As you consider whether to entrust your child to adoption, you may be daydreaming about what things would be like if you kept your baby. A very normal part of this process is picking out names.

It makes sense to name your child, even if you do plan to proceed with adoption. After the adoption, the baby gets a new, “amended” birth certificate that effectively erases his or her original identity and makes it appear as if he or she had been physically born to the new parents. The name the new parents choose will go on that document. Your chosen name can go on the original birth certificate. (If you and the potential adoptive parents agree on a name, it can be the same in both places.)

Don’t be afraid to do this. Many adopted people are quite pleased and glad that their birth parents took the time and thought to give them a name. Naming your child shows you care.

How does it work? Different states and even different hospitals handle the process in different ways. I did have a name picked out for my son, but was never given the opportunity to fill out any birth certificate paperwork during the badly-handled delivery and surrender experience. Unfortunately, that means my son’s original birth certificate will always read “Baby Boy Lowe”—as if he were some foundling that I hadn’t cared enough about to name.

Now, ”Baby Boy Lowe” just doesn’t have the same ring as “Matthew Alexander Lowe,” the name I had chosen. (I did try to rectify the situation soon after his birth, but ran into terrible pigheadedness from the bureaucrats who keep birth and adoption records. Any adopted person who's ever conducted a search for their birthfamily knows just the kind of rudeness and condescension I’m talking about.)

Come to think of it, this reminds me of another yet another indignity—the hospital staff’s insistence on referring to my child by an acronym: BUFA, or Baby Up For Adoption. As soon as he was born, they took a black magic marker and wrote the term in gigantic letters on his crib card.

I kept crossing out BUFA and writing the name the adoptive parents had chosen for my son (they were present, and I was trying to honor their choice).

The nurses kept crossing the name out and writing BUFA again. It was like a silent war between us.

It shouldn’t be hard to understand, but the nurses sure didn’t seem to get the fact that the term BUFA is offensive. For starters, he wasn’t UP for adoption to anyone who walked by; I had made a carefully thought out adoption plan with handpicked parents. He wasn’t a generic orphan but someone much beloved, so much so that he was named by two families! And there was to be no secrecy or lies in our adoption—everyone was present and knew everyone else. So why the insistence on BUFA?

Sadly, this isn't the end of it. There are even more potential pitfalls associated with names and the birth certificate. I’ll cover them in future posts.