoption, they see the decision as unloving, when that is often far from the case. The focus is on ratings rather than on truth.
I am glad that we have birthmothers willing to talk about their experiences and educate the public. Jenna does a wonderful job on the Birth-First Parents blog, as does Coley on the Open Adoption blog. I am glad that hopeful adoptive parents have these resources to counter the misconceptions that the media provides.
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
The media is stupid. It’s all about ratings, not facts. Folks can’t really learn anything from it, even the news a lot of the time anymore than they can learn history from Amadeus or other biopics.
Which is a shame, because how else are people supposed to get facts? No wonder folks have so many annoying notions of adoption.
Also, it could be something left over from the past.
I wish that television would show how women in crisis pregnancy are guilt-tripped and otherwise coerced into believing that they aren’t good enough to raise their own baby. I wish they would show how often women who are down on their luck or temorarily ill are talked into doing what the agency, doctor, whoever claims is “the best thing for the baby.” That ought to be shocking enough.
PS I was horrified by the Chandler/Monica adopting twins episodes. The poor birthmother.
“I was horrified by the Chandler/Monica adopting twins episodes.”
While I enjoyed seeing Monica and Chandler become parents and liked the thought of them raising twins, I was bothered by how stupid they made the birthmother appear. She was a walking “dumb blonde” punchline the entire time, and that bothered me. I would not want people making those kinds of assumptions about my son’s birthmother.
- Faith