TITLE: Birth/1st Parents

DESCRIPTION

This event was held on June 26, 2021 featuring panelists Claudia Corrigan D'Arcy, Christopher Emanuel, Ashley Mitchell, and Renee Gelin. The second edition of our 2021 adoptee ally series will feature birth/first parents sharing their lived experiences. Birth/first parents are often abstract or villainized figures in an adoptee’s mind. Because birth/first parent stories are commonly minimized, we fail to recognize them as complex people also living with the impact that adoption has on their lives.

PANELISTS

Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy (she/her) got involved in the adoption community in early 2001 when she began preparing to search for and reunite with her son who was placed in a traditional closed domestic infant adoption in 1987. Claudia and her son are now in a successful reunion. Since 2005, she has published Musings of the Lame and has been very involved in adoptee rights advocacy in many states. She currently serves as the Associate Executive Director of Communication at the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York. Claudia is looking forward to exploring how we can better understand how to truly heal the riffs and separations caused by relinquishment and share how to repair the relationship between parent and adoptee.

Renee Gelin (she/her) lost her son to a devastating unnecessary adoption in 2011, after which Renee knew she needed to help other mothers to avoid unnecessarily separating from their newborns and help them preserve their families if possible. She is now the president of Saving Our Sisters. SOS is committed to helping expectant families make fully informed decisions based on information that so many other families have learned too late. Renee is thankful for being invited here to connect with you all to build the villages that have been lost and hopefully prevent unnecessary trauma via unnecessary adoption.

Ashley Mitchell, owner of Big Tough Girl and Founder + Executive Director of Lifetime Healing Foundation, set out to seek increased care, understanding, and free post placement care resources for birth mothers. For over a decade, Ashley has been an important birth mother voice speaking to reform, ethical practice, and national grief and trauma support. Ashley is humbled to be welcomed into this space to sit knee-to-knee with fellow Birth Parents, as well as Adoptees, and to share my experience as I have walked out 15 years of an open adoption with my son and all the complexities that come with that.

Christopher M. Emanuel is an accomplished Dad Coach, teen program director, radio host, a national trainer at the One Circle Foundation and the Executive Director of Sky Is The Limit Foundation. Mr. Emanuel is dedicated to educating, empowering, and promoting Responsible Fatherhood and positive youth development. His efforts have been highlighted on the Oprah Winfrey Network, The New York Times, The Atlantic Journal, ABC Nightline News, and preserved in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. When not volunteering or working, Mr. Emanuel enjoys spending time with his daughter, track and field, and travelling. As a part of this panel, he hopes to stimulate healing, create pipelines for family preservation and the importance of Fathers’ rights in adoption.