Mother’s Hope organizes talk on adoption
Morung Express News
Dimapur | April 8
Four members from a Hong Kong based non-profit, charitable organization, Mother’s Choice today spoke on adoption at Mother’s Hope here. Gretchen Ryan, social worker and a mother of five adopted children, who has been working with the organization for the last 25 years, said at the session that the most important thing in adoption is openness. Asserting that adopted children have the right to know about their birth parents, she said it is important to keep the conversation open with the children. “If we do not talk to the children, we are denying them the right to feel and the right to bond with their biological parents.”
Speaking from her own experiences, Gretchen mentions “Words help me feel comfortable and also prepare my children to answer questions.” Children face most of the questions, she explained, and informed, the most common one being, “Where are your real parents?” Calling herself a “walking advertisement for adoption” Gretchen said she began telling the stories to her children bit by bit and then built their life story on it. “As a parent we don’t have to fear. It is their information. We need to share it at the right time,” she adds. “An adoptive parent needs to claim,” she asserted, because a sense of entitlement is important and helps take fear and insecurity away from the child. “If we don’t talk about it then we are saying there is something wrong,” she added while stating adoption has been the most wonderful gift and “there is no shame” in adoption. Meanwhile, the CEO of Mother’s Choice, Alia Eyres stated that the organization started with a belief that “Every child needs a family.”
Alia, while asserting that the organization always put the best interest of the child first, said “We want to break cycles of hopelessness and start new cycles by being a voice (on adoption).” Mother’s Choice, founded in 1987, works with women in crisis pregnancies, provides child care, adoption services, foster care etc.
In an interview with The Morung Express, the founder and director of Mother’s Hope, Moamenla Jamir shared that Nagas are opening up to the idea of adoption gradually “with the rate of infertility increasing.” As the brochure reads, Mother’s Hope was started to “Give hope and bring hope to unwed pregnant girls and their families and going through crisis pregnancies to provide and promote loving, nurturing care to newborn babies, infants needing permanent loving families.”
Moamenla revealed that most of the pregnant girls who come to Mother’s Hope are young teenagers; the youngest one so far being 12 years old. She did not mince words when saying that 90% of pregnancies among the girls happened through “various kinds of rape” and only 10% through consensus. She revealed that abortion is rampant in Nagaland. In 2001, during a research with a doctor in six nursing homes in Dimapur, Moamenla discovered 550 women underwent abortion within a month. “Abortion is not the only solution” for some, she said. Mother’s Hope’s services are available free of cost and anybody can avail them. Mother’s Hope has so far helped deliver 300 children and almost 200 children find families through adoption since its inception in 2001.
