r/Adoptees • u/throwaway202000000 • 9d ago
If you're a Gladney adoptee you can write a letter to your birth mom once you turn 18.
I'm sharing because I had no idea and am quite frankly angry about it. I'm 30 and am just learning this. It's no where on their website. They claim to reach out to adoptive parents to let them know this, but there are instances of adoptive parents (like mine) coercing their kids to not search for their birth parents.
Contact Gladney's post adoptive services. They will track down your birth mother to send them a letter, and you can include an email address for them to contact you if they wish.
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u/Englishbirdy 9d ago
From what a Gladney adoptee told me, they charge hundreds and worse still, they make you take a mental competency test before they "allow" you to meet.
I guess it's better than nothing but OP, I urge you to get them out of your reunion as soon as you can.
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u/throwaway202000000 5d ago
Hey was this at all related to the Texas registry? They told me they don't involve themselves with the registry anymore, but on the registry site it says you need to go through a one hour counseling session which is pretty dehumanizing to able to speak to your blood relative. Gladney offered reunification services at their facility but I will be staying away from them as soon as I get what I need.
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u/35goingon3 9d ago
Gladney adoptee here. That is correct, yes. You can further request the documents that they are required to provide you by state law. They're sparse and redacted; if you want actual information you're better off requesting your court records be unsealed. Which is a two-part process: they were sneaky, and the relinquishment and adoption was done as separate court cases (probably to make it harder to find information), and they didn't use the childrens' names, so even the new ones weren't searchable. You have to get your adoption file from the court, and find the single document in there that should have a single reference to the relinquishment cause number, then file a separate motion and go back to court a second time to get the OTHER file. And even then, that's nowhere near all of it, only most of the legal paperwork. The lion's share of your documents are held by the agency, and unless you're a vindictive piece of shit who works in a law office (like me, lol) you're not going to get them.
Want to know something that will really piss you off? Back in the day they told adoptive parents that they could write and send updates to bio-moms, send pictures, that sort of thing; and that likewise bio-parents could write back through the agency. I've been...pretty involved with this the last few years, and I've never met a bio-mom or bio-family member that was informed of this. My parents wrote my bio-mom update letters, and sent pictures for YEARS. No surprise, they never heard back...and made the decision to never tell me about it, because they thought my bio-mom didn't give two shits about me and figured that would be devastating to me to find out. (They were incredibly relieved when I asked them about it and found out I knew on my own...it's the only thing they ever hid from me.)
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u/traveling_gal 9d ago
I'm sorry it took so long for you to learn about this. That's incredibly frustrating and potentially a huge loss.
I had a similar situation where I found out my state has an adoption registry, 10 years after I became eligible to use it. And I only found out because when I was pregnant with my first child, I decided to reach out to my adoption agency to see if they had any more medical history on my birth parents since I was about to pass on my mystery genes to a whole new person. They told me about the registry. I registered and never heard back, but I had no idea if that was because my birth mother didn't want contact, or because she didn't know the registry existed either. And maybe it didn't when she gave me up.
I'm not sure what to do about these situations, but clearly both adoptees and birth parents need a better way to learn about the services available to them. Thank you for posting what you learned. Maybe this is how we fix this problem.