By VALERIE J. NELSON, Los Angeles Times
Living with a secret is psychologically destructive - that concept was nearly an anthem for Annette Baran, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist who co-wrote "The Adoption Triangle," an influential 1978 book credited with giving early shape to the open-adoption movement.Baran died July 11 at St. John's Medical Center in nearby Santa Monica of complications from an infection, said her son Joshua. She was 83 and lived in Santa Monica.
"If there ever was an activist who changed the world of adoption, it was Annette," said Joyce Maguire Pavao, founder of the Center for Family Connections, an educational and counseling center in Cambridge, Mass., that specializes in adoptions.
Annette, 1981
From the late 1950s to 1974, Baran was director of adoptions at was then called Vista Del Mar Child-Care Service in West Los Angeles and placed more than a thousand babies, her family said.
Her acceptance of working in an era of sealed records and secrecy surrounding adoption eroded after a birth mother insisted on meeting the potential adoptive parents, Baran later said.
As Baran watched the back-and-forth between the couple and birth mother, she said she thought, "This is pretty good. Why does this have to be secret?"
As time went on, she also encountered many adoptees searching for their birth mothers who were in psychological pain, said Betty Jean Lifton, an adoption reform advocate.
"She thought, 'Oh my god, what have I done?' It really radicalized her," Lifton said. "She was waking from the great sleep that social workers were in and realizing how secrecy in closed adoption affected people."
Moved to crusade for open adoption, Baran joined a novel research project started by a University of California-Los Angeles psychiatrist, Dr. Arthur Sorosky, who noticed that his patients who had been adopted tended to have identity problems. Another Vista Del Mar social worker, Reuben Pannor, collaborated with them.
When they solicited opinions on open adoption - the idea that birth parents and adopted family know who each other are - they received more than 600 letters and interviewed many of the writers.
"The Adoption Triangle: The Effects of the Sealed Record on Adoptees, Birth Parents, and Adoptive Parents" resulted from that study. It helped popularize the argument that an adoptee's knowledge of birth parents is crucial to his or her identity.
Adopted adults "told us the reunion with birth parents made them feel normal and whole, for they finally experienced genealogical connections," the researchers wrote in 1980 in a letter to the Los Angeles Times.
For birth parents, there is "always a lingering pain for that child given up for adoption," they wrote. "Birth parents do not know if that child is alive or dead, well or ill."
"All adoptees, if they have a shred of intelligence, have to assume somebody dumped them," Baran told the Chicago Tribune in 1985, displaying the forthrightness that was a hallmark. Knowing about their background can ease those fears, she said.
The book significantly altered people's attitudes about adoption, according to several histories of adoption in the United States. The authors "quickly became the intellectual patron saints of the adoption rights movement," E. Wayne Carp wrote in the 2000 book "Family Matters."
Today, varying levels of open-adoption practices have become the norm, said Chuck Johnson of the National Council for Adoption.
In the early 1980s, Baran was again ahead of her time when she began investigating the secrecy surrounding birth by artificial insemination, colleagues said.
With Pannor, Baran interviewed donor offspring, donors and parents years after the fact and wrote the 1989 book "Lethal Secrets: The Shocking Consequences and Unsolved Problems of Artificial Insemination." The authors advocated for a child's right to know and were critical of the business of artificial insemination.
"No child is the product of a teaspoon full of sperm," Baran said more than once while arguing that donor records should be made public. "A child has a father - a genetic father. And to be denied half of one's genetic origins is really unfair."
She was born Annette Dolinksy on Jan. 7, 1927, in Chicago to house painter Hyman Dolinsky and his wife, Lillian. Her brother, Meyer Dolinksy, wrote for television.
Growing up, she spoke Yiddish as her first language and as an adult hosted a Yiddish-speaking group in an effort to keep the language alive.
At UCLA, she earned a bachelor's degree in social work and followed it with a master's in the same subject at the University of Southern California.
After working at Vista Del Mar, Baran directed an adolescent drug treatment program at UCLA, and as a psychotherapist in private practice often counseled adoptees.
"She became the Joan of Arc of open adoption," her son said. "To the adoptees, she was their hero. At conferences, they would cheer her and weep."
