In my last post, I talked about the importance of spending time with your baby in the hospital. I mentioned that I am a firm believer in that you have to “say hello before you can say goodbye” and that spending time with your baby in the hospital can be healthy.

In one of the comments of that particular post, Faith who writes the Hoping to Adopt Blog here, commented about how her son’s birthmother chose to say goodbye. Faith mentioned that his birthmother took her time saying goodbye and that she chose to do so in the privacy of her own home, not in the hospital. She also mentioned that her son’s birthmother signed the relinquishment papers in her own home and not the hospital bed.

If you are making an adoption plan for your unborn baby, I encourage you to think about how you would like to say goodbye to your baby and how you want to sign those relinquishment papers. Adoption agencies and adoption professionals may try and tell you how it is normally done and just because others have done it a certain way before does not mean you have to do it in the same way, unless some law requires that you do. Adoption laws do vary from state to state on when after birth you can sign relinquishment papers. I’ve never come across one law saying you have to sign them in a hospital bed though!

I signed the relinquishment papers on the last day of my hospital stay on the bedside table while four other people (a notary, a hospital rep, the adoptive parents attorney, and “my” attorney whom I’d only met a few hours earlier) were all in the room as well. Personally speaking, I don’t think I could have signed them in my own home though, I wouldn’t have wanted to have to look in the chair I was sitting in when I signed those papers daily, but I do wish I had been given the option of signing them somewhere other than the hospital bed, such as an attorney’s office. I’m glad that future children will not be delivered at that same hospital because I think that experience could taint future experiences and I’m sure in some ways it will always be in the back of my mind.

For more on laws about signing relinquishment papers, check out this page on Consent to Adoption.