Yellow Fever
April 5th, 2011, 06:20 AM
How Alberta pioneered gay adoption
By Theresa Tayler, Postmedia News March 29, 2011
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/4510588.bin?size=620x400
Baby Abby with adoptive parents Bruce Sellery, centre, and Dennis Garnhum, at their Bridgeland home.
Katelyn Kerik was 17 years old when she found out she was pregnant.
"The nurse came in, sat down and said, 'It's positive.' I started to cry," Kerik says, recalling the day nearly two years ago she found out she would be having her first child well before graduating high school.
Kerik grew up in small-town Alberta and now lives in Red Deer. While she currently has a good relationship with her mother, she was in and out of foster care as a child. Stress began to overcome the teen during her pregnancy as she worried that, without a high school diploma, no source of income and little support from the birth father, she wouldn't be able to raise her child.
"I went home and told my mom and stepdad that I wanted to keep my baby. I didn't know how it was going to work out. All I knew was that I really wanted to be a mom," she says.
As her pregnancy progressed, however, worst-case scenarios began to flood her mind. What if her baby was taken away and put into foster care? Would she be strong enough emotionally to raise a child? Could she afford it? Or was the same difficult childhood Kerik had experienced in the cards for her baby? It was that vicious circle of family strife that Kerik wanted to avoid with her baby girl, whom she planned to call Abigail.
Soon after, a social worker alerted Kerik to an Alberta-based agency called Adoption Options that encourages so-called open adoption. In that, birth mothers choose adoptive parents and maintain relationships with the baby and its new family.
Kerik began to think this could be the answer she was searching for.
There were several things the teen was looking for in parents. An artistic and creative environment was at the top of the list. She was also determined to pick educated people who could provide for the child financially.
"I wanted people who would raise her with a very open-minded outlook on life," Kerik says.
When she came to the file of a couple with all of these qualities, Kerik knew she had found the perfect parents for her baby.
That couple was Dennis Garnhum, artistic director of Theatre Calgary, and Bruce Sellery, a journalist and author specializing in financial planning advice.
Kerik's mother and grandparents supported her decision regarding adoption. But when the teen explained her intention to hand her child over to two gay men living in the heart of Calgary, eyebrows raised.
"They were expecting a traditional family," Kerik explains. "My mom and the rest of my family wanted me to reconsider and look into finding a straight couple."
But the teen mom was adamant Garnhum and Sellery were the best choice.
Today, as Garnhum, 43, and Sellery, 40, watch their adopted one-year-old Abby toddle over to her toys, letting out enthusiastic gurgles as she plays, they recall their adoption application back in 2007. The couple was expecting to have to jump through plenty of hoops to qualify.
"Adoption, marriage . . . These were things that would never be an option to me in my mind growing up," Garnhum says. "I didn't think about it because I knew it would never happen for me."
Despite their fears, however, the couple was pleasantly surprised to find out that gay and lesbian parent placements had been happening in Alberta since at least 1999, seemingly with little fuss or backlash. As more gay couples move toward adoption, Alberta has emerged as a pioneer, thanks to some unlikely, and perhaps unwilling, champions: former Tory premiers Don Getty and Ralph Klein.
Yes, Klein, the same former premier who threatened to invoke the notwithstanding clause so Alberta could opt out of allowing same-sex marriages when the federal government legalized the unions in 2005. Even as Alberta's Tories fought same-sex advancements, their privatization philosophy was paving the way toward open adoptions. That, in turn, has made Alberta a groundbreaking jurisdiction in same-sex adoptions.
The roots of open adoption in Alberta stretch back to the 1980s, when the provincial government began to rewrite the Child Welfare Act (now called The Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act).
Marilyn Shinyei, who co-founded Adoption Options in 1985, says one of the reasons the government was keen to overhaul the legislation was that both Getty and Klein were eager to keep stress off the public system by allowing private adoption.
