By Rosemary Miller

November is National Adoption Awareness Month, and in Montana, we have much to celebrate.

Catholic Social Services of Montana, formerly Catholic Charities, has been placing infants in adoptive homes since 1953.

For years, adoption was a very secretive process. The expectant mother often was sent away from her family, to a maternity home or to stay with relatives far away, until she had the baby. The situation never was discussed among the family members, and the young woman was made to feel she had brought shame upon them.

The prospective adoptive parents suffering the often emotionally ravaging experience of infertility rarely told anyone about their inability to conceive a child. Questions from friends and relatives, wanting to know when the couple would start a family, intensified the pain. They often expressed to the social workers doing home studies, in anticipation of adoption, that they felt God was punishing them by not sending them a baby. This feeling was replaced by gratitude to God, when they eventually became adoptive parents.

When the baby was born, a foster home provided care until the adoption agency could obtain custody of the child. Then the social worker decided which family would receive the baby. Only very basic information followed the baby into the adoptive home. Some children never were told they were adopted, and because the family members never mentioned anything about the adoption, the children grew into adulthood believing they had been born to the parents who raised them.

Today, adoption is very open unless, in a few cases, openness would compromise the child’s safety. While pregnant, the expectant mother almost always stays with her family or in the community. If she makes an adoption plan, she chooses the family that will receive her child, and she meets the family before the birth. Together, they forge a relationship to welcome the baby into the world. During the preparation time, they have the opportunity to get know each other. The medical history of the birth family is shared with the adoptive family, and later in the child’s life, the birth family is available to provide important health history if a medical concern arises.

Open adoption allows the child to be supported and loved by the adoptive relatives and by relatives in the birth family. A child never can be shown too much love. Openness helps adopted children grow up with a healthy sense of who they are. Adoption is all about the child.

It is something to celebrate, and November is a time when many families gather for celebrations in Great Falls, Billings, Helena and Missoula. At ceremonies in these cities, families share with the public their finalization of the adoption of a son or daughter. The families come from nearly all of the adoption agencies in Montana, and the adopted children range from infants to teenagers.

See the opening page of our website at www.cssmt.org for dates, times and locations in each city, and join us in celebrating adoption in Montana.


Rosemary Miller is executive director of Catholic Social Services of Montana.


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 27, No. 11, November 18, 2011.