Biography Adoption

How does a mother cope when she is forced to walk away from her three children and never see them again? That is what happened to JB's mother, Myrtle. Eventually, rescued from her despair by tall, dark, and handsome George Rowley, who fell in love with her, Myrtle started a new life and had seven more children. She buried the grief of losing her first children deep within and kept her pain secret. JB and her siblings were unaware of the existence of Myrtle's first three children until after she died.

When Sandra Leigh was seven years old, she fell into the role of protector of her mother and three younger siblings. One winter night, she ushered her mother out of the house during one of her father’s tirades, and then snuck her back into the dark home through a window. Sandra was used to events like these; what she wasn’t used to were the mountains and nature surrounding her new home in West Virginia.

When Deb Moerke and her husband decided to become foster parents, they never imagined how their lives would change. And never did they imagine their worst nightmare coming true: Their five-year-old foster daughter, Hannah, murdered at the hands of her birth mom, Karen. The Moerkes were overwhelmed with horror and grief. And just when they didn’t think they could bear any more, Deb received a phone call from Karen in prison. Facing a life sentence for Hannah’s murder, she was pregnant. And Karen had an incredible request: Would Deb take her unborn baby and love it as her own?

The moment Diane Burke, an author and mother of two grown sons, received an unexpected certified letter in the mail, she had no idea her life would be shaken to its core. Memories of a past she had buried more than forty years ago suddenly resurfaced and she wasn't prepared to deal with them. Steve Orlandi, happily married, father of two and step-father of three, was living the typical middle class American life. But since the age of eight, when he discovered he was adopted, he had led that life dealing with inner questions about his self-identity and genetic history.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, young pregnant women entered the front door of a clinic in a small North Georgia town. Sometimes their babies exited out the back, sold to Northern couples who were desperate to hold a newborn in their arms. But these weren't adoptions - they were transactions. And one unethical doctor was exploiting other people's tragedies. Jane Blasio was one of those babies.

Adoption is often framed by happy narratives, but the reality is that many adoptees struggle with unaddressed trauma and issues of identity and belonging. Adoptees often spend the majority of their youth without the language to explore the grief related to adoption or the permission to legitimize their conflicting emotions. Adoptee and counselor Cameron Lee Small names the realities of the adoptee's journey, narrating his own and other adoptees' stories in all their complexity.

Uno de los más preciosos libros acerca del significado de la palabra familia. Cerca de cumplir los cincuenta años, Fabiola Hablützel descubrió que era adoptada. Después de salir del estado de conmoción que esta noticia le produjo, pensó que aquel descubrimiento era la respuesta a la pregunta que se había hecho desde niña. En más de una ocasión, la posibilidad de no ser hija biológica de sus padres rondó su mente, ya que el parecido físico con ellos no resultaba suficiente. Por más que recibió todo el amor que alguien hubiera podido desear, sentía que había algo distinto en ella.

Adoption is often painted as a happy, inspirational act—a baby finds a family and lives happily ever after. But the truth is that adopted children experience displacement and rupture from their mother and that trauma can impact an individual for a lifetime. Adoption can lead to feelings of loss and grief not just for the adoptee, but for the biological and adoptive parents as well. This startling fact comes vividly to life in Janet Sherlund’s heartbreaking memoir, Abandoned at Birth.

In 1970, Lynda was 18, unmarried and pregnant when she was forced to give her baby up for adoption. She was sent by a doctor to a Catholic girls’ home for unmarried mothers, and told she’d have no hope of keeping her child because she was Aboriginal. After 26 years, Lynda was finally able to make contact with her lost son – but the much wished for reunion didn’t go well. When she looked into the adoption records, she found a web of lies – lies about her family, the baby’s father, her ‘consent’ for the adoption – and her Indigenous heritage had been completely erased.

Cuong was born during the Vietnamese war and was transported in a cardboard box, by soldiers, to Australia where he was adopted. Other children objected to his exotic appearance, so different from that of his curly-haired, blue-eyed family, but his adopted family always reassured him and his brother stuck up for him against bullies. Through Cuong's eyes, children can learn about the pain of being different and the joy of being loved, by people who adopt, adore and stand up for him.