By 1989, the province had formalized rules for adoption without government involvement. The regulations required all private agencies be licensed, and staff members to have a university degree in social work. What emerged was a push by adoption agencies like Shinyei's toward open adoptions.
It is not a new concept. According to Terri Spronk, a professor in the social services and child and youth care programs at Vancouver Island University, open adoption was the most common kind of child placement before the Second World War. It wasn't until the 1940s and '50s that closed adoptions became the norm, the belief being it was better for everyone if records were closed and children had no contact with their birth mothers.
But rule changes in Alberta came at a time when the thinking about adoptions was changing. Heartbreaking stories about children spending years searching for birth parents and a realization that biological bonds linger long after children and parents are separated opened the door to ideas that challenged traditional adoption roles. It wasn't always a smooth transition.
"Blood is thought to be thicker than water. (Open adoption) is a notion that seems to threaten our ideas about family and what a traditional nuclear family should look like," Spronk says. "Alberta was one of the few provinces doing this up until recently. It appears to me that open adoption was somewhat of a breaking trend in Alberta. It's now quite common across North America.
One of the unintended side-effects in Alberta, however, was a slow acceptance of same-sex adoption.
When Alberta's system opened, there were no regulations on gay and lesbian couples applying, and it was made illegal to discriminate against gays in adoption in 1999, but Sheryl Proulx, Adoption Option's current program director, says it was widely known the province was "far from open to the idea" of same-sex adoption.
"Everyone knew there was no way the government was placing children with same-sex couples (before 2006)," Proulx says.
"We would hear stories. If a gay or lesbian couple applied, the government would send someone to do a home study on them -because the written rule was they had to access every couple equally -but none of those couples were getting further along in the process than that."
Open adoptions changed that. Some same-gender couples began seeking out private agencies that might approve them as parents. Adoption Options proceeded with their first same-gender parent adoption in 1999. (In contrast, the first public adoption to same-gender parents didn't happen until 2006).
One same-gender couple who went to Adoption Options was Kathy and Sharlene Hamilton. They adopted their first daughter, Karly, in 2005 and their second, Abigail, in 2010
If there's such a thing as a typical neo-nuclear family, they fit the bill. They live on a cosy Calgary cul-desac, go to church on Sunday, and enjoy their family night Fridays together, which usually consist of homemade pizza and a few hours huddled around a board game.
"We make coffee every morning and mow the lawn when it grows. There's nothing different going on here," says Sharlene Hamilton, with a laugh.
Sharlene, 42, a student minister with the United Church, is similar to many busy working mothers -her days are jam-packed. Sharlene's wife, Kathy, 43, is equally busy balancing an accounting career with their active family schedule.
"Being a mom, having a family, eventually marrying Kathy -even 20 years ago, I always felt it would happen," says Sharlene.
Kathy, on the other hand, had resigned herself to a life without marriage and parenthood.
"For years, I just thought, 'Kathy, you're gay, you don't have kids.' It's a very homophobic view on my part -it was something I had to deal with as part of my own coming out and accepting of who I am," she says.
Kathy and Sharlene have been a couple since they met in the late '80s. They had a solid relationship and were financially stable for years before the idea of having children first arose. But Kathy wasn't convinced adoption was a good idea.
"I was scared. I was thinking, 'Is this fair to the child? Will society treat them badly or react badly because they have two moms?' " she says.
As of yet, not one neighbour, church member, work colleague or friend has batted an eye about their decision to add to their family.
But the women had some trepidation about sharing their happy news the week before they brought their first daughter home
"You know, we all judge people. This time, it was me who was being judgmental. My boss at the time just happened to be an American, Republican and Catholic. I thought, 'Wow, I'm going to tell him I'm married to a woman and we've adopted a child. This could go over like a ton of bricks,' " Kathy says.
"He said, 'That's all? I thought it was something bad, like you were going to quit'," says Kathy, with a smile
Proulx believes Adoption Options was responsible for the first recorded same-gender parent adoption in Alberta. Since then, she estimates the agency has facilitated about a dozen.
