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Open Adoption From A Birth Mother's Perspective: A Story To Help Educators At All Levels Understand And Help Others Heal, Sara Elizabeth Villeneuve

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

When I was just 17, and in my first year of college, I found out I was pregnant and I had to navigate my way through adoption and healing after relinquishment. Adoption is a difficult choice. There is no one path that each birth parent follows, and there is no one road to healing that works either. Each birth parent's experience is unique. Adoption and being a birth parent has historically carried a stigma of shame for "giving up' a child. In just the last 40 years, an adoption renaissance has brought new understandings about the process, the opportunities for …