It’s Abrazo’s founder, Elizabeth, here to share some thoughts on lost adoption connections. Because I recently learned of one of my own lost adoption connections, without whom I would not have ever built my career in adoption.
Linda was an adoption attorney (and founding member of Quad A) who hired me for my first adopton job four decades ago. She eventually left Texas and passed away in New Mexico in May 2026, and learning of Linda’s death left me with a lot of mixed feelings, so bear with me as I sort them out.
Becoming a Baby Adoption Professional
When I first met Linda, she was three years into running the first Texas adoption agency owned by an attorney. I was a laid-off public relations officer with a degree in journalism and sociology. I was at that “I’ll take any job I get offered” point. Linda was a tall, smart, laid-back blonde who hired me on the spot to be her agency’s first-ever birthmother counselor. I’d never worked with birthmothers nor done any counseling, at that point. I knew absolutely nothing about adoption, but I thought Linda must’ve hired me for my empathic personality. (In truth, I really think she needed somebody with a PR background, a degree, and some lower salary requirements.)
Linda’s agency was then the second-largest adoption program in Texas, and it was unique because it allowed placing parents to have a say in choosing their baby’s family, something that was traditionally a decision left entirely to social workers. As the “counselor,” I was expected to keep the placing mamas in line (ahem), to “help” them choose between one of three pre-selected and nonidentifying adoptive parents profiles. It was my job to be with them in the hospital… and then to support them in their grief after relinquishment when their baby’s parents left with the prize. (And disconnected their toll-free number that had been the birthmother’s only means of contact with that couple whose last name and address she wasn’t ever allowed to know.) Linda was something of a free spirit (albeit a highly-educated one), so as her PR point person, I had my hands full trying to keep my boss from saying the wrong thing to the press, and downplaying her agency’s affiliation with notorious NY adoption attorneys.
It was Linda’s dad, a renowned Texas attorney, who had inspired her career path, but it was her son and stepsons who were truly her greatest joy in life. I don’t remember Linda ever doing any of the agency’s legal work herself, although she never backed away from a fight if it meant getting an adoption done. Linda held court in her office, smoking at her desk and chatting with staff and occasionally, clients (especially our celebrity clients, typically well-known actresses, athletes or East Coast muckety-mucks.) She left the day-to-day office management to a high school graduate and friend who served as her office manager, but Linda was known for throwing great staff luncheons, having a big heart and being very generous. (She actually covered the cost of my graduate degree in exchange for all my unpaid overtime, for which I am forever grateful.)
What Gets Lost (& What We Find)
In the two years I worked for Linda’s agency, I learned everything I could about adoption there. However, it was actually what I learned about how and when adoption should not be done that had the biggest impact, and this led me to leave that job. I knew afterwards that I could never again work in adoption in a place where there was not greater transparency and truthfulness between everyone involved. That’s also what inspired my firm conviction that fully-open adoption is ultimately best for everybody, whenever adoption is the right decision for any child.
Linda and I only spoke again once in the years after I left, when we ran into each other at an adoption conference out-of-state. I (and several of her other employees) had gone to work at other adoption agencies, something that typically angered her, but she and I sat together at the hotel bar and reminisced that one night. In later years, bankruptcy and legal problems caused her to close her agency and leave Texas for good. I still thought of her now and then, and considered sending her a note to thank her for making my career possible, but I didn’t know how she might respond? Now I wish I’d had… but now this is forever one of my own lost adoption connections.
It’s not uncommon to see things differently with the benefit of time and space. Adoptive parents who may have feared the birthparents continued involvement at the time of placement often come to miss them in the months and years that follow. Birthparents who worry that the child they placed might grow up to resent them find healing in knowing that wasn’t the case, at all. And adoptees needing assurance that their adoption was never in any way a rejection of them can find being connected with their birthfamily helps them feel more secure in themselves. It reinforces their identity as being the result of both the parents who placed them and the parents that adopted them.
Managing Lost Adoption Connections
Ever since leaving that first adoption job, I have worked only in open adoption, as I said. That’s because I learned the vast damage that closed and semi-closed/semi-open adoptions can do to adoptive families, birthparents and adoptees. When Linda’s agency was shut down abruptly in 2012, it left thousands in the lurch, which was why Abrazo launched a private Facebook group to lend support to disenfranchised ASA birthparents who had no notice of the closure and no means of finding the children they’d placed, as a result. DNA testing has begun to open doors that once seemed shut forever, but it still takes good counseling to help create healthy relationships between folks who have suffered the toll of lost adoption connections over the course of many years.
One of the members of Abrazo’s private Facebook group for ASA birthparents was a birthfather who had supported his then-girlfriend’s adoption plans. However, he’d found himself cut off from contact with the baby they’d placed upon learning the adoptive family lived somewhere in Europe. He never gave up hope of finding his son, though, and Abrazo was happy to help facilitate an international phone call with the couple. They weren’t exactly happy to be “found” but when their son graduated from high school, he made the choice, himself, to fly from France to Texas to meet his birthdad and had a wonderful time building those long-lost bonds at long last.
No adoptee should ever have to wait for decades to meet “their own people.” Adoption author Patricia Martinez Dorner stopped by Abrazo just this week to bring more copies of her book, How To Open an Adoption. Pat has graciously donated these so that Abrazo can distribute them for free to anyone in need of a copy (so contact our office if you’d like one.)
Because there’s never any time like the present to recover long adoption connections, to help adoptees gain the answers they seek and/or to give all the parents that love them a chance to thank each other, once again.