Adoption By Choice, another open agency founded around the same time as Adoption Options, did its first same-gender parent adoption in 2004, and has since helped about six gay or lesbian couples adopt.
According to Karen March, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, without the open adoption model, gay and lesbian adoptee parents in Alberta may have never had a chance at a fair application.
"With an open adoption, the birth parents have a say in where that child goes. If they say, 'I want my child to go to a same-sex couple,' that takes the onus off the state," March explains.
"When it's the birth parent's choice, that makes it hard for the critics to say, 'This is wrong,' "
In 2003, while completing a Ph.D at the University of Calgary, Spronk studied seven adult children raised in an open adoption in Alberta.
She says all seven agreed that open adoption was a good thing for adoptees.
"It's a matter of needing or wanting to have that information about where they came from . . . who they are," says the Vancouver Island-based professor
However, while the adult children were happy to have known their birth families while growing up, not all of Spronk's case-study subjects continued to have strong or ongoing relationships with their birth mothers and birth families once they reached adulthood.
"No adoption situation is ever going to be perfect," Spronk says.
Open adoptions can be a precarious situation to navigate even for the most conventional of families. Children often end up with large and often culturally different sets of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
When Garnhum and Sellery applied to become parents in 2007, they were pessimistic they would be considered eligible. Even if the adoption was legally viable, would there be a birthmother willing to consider two men as parents for her child?
The couple had only one "off-putting experience" during the application process.
When they went to a local walk-in clinic for their medicals, the doctor said he was "wrestling with the idea" of signing the forms.
He told them that, morally, he didn't believe they should be able to adopt a child. But, because there was nothing wrong with them physically, he had to check the box approving them.
"We got our forms and that's the main thing. He can believe whatever he wants, I'm not going to convince him of anything. So why bother trying?" Sellery says.
Although approved, the couple still waited three years before Kerik picked them. However, when she gave birth in December 2009, Kerik suddenly had a change of heart and opted to try to raise Abby as a single mom.
"I tried so hard. I really did, but I just couldn't do it and it broke my heart," she says.
At Kerik's request, Adoption Options stepped in and contacted Garnhum and Sellery.
"I knew Abby would never want for anything with them as her parents," Kerik says.
The two men took their new daughter home pledging to Kerik they would include her in Abby's life.
For the past year, the unconventional family has made things work, visiting each other regularly
Remarkably, Kerik's conservative, at-first disapproving grandparents have warmed to their grandbaby's new dads as has Kerik's mother
It's a relationship that Garnhum says he and Sellery cherish.
"When we first met the grandmother, she told us she didn't understand why (Katelyn) wanted to do this when Abby could have easily been placed with a man and woman. She told us she wasn't behind it, and she didn't like it," says Garnhum.
But then she changed her mind.
"She told us she had been working through it and she could see we were good parents to Abby and good men. By the end of our first lunch together, she asked if she could give us a hug, and eventually we were visiting her workplace with Abby and she was introducing us to her friends," says Garnhum, laughing.
Making an open adoption work isn't always easy, but Garnhum says it's doable when the adults involved are determined to put the child's welfare first
He says Abby's birth family has always given him and Sellery two distinct messages.
"The first is that they miss Abby profoundly. The second is that they know she's in the right place with the right two parents," says Garnhum. "All families are complicated, you just navigate your way through it day by day.
"It's amazing how much this has opened our minds. We never had a reason to go to Red Deer before. And now we go all the time. We sit in the backyard. We have barbecues. They make Abby beautiful blankets.
. . . It's a relationship we couldn't have imagined, either."
However, as Sellery points out, there is at least one drawback to equality for gays and lesbians in Alberta.
"The downside of the rights we have gained is that now any gay couple that has been together for more than five minutes is being asked by their mothers, 'When are you getting married and when are you having a kid?'" says Sellery, with a laugh.
