Effects of adoption on the birth mother other important milestone in the child’s life. Reports show that a birth mother feels grief when she has more children because this evokes the memory of the child she gave up. If she is faced with future infertility, she may believe it is a form of “punishment” for relinquishing her parenting rights over a child. Many birth mothers continue to mourn the loss of their child but with varying intensity. It is not until a mother actually places her child for adoption that she experiences what Julie Axelrod believes is similar to the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining,
Kübler-Ross model Yale University obtained some findings consistent with the five-stage hypothesis but others inconsistent with it. Several letters were also published in the same journal criticizing this research and arguing against the stage idea. George Bonanno, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, in his book "The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After a Loss", summarizes peer-reviewed research based on thousands of subjects over two decades and concludes that a natural psychological resilience is a principal component of grief and that there are no stages of grief to pass. Bonanno's work has