Orphaned at birth in South Korea, challenged with medical and developmental complications, and unadopted by age three, Min Soo’s hope of finding a home seems lost. But God chooses a family on the other side of the world who opens their home to this whirlwind of a child. Although Min Soo is dearly loved, his constant challenges tax his adoptive parents to the core. When he’s old enough to understand, Min Soo wonders if God has a purpose for “a child in a man’s body.” He comes to grips with the multiple obstacles he faces—except one.

Faith to Foster is a candid look into the life of ordinary foster parents T.J. and Jenn Menn. It is a journey chronicling their decision-making process, how the children arrived, the birth parents struggle to rehabilitate, help from friends and family, emotional goodbyes, and how faith in Jesus empowered them through it all. TJ and Jenn share their experiences and feelings in a way that encourages any listener to serve their neighbors, not just foster parents. Faith to Foster reminds Christians how God can use them to make a difference in their community.

Foster children are society's throwaway kids, the children no one wants—until someone finally does. Saving Michael provides an inside look at Keri Vellis's struggle to secure the best possible services for two severely abused and traumatized siblings. Listeners get a glimpse of Keri and her family's day-to-day life as she went from mother of three to adoptive mother of three more children and then the temporary caregiver of another seventeen.

In 1974, Liz Harvie – born Claire Elaine Watts – was given up for adoption by her birth mother Yvonne. Claire was just eight weeks old when her adoptive parents took her in – and renamed her Elizabeth. Although brought up in a ‘perfect’ household, the emotional – and physical – trauma of being taken from her biological mother would never leave Liz. She constantly wondered: what does my real mum look like? Will she come back for me? Why did she abandon me?

Abandoned as a baby to the British care system, Alex Wheatle grows up with no knowledge of his Jamaican parentage or family history. Later, he is inexorably drawn to reggae, his lifeline through disrupted teenage years and the challenges of living as a young Black man in 1980s Britain. Alex's youth was portrayed in Oscar Award-winning director Steve McQueen's "Small Axe" series (2020). In Sufferah, he tells his own story urgently, vividly and unsentimentally. His award-winning fiction - and this memoir - are a call to never give up hope.

In this unflinching, unforgettable memoir, Regina Louise tells the true story of overcoming neglect in the US foster-care system. Drawing on her experience as one of society’s abandoned children, she tells how she emerged from the cruel, unjust system, not only to survive, but to flourish. After years of jumping from one fleeting, often abusive home to the next, Louise meets a counselor named Jeanne Kerr. For the first time in her young life, Louise knows what it means to be seen, wanted, understood, and loved.

Delilah, the most listened-to woman on American radio, has distinguished herself as the “Queen of Sappy Love Songs” and America’s ultimate romance guru. But Delilah’s life off-air is all the more extraordinary - a life full of trials, forgiveness, faith, and adventure. In One Heart at a Time, Delilah’s heartfelt account of her own story reveals what shaped the voice that 9 million listeners know and love.

As a child, Susan Silverman was surrounded by a loving family; although her parents weren't happily married, they were devoted to their kids. In a vibrant, funny, imminently relatable voice (think Anne Lamott meets Katrina Kenison), Silverman tells of a family's evolution - from her parents' devastating loss of their infant son to raising bright and wildly unique daughters. It's also the creation story of her own family - raising her own bright and wildly unique daughters and taking a journey to adopt two boys from Ethiopia.

As she closes the door on her stunningly successful television show, Rosie O' Donnell opens her heart to share the amazing experience that changed her life forever. "An enormously powerful story," says Publishers Weekly, "about how forces strong enough to shatter one person can make another shine like a diamond."

Falling pregnant as a teenager in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to the convent in Co. Tipperary to be looked after as a fallen woman. She cared for her baby for three years until the Church took him and sold him, like countless others, to America for adoption. She spent the next 50 years secretly searching for him, unaware that he was searching for her from across the Atlantic.