"You see, we've also gained equality in terms of parental pestering."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
By Theresa Tayler, Postmedia News March 29, 2011
http://www.vancouversun.com/life/4510588.bin?size=620x400
Baby Abby with adoptive parents Bruce Sellery, centre, and Dennis Garnhum, at their Bridgeland home.
Katelyn Kerik was 17 years old when she found out she was pregnant.
"The nurse came in, sat down and said, 'It's positive.' I started to cry," Kerik says, recalling the day nearly two years ago she found out she would be having her first child well before graduating high school.
Kerik grew up in small-town Alberta and now lives in Red Deer. While she currently has a good relationship with her mother, she was in and out of foster care as a child. Stress began to overcome the teen during her pregnancy as she worried that, without a high school diploma, no source of income and little support from the birth father, she wouldn't be able to raise her child.
"I went home and told my mom and stepdad that I wanted to keep my baby. I didn't know how it was going to work out. All I knew was that I really wanted to be a mom," she says.
As her pregnancy progressed, however, worst-case scenarios began to flood her mind. What if her baby was taken away and put into foster care? Would she be strong enough emotionally to raise a child? Could she afford it? Or was the same difficult childhood Kerik had experienced in the cards for her baby? It was that vicious circle of family strife that Kerik wanted to avoid with her baby girl, whom she planned to call Abigail.
Soon after, a social worker alerted Kerik to an Alberta-based agency called Adoption Options that encourages so-called open adoption. In that, birth mothers choose adoptive parents and maintain relationships with the baby and its new family.
Kerik began to think this could be the answer she was searching for.
There were several things the teen was looking for in parents. An artistic and creative environment was at the top of the list. She was also determined to pick educated people who could provide for the child financially.
"I wanted people who would raise her with a very open-minded outlook on life," Kerik says.
When she came to the file of a couple with all of these qualities, Kerik knew she had found the perfect parents for her baby.
That couple was Dennis Garnhum, artistic director of Theatre Calgary, and Bruce Sellery, a journalist and author specializing in financial planning advice.
Kerik's mother and grandparents supported her decision regarding adoption. But when the teen explained her intention to hand her child over to two gay men living in the heart of Calgary, eyebrows raised.
"They were expecting a traditional family," Kerik explains. "My mom and the rest of my family wanted me to reconsider and look into finding a straight couple."
But the teen mom was adamant Garnhum and Sellery were the best choice.
Today, as Garnhum, 43, and Sellery, 40, watch their adopted one-year-old Abby toddle over to her toys, letting out enthusiastic gurgles as she plays, they recall their adoption application back in 2007. The couple was expecting to have to jump through plenty of hoops to qualify.
"Adoption, marriage . . . These were things that would never be an option to me in my mind growing up," Garnhum says. "I didn't think about it because I knew it would never happen for me."
Despite their fears, however, the couple was pleasantly surprised to find out that gay and lesbian parent placements had been happening in Alberta since at least 1999, seemingly with little fuss or backlash. As more gay couples move toward adoption, Alberta has emerged as a pioneer, thanks to some unlikely, and perhaps unwilling, champions: former Tory premiers Don Getty and Ralph Klein.
Yes, Klein, the same former premier who threatened to invoke the notwithstanding clause so Alberta could opt out of allowing same-sex marriages when the federal government legalized the unions in 2005. Even as Alberta's Tories fought same-sex advancements, their privatization philosophy was paving the way toward open adoptions. That, in turn, has made Alberta a groundbreaking jurisdiction in same-sex adoptions.
The roots of open adoption in Alberta stretch back to the 1980s, when the provincial government began to rewrite the Child Welfare Act (now called The Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act).
Marilyn Shinyei, who co-founded Adoption Options in 1985, says one of the reasons the government was keen to overhaul the legislation was that both Getty and Klein were eager to keep stress off the public system by allowing private adoption.
