Reproductive Rights

Get Your Facts About Adoption, Mirah Riben on Huffington Post, More Adoption Blogs from Adoption Bloggers December 30, 2015

Infertility: The Important Missing Piece in Health Education Classes

By Mirah Riben Why would adolescents need to be concerned with infertility, one might wonder? The answer is that, since fertility is precarious, decreases with age, and is negatively impacted by common adolescent behaviors, it is important to be cognizant of these risk factors to avoid than anguish of infertility. “Abstinence Only” sexuality education curriculum is mandated in order for American public schools to obtain federal funding. Opting out of…

Adoption Truth, Mirah Riben on Huffington Post, More Adoption Blogs from Adoption Bloggers October 28, 2015

New York Times Misguided: Anonymous Human Ova Sale Creates a Danger

By Mirah Riben A class action federal lawsuit is being pursued by egg “donors” for what they call “price fixing.” The lawsuit challenges the guidelines prepared by two professional organizations that set suggested limits on payments for egg “donations.” The mega-billion-dollar infertility industry argues that, regardless of the discomfort and risk involved in hormone injections and egg extraction, paying high compensation rates for these procedures would make it too tempting…

New Documentary Bravely Probes Surrogacy’s Complexities and Dangers

Adoption Events May 20, 2014

Join me in the New York  Screening of “Breeders: A Subclass of Women?” on June 18th

As I have long said that there is a strong correlation between what happens in surrogacy and what happens in adoption, so a film like Breeders is very important. It is an honest look at the risks of surrogate mothers and the commoditization of fertility and pregnancy, egg donations, and assisted reproductive technology in regard to human rights violations and women’s empowerment. Surrogacy is making all the same mistakes that have been made in adoption and have not yet learned from the past decades of education and awareness because the two have been seen as separate, but it’s really not very different.

Birthmother Regrets & Lessons, Costs of Adoption, Cultural Views on Adoption December 8, 2013

To the Parents Who Just Found Out Their Daughter is Pregnant

Maybe you or she or even some well meaning friends might suggest that your daughter relinquish this baby to adoption and this will, no matter what you might have been lead to believe or what you might read in most publications, will NOT allow her to continue life as planned. By encouraging or supporting your daughter to relinquish her baby to adoption you are, in a most literally, sense helping to destroy the child you now know as your daughter.

Pick a DOOR.. what's behind door number one??

Adoption Questions and Facts, Cultural Views on Adoption, Rants and Raves, Relinquishment November 9, 2013

Adoption is NOT an Alternative to Abortion

Increasing adoption awareness does not decrease abortions. The alternative to abortion is giving birth. The alternative to adoption is actually parenting your own child. Separate events at separate times even if in the same pregnancy. It’s NOT the “Price is Right” Pregnancy Door Game. The decisions made when facing an unplanned pregnancy do not happen at once and suddenly face three doors to go through parenting, adoption or abortion.

My sympathy for your infertility ends, when your compromised ethics infringe upon the rights of another family. When you believe that your pain & desires entitles you to another mother’s child, I draw a line

Rants and Raves September 10, 2013

Fertility and Getting Pregnant versus Infertility and Adoption

I just do not support adoption as a solution to fix your infertility. Or her infertility. Or their infertility or just about anyone’s . I do not support domestic infant adoption. Period. See, Adoption will not FIX your problem. Your problem is that you are infertile and cannot have your own child. If you adopt a child, then you will still NOT have your own child. You will have someone else’s child and you will still be infertile. And for you to GET that child, you will have to be part of a highly unethical and inhumane profit driven business. And I don’t care how wonderful you are, how much you have wanted to have a kid, how perfect of parents you would be, you still don’t get a pass on ethics.

Center for Bioethics and Culture

A Birthmothers Life July 23, 2013

The Center for Bioethics and Culture

Center for Bioethics and Culture
I have heard from more than a few good sources that many adoption attorneys are making most of their money through surrogacy agreements these days. In my opinion, the only difference between adoption relinquishment and surrogacy is that one pregnancy is usually unplanned and one pregnancy is planned. In either case, someone is getting paid for the separation of a mother and her genetic creation, her child.

A Birthmothers Life May 10, 2013

Societies Attitude when Birth Control Fails

“Yet whether it was an accident, ambivalence, or a careless mistake, it’s always the woman’s fault. She allowed herself to get pregnant. She couldn’t keep her legs closed”

Other women, other mothers, who have faced the surprising results on the dreaded “pee stick of doom”. But it’s not about adoption, it is in support of parenting, and parenting young. Rolling with the natural and biological results of sex, accepting a pregnancy before it’s time and the battles of birth control, but most of all the judgment that society, often other women, thrust upon us for daring to get pregnant in the first place.

Marriage Equality Not Adoption Equality

Adoption News, Rants and Raves March 29, 2013

All Wrong: Defense of Marriage Act and Adoption Don’t Belong Together

It’s not the “gay” that makes adoption lesser, for adoption is an equal opportunity loss provider. Children who are adopted, no matter how wonderful their gay or straight parents are, have already experienced a known harmful trauma; the breakage and separation from their original family. It’s not that they are getting substitute Daddy in place of a substitute mommy, or trading a daddy for a second mommy that is adding to the issues. It’s that the mommy and dada that they were born to have been replaced at all: period.

But that STILL has nothing to do with Marriage Equality. Nothing.

if you hear the pain in a woman's voice, and choose to shut it out....that says something about you. it says nothing about the voice you choose not to hear

Cultural Views on Adoption, Rants and Raves, Relinquishment February 4, 2013

Infertility Does NOT Give You the Right to Adopt!

The latest batch of pro-adoption propaganda, “What’s Mine is Yours”, by Katherine Nelson and Deanna Harper, has set a “beautiful” song that highlights the pain and suffering of infertility while promoting adoption and glorifying relinquishment. But with this song and the simplification and romanticism made of the relinquishing mother, Katherine Nelson leaves out millions of real mothers who have suffered a real loss of living, breathing children, many now gown adults. And often this trauma was inflicted by the hands who those claim to want others to understand; women who should be able to appreciate the true longing to be mothers. She promotes a false cure, a band aide, in adoption, by glorifying the very need that claimed so many of our children.