Open (Secret)

Unpacking later in a spare room upstairs, Hava took a long look at her birth son. "What are you supposed to give me?" she said, folding him into an embrace. He was supposed to kiss her, but squirmed away instead, then sat on the bed holding a bag of Gummi Bears he and Daniel had gotten Hava as a present. "I missed you," Hava told him.

Downstairs, the boys wanted Hava to play with them; she sat companionably on the floor near a wooden train set, which is Jonathan's favorite toy. "The one in the back won't go, and the one in the middle won't go," he said to Hava, who thought he was referring to two engines. As a toddler, Jonathan had a speech delay, and although he is now talking volubly and very intelligently, some sounds are not yet fully articulated. "She doesn't know what you're talking about," Daniel told his brother. "I do! I do!" protested Hava, but she didn't; he was talking about the control buttons on a single engine. "I always feel so guilty when I don't understand him," Hava said later. "Ann is better, because she sees him every day."

"When can we play the snail game?" Daniel asked; they moved on to Snail's Pace Race, a board game that involves rolling dice and moving snails along a track. Ann was standing behind the counter that separates the kitchen from the family room, mixing marinade for dinner. There was a dispute when Jonathan mistakenly rolled twice and Daniel objected. "We can say he was rolling for me," said Hava soothingly, and peace was restored until Ann said to Hava, "Cheater!"

"I'm not a cheater!" Hava cried.

Ann came around the counter and said to the boys: "Who's the cheater?"

"She is!" the boys said, pointing at Hava.

"I'm not!" wailed Hava, and then everybody -- including Hava -- started to laugh. Once, at a family party they'd all attended, Daniel had been playing a game with Hava's siblings, someone had jokingly called someone else a "cheater," and soon the allegation was being lobbed at everyone, including Daniel, who'd been upset and had to be comforted. "Cheater" had evolved into a running Goldfarb joke, which would be revived later that night, at dinner. Afterward, the boys would go to bed, and Ann and Hava would sit up talking, and it would occur to Hava to wonder how important it had been to Ann and Larry to have biological children. Ann would reply that biological relationship didn't matter, but that she would like to have experienced pregnancy. They would talk about an abortion Hava had at the beginning of her relationship with Jonathan's birth father, and how she got pregnant again immediately, she thinks, as a way to deny that the abortion happened. They would talk about a miscarriage Ann experienced, and how the day Ann met Hava would have been Ann's due date if that pregnancy had gone forward, and they would joke about how these lost pregnancies seem to have coalesced in Jonathan, who passed, in a way, from Hava's womb, such a gift, to Ann.

NOW 46, ANN GOLDFARB WAS EXPOSED WHILE IN UTERO TO DES, a drug prescribed to pregnant women in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s under the mistaken idea that it would prevent miscarriage, and which, instead, compromised the reproductive tracts of many female fetuses. Ann met Larry in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley, and they began trying to conceive when Ann was in her early 30s. Unsuccessful, they tried in vitro fertilization, then IVF using eggs from a donor. Adoption was the obvious alternative, though Ann worried about one more disappointment if a birth mother changed her mind. "I wanted the security of knowing that once I had the baby, it was done."

In this, she was like many adoptive parents, who, experts agree, are often daunted by the prospect of interacting with a birth mother, whose role has changed enormously. In the 1950s, at least 75,000 newborns annually were relinquished by birth mothers who were usually unmarried, usually white and often teenagers: young women from middle-class homes who were "told by family members, social-service agencies, and clergy that relinquishing their child for adoption was the only acceptable option," wrote Ann Fessler, an adult adoptee who in 2006 published The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade. Sent to maternity homes to avoid the stigma associated with unwed motherhood, the women were quickly separated from their newborns. Most never saw the babies again. Many adopted children were never told they were adopted, though many, in the end, found out. In the 1970s, a movement emerged -- fueled by birth mothers and by adult adoptees -- to open records, encourage more openness in adoptions, and garner some rights for birth mothers. "It serves no one's ultimate interests to pretend that these people don't exist," says Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute and an adoptive father.

Since then, more factors have combined to empower birth mothers, among them massive social changes. Single motherhood is now not only acceptable but also routine. In the United States in 2003, one-third of births were to unmarried mothers. Contraception is widely available, abortion safe and legal. All of these have cut deeply into the number of women relinquishing babies: The Donaldson Institute reports that about 14,000 women now relinquish infants for adoption every year. The majority are still white, although today there is very likely to be a socioeconomic difference between birth mothers and adoptive parents.

Domestic adoption of voluntarily surrendered infants, still viewed as the classic adoption scenario, is now the least common. Of the estimated 135,000 adoptions that take place in the United States every year, most -- about 50,000 -- now are foster-care adoptions from the child-welfare system, according to a 2006 report by the Donaldson Institute. Second -- about 48,000 -- are adoptions of an older child by a stepparent, and third -- about 23,000 and steadily growing -- are adoptions of children from other countries.

And the laws of supply and demand apply in family-making as elsewhere: In the United States, as birth mothers have dwindled in number, their negotiating leverage has increased. These days, the average birth mother is, like Hava Leichtman, a young woman in her early 20s, who has actively decided to carry a pregnancy and relinquish that infant, often defying pressure to abort or let a relative raise her child. Courting her attention are tens of thousands of infertile couples.