By 1989, the province had formalized rules for adoption without government involvement. The regulations required all private agencies be licensed, and staff members to have a university degree in social work. What emerged was a push by adoption agencies like Shinyei's toward open adoptions.
It is not a new concept. According to Terri Spronk, a professor in the social services and child and youth care programs at Vancouver Island University, open adoption was the most common kind of child placement before the Second World War. It wasn't until the 1940s and '50s that closed adoptions became the norm, the belief being it was better for everyone if records were closed and children had no contact with their birth mothers.
But rule changes in Alberta came at a time when the thinking about adoptions was changing. Heartbreaking stories about children spending years searching for birth parents and a realization that biological bonds linger long after children and parents are separated opened the door to ideas that challenged traditional adoption roles. It wasn't always a smooth transition.
"Blood is thought to be thicker than water. (Open adoption) is a notion that seems to threaten our ideas about family and what a traditional nuclear family should look like," Spronk says. "Alberta was one of the few provinces doing this up until recently. It appears to me that open adoption was somewhat of a breaking trend in Alberta. It's now quite common across North America.
One of the unintended side-effects in Alberta, however, was a slow acceptance of same-sex adoption.
When Alberta's system opened, there were no regulations on gay and lesbian couples applying, and it was made illegal to discriminate against gays in adoption in 1999, but Sheryl Proulx, Adoption Option's current program director, says it was widely known the province was "far from open to the idea" of same-sex adoption.
"Everyone knew there was no way the government was placing children with same-sex couples (before 2006)," Proulx says.
"We would hear stories. If a gay or lesbian couple applied, the government would send someone to do a home study on them -because the written rule was they had to access every couple equally -but none of those couples were getting further along in the process than that."
Open adoptions changed that. Some same-gender couples began seeking out private agencies that might approve them as parents. Adoption Options proceeded with their first same-gender parent adoption in 1999. (In contrast, the first public adoption to same-gender parents didn't happen until 2006).
One same-gender couple who went to Adoption Options was Kathy and Sharlene Hamilton. They adopted their first daughter, Karly, in 2005 and their second, Abigail, in 2010
If there's such a thing as a typical neo-nuclear family, they fit the bill. They live on a cosy Calgary cul-desac, go to church on Sunday, and enjoy their family night Fridays together, which usually consist of homemade pizza and a few hours huddled around a board game.
"We make coffee every morning and mow the lawn when it grows. There's nothing different going on here," says Sharlene Hamilton, with a laugh.
Sharlene, 42, a student minister with the United Church, is similar to many busy working mothers -her days are jam-packed. Sharlene's wife, Kathy, 43, is equally busy balancing an accounting career with their active family schedule.
"Being a mom, having a family, eventually marrying Kathy -even 20 years ago, I always felt it would happen," says Sharlene.
Kathy, on the other hand, had resigned herself to a life without marriage and parenthood.
"For years, I just thought, 'Kathy, you're gay, you don't have kids.' It's a very homophobic view on my part -it was something I had to deal with as part of my own coming out and accepting of who I am," she says.
Kathy and Sharlene have been a couple since they met in the late '80s. They had a solid relationship and were financially stable for years before the idea of having children first arose. But Kathy wasn't convinced adoption was a good idea.
"I was scared. I was thinking, 'Is this fair to the child? Will society treat them badly or react badly because they have two moms?' " she says.
As of yet, not one neighbour, church member, work colleague or friend has batted an eye about their decision to add to their family.
But the women had some trepidation about sharing their happy news the week before they brought their first daughter home
"You know, we all judge people. This time, it was me who was being judgmental. My boss at the time just happened to be an American, Republican and Catholic. I thought, 'Wow, I'm going to tell him I'm married to a woman and we've adopted a child. This could go over like a ton of bricks,' " Kathy says.
"He said, 'That's all? I thought it was something bad, like you were going to quit'," says Kathy, with a smile
Proulx believes Adoption Options was responsible for the first recorded same-gender parent adoption in Alberta. Since then, she estimates the agency has facilitated about a dozen.