In addition to her son Joshua, she is survived by her husband of 62 years, architect Ephraim Baran; another son, David; a daughter, Naomi; and two grandchildren.
If you have any photos that include Annette, please send them to Pam Hasagawa or to Annette's family.
I have to say again that I simply cannot understand the few who fault Annette for her early work in adoption, following what was taught in social work school, when she did so much good - for the vast majority of her adult life - to reform it!
There seem to be some people who cannot understand how different life was in the 60s. They cannot recognize that the 1950s and 60s were as different from today as Victorian times. We not only could not wear shorts or jeans to school - we could not wear pants at all, even on the coldest days. In the bitter cold, we wore them under our skirts and had to take them off when we got to school. Lipstick was taboo all through high school (though we snuck it). In my home the word "stupid" was the worst word you could use. And I was raised in Brooklyn, NY - not the midwest or deep south...and in a non-religious, LIBERAL home!
Rock-n'roll was considered the devil's music by most of the country and DJs were banned from playing many artists. And during my lifetime, Black people were segregated in many ways still, including in school, until Brown vs the Board of Education in 1954 a year before Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a bus. The Woolwoth sit-in in NC occurred in 1960! In 1965 voting and registration rights bills for Blacks were still being passed. And the year I was persuaded to lose my daughter to adoption, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was shot.
Childbirth was also very different. Lamaze did not exist in the U.S. as an accepted practice until well into the 70s. Mothers were retunirely put out for childbirth, some restrained.
Mothers whose babies died had them whisked away without a peek, as that was thought best. Would you beat up on the doctors, nurses and social workers who prescribed to that theory? And so it followed through to adoption practices.
Babies were believed to feel no pain. They know now that is not true. Babies were put to sleep on their stomachs - without knowing that could suffocate and die in their sleep!
We sat in the sun for hours on end - even using baby oil and reflectors to multiply the effects of the sun - without any knowledge that it was dangerous and caused cancer. For that matter, smoking was considered glamorous and there was no knowlegde that that too was a carcinogen.
Sex was taboo. TV shows never mentioned anything sexual - even between married couples.
In adoption, mothers were told to put it all behind us and start ove frwh Forget and get on with lives. it was beleived we could. Adoptive parents were routinly counseled not to tell their children they wer adopted so the child would feel he belonged to them and wa snot different in any way form other children born into their families. These things were beleived to be best.
To hold Annette to the fire for her long past work that she since denounced is to hold Abraham Lincoln responsible for the slavery that occurred prior to the civil war or to find Jonas Salk culpable for those who were crippled by polio before he created the vaccine that all but eradicated that disease.
Annette was a product of the social work school of her day. But she saw it as wrong, denonced it and worked to turn it around. She was a whistelblower.
Those who see wrong and do something to change it are to be applauded not castigated for not doing it sooner....especially not by those who have done NOTHING, half of whom were "asleep" through the entire revolutionary change in adoption Annette Baran spearheaded.
As this article above points out, she was the first to HEAR US: adoptees and mothers! She heard us and she became our spokesperson in the professional community and MADE THEM hear us in ways that we never could! Annette wrote Adoption Triangle in 1978. What were YOU doing to change adoption practice in 1978? Unless you were doing MORE than she was (which is no one) you have no right whatseover to belittle this woman and her work.
Anyone who could read her words seeking to change adoption to guardianship and do anything but praise her is simply ignorant, IMHO, and unable to comprehend logic and the value of what this woman has accomplished in her lifetime. That all she called for has yet to be accomplished is a fact, just as racism still exists long after all the efforts of people like Martin Luther King forged the path where none had previously existed. They showed the rest of us the way. It is up to us to follow in their footsteps with gratitude and appreciation for their courge to blaze trails.
Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing. ~ Aristotle
Rebels and dissidents challenge the complacent belief in a just world, and...they are usually denigrated for their efforts. While they are alive, they may be called "cantankerous", "crazy", "hysterical", "uppity", or "duped". Dead, some of them become saints and heroes, the sterling characters of history. It's a matter of proportion. One angry rebel is crazy, three is a conspiracy, fifty is a movement. ~ Carol Travis
Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for. ~ Chief Justice Earl Warren
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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