I’m Having Their Baby Season 2 premieres Wednesday, June 12 at 10pm ET/PT on Oxygen.
To many of us, adoption is a process that seems pretty cut-and-dried: expectant mother whose pregnancy is unplanned and unwelcomed gives her baby a better life via overjoyed, indulgent parents who long for a child they cannot or choose not to have on their own. A happy ending for all.
Oxygen’s emotional docuseries I’m Having Their Baby — which debuts its second season June 12 — lays bare that, while that outcome is often the case, the path to it is rarely so simple.
For even the most resolved birth mothers, a growing belly and ultrasound images turn what is, at first, a frightening predicament into a very real child growing close to their hearts both literally and figuratively. Factor in the pressure to chose ideal adoptive parents, and pushback from partners, friends and family members who do not share their view of the adoption, and the result is months of agony and indecision that come to a head in the delivery room and sometimes beyond.
Meanwhile, for adoptive parents, pinning dreams of parenthood on a child whose birth mother and father may change their minds at any moment is equally unsettling.
I’m Having Their Baby’s Season 2 premiere features a pair of ambitious single moms whose dreams of furthering their education are complicated by unexpected pregnancies and partners who hope to convince them to keep their babies.
In Goshen, Indiana, 23-year-old Tory is already mom to Bentley, 3, whose birth dad is no longer in the picture. Tory is seven months pregnant by her current boyfriend Mike, 38, who has three children of his own. Tory hopes to return to school and pursue a career in the medical field, but Mike envisions getting married, settling down and raising their children together — including the unborn daughter they call Eliza. Though he’s already signed papers relinquishing his parental rights, Mike now regrets it and — while Tory and Sarah, the Ohio woman who plans to adopt Eliza with her husband Joe, are on an outing — he meets up with Joe to confess his plan to fight the adoption.
In Dallas, Sharanda, 30, is the mother of four children and pregnant with a son by her live-in boyfriend Jeremy, who is also the father of Sharanda’s youngest child. Kind, patient Jeremy says Sharanda is his world and hopes to raise their son together because his own dad wasn’t around when he was growing up. Sharanda loves Jeremy, too, but worries that their combined salaries aren’t enough to support another child and her dream of becoming a registered nurse. Complicating matters are Jeremy’s mother and Sharanda’s sister, who share Jeremy’s belief that the new baby should remain in the family no matter the hardships it presents.
Especially for viewers with no adoption experience, watching these three sets of parents — Tory and Mike, Sarah and Joe, and Sharanda and Jeremy (whose child’s prospective adoptive parents did not appear on camera) — wonder what their families and their lives will look like after the babies are born can’t help but make us examine our own impressions of adoption and the parents and children involved in a way that is eye-opening and frequently heartrending. And even critical, given the results of a recent uSamp study released by Oxygen that showed
- Nearly three-quarters of non-adoptive parents don’t think raising an adopted child would be any more difficult than raising a biological child.
- Nearly 70 percent of non-adoptive parents don’t think raising an adopted child would be difficult.
Meanwhile:
- 51 percent of adopted children reveal that their personal adoption story completely shaped who they are as a person
- 29 percent of adopted children’s friends and families think adoption had a great impact on them
I’m Having Their Baby Season 2 premieres Wednesday, June 12 at 10pm ET/PT on Oxygen.
Photo Credit: Oxygen Media