![]() ![]() Deanna already knew that she was adopted, but she hadn’t known that she’d had another name. Melanie Lynn Alley was another person, but also, somehow, herself. The language on the paper was confusing, but she understood that it said that Melanie Lynn Alley, born in 1966, had become Deanna Lynn Doss. She opened it, and found a piece of paper with her name on it. She pulled it out from under the bed and saw that it was a box. She wriggled underneath her parents’ bed to hide, and in the darkness she felt something hard and cold, made of metal. One day, when she was very little, Deanna was playing hide-and-seek with her sister. ![]() That is not true.” How many parents tell their adopted children, I love you as if you were my own? And how many of those children wonder, Am I not your own? “You know, if they say, I don’t feel any differently about my biological kids than my adopted kids, I’m just a mom, we’re just a family. “A big thing that adoptees get frustrated by is when people say that adopting kids is no different,” Deanna said. A study found that adoptees attempt suicide at four times the rate of other people. There are disproportionate numbers of adoptees in psychiatric hospitals and addiction programs, given that they are only about two per cent of the population. But as an adoptee you’re expected to be over it because, O.K., that happened to you, but this wonderful thing also happened, and why can’t you focus on the wonderful thing?” Would you tell your friend who lost their family in a car accident, Get over it? No. “And they’ll say, Well, yes, but if it happens to a newborn what do they know? You were adopted, get over it. “I explain to friends that in order to be adopted you first have to lose your entire family,” Deanna said. Being adopted is, to her, as to many adoptees, a profoundly different way of being human, one that affects almost everything about her life. If someone says of Deanna that she was adopted, she corrects them and says that she is adopted. It distresses her that many of her fellow-Christians, such as Barrett, talk about adoption as the win-win solution to abortion, as though once a baby is adopted that is the end of the story. She believes that a child who starts life in a box will never know who they are, unless they manage somehow to track down their anonymous parents. At this point, Deanna became so upset that she stopped listening.ĭeanna is adopted, and she has spent much of her life grappling with the emotional consequences of that. Why, Barrett wanted to know, didn’t safe-haven laws remove the burden that was allegedly being imposed upon a woman who couldn’t obtain an abortion? The woman wouldn’t be forced to be a parent, and the baby could be adopted. But then Amy Coney Barrett asked about “safe haven” laws, which permit a mother who doesn’t want to keep her baby to drop it off anonymously in a deposit box at a hospital or a fire station. She is opposed to abortion, and was glad that Roe might soon be overturned. Deanna is a pastor and a director of women’s ministries at a Pentecostal church in Florida. ![]() The TV was tuned to a news segment about the oral arguments at the Supreme Court for the case that challenged Roe v. ![]() One evening in December, 2021, Deanna Doss Shrodes had come home from work. The mother is asked if she wants to hold the baby and says no. The mother relinquishes her at birth to an adoption agency. On September 18, 1985, a baby girl is born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. ![]()
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