Adoption By Choice, another open agency founded around the same time as Adoption Options, did its first same-gender parent adoption in 2004, and has since helped about six gay or lesbian couples adopt.
According to Karen March, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, without the open adoption model, gay and lesbian adoptee parents in Alberta may have never had a chance at a fair application.
"With an open adoption, the birth parents have a say in where that child goes. If they say, 'I want my child to go to a same-sex couple,' that takes the onus off the state," March explains.
"When it's the birth parent's choice, that makes it hard for the critics to say, 'This is wrong,' "
In 2003, while completing a Ph.D at the University of Calgary, Spronk studied seven adult children raised in an open adoption in Alberta.
She says all seven agreed that open adoption was a good thing for adoptees.
"It's a matter of needing or wanting to have that information about where they came from . . . who they are," says the Vancouver Island-based professor
However, while the adult children were happy to have known their birth families while growing up, not all of Spronk's case-study subjects continued to have strong or ongoing relationships with their birth mothers and birth families once they reached adulthood.
"No adoption situation is ever going to be perfect," Spronk says.
Open adoptions can be a precarious situation to navigate even for the most conventional of families. Children often end up with large and often culturally different sets of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
When Garnhum and Sellery applied to become parents in 2007, they were pessimistic they would be considered eligible. Even if the adoption was legally viable, would there be a birthmother willing to consider two men as parents for her child?
The couple had only one "off-putting experience" during the application process.
When they went to a local walk-in clinic for their medicals, the doctor said he was "wrestling with the idea" of signing the forms.
He told them that, morally, he didn't believe they should be able to adopt a child. But, because there was nothing wrong with them physically, he had to check the box approving them.
"We got our forms and that's the main thing. He can believe whatever he wants, I'm not going to convince him of anything. So why bother trying?" Sellery says.
Although approved, the couple still waited three years before Kerik picked them. However, when she gave birth in December 2009, Kerik suddenly had a change of heart and opted to try to raise Abby as a single mom.
"I tried so hard. I really did, but I just couldn't do it and it broke my heart," she says.
At Kerik's request, Adoption Options stepped in and contacted Garnhum and Sellery.
"I knew Abby would never want for anything with them as her parents," Kerik says.
The two men took their new daughter home pledging to Kerik they would include her in Abby's life.
For the past year, the unconventional family has made things work, visiting each other regularly
Remarkably, Kerik's conservative, at-first disapproving grandparents have warmed to their grandbaby's new dads as has Kerik's mother
It's a relationship that Garnhum says he and Sellery cherish.
"When we first met the grandmother, she told us she didn't understand why (Katelyn) wanted to do this when Abby could have easily been placed with a man and woman. She told us she wasn't behind it, and she didn't like it," says Garnhum.
But then she changed her mind.
"She told us she had been working through it and she could see we were good parents to Abby and good men. By the end of our first lunch together, she asked if she could give us a hug, and eventually we were visiting her workplace with Abby and she was introducing us to her friends," says Garnhum, laughing.
Making an open adoption work isn't always easy, but Garnhum says it's doable when the adults involved are determined to put the child's welfare first
He says Abby's birth family has always given him and Sellery two distinct messages.
"The first is that they miss Abby profoundly. The second is that they know she's in the right place with the right two parents," says Garnhum. "All families are complicated, you just navigate your way through it day by day.
"It's amazing how much this has opened our minds. We never had a reason to go to Red Deer before. And now we go all the time. We sit in the backyard. We have barbecues. They make Abby beautiful blankets.
. . . It's a relationship we couldn't have imagined, either."
However, as Sellery points out, there is at least one drawback to equality for gays and lesbians in Alberta.
"The downside of the rights we have gained is that now any gay couple that has been together for more than five minutes is being asked by their mothers, 'When are you getting married and when are you having a kid?'" says Sellery, with a laugh.
"You see, we've also gained equality in terms of parental pestering."
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald