Reproductive Rights

Blog for Choice 2013 Lame Style

If you don’t believe in abortion, then don’t have one. I promise I won’t force you, but please don’t force my daughter to feel shame or cross state lines for wanting to control her fertility. Don’t give our countries women fake choices and then blame them and shame them for doing what they must. Don’t make them endanger their lives or be slaves to their bodies. Don’t let sex become something only the rich deserve. Don’t feed the adoption machine at the risk of women’s lives. You decide your moral code for your body and I will decide the moral code for my body.



The Culture of Poverty and Adoption: Adoptive Parent Views of Birth Families

Kathryn A. Sweeney* Purdue University Calumet Abstract This study used data from 15 in-depth interviews to better understand how perceptions of birth families by White adoptive parents rely on and challenge cultural perspectives of poverty.  Findings show the complexity of their views: even when adoptive parents recognize structural causes of poverty, they tend to rely on the idea that birth parent poverty results from inadequate choices made by individuals.  Findings…


Crisis Pregnancy Centers Funneling Adoption Misinformation

What the adoption industry counts on is that we won’t bother digging in and finding how they are all connected. It’s really easy to make a nonprofit host one website that links to another controlled website that links to another and make them all look independent. What they are doing is breaking up the whole message into little bits that then get fed to women over and over again, It looks like the message comes from all these different sources that have only her best interests at heart, but all roads lead to Bethany and Adoption and a lifetime of grief.


It’s NOT About Vaginas

This whole election has just made me feel HATED for being a women and I am just having trouble understanding it. I have trouble understanding we are having these conversations with the other side. I have trouble understanding WHY there even IS another side!


Conversations with the “Other Side”

Huge said: “So you are an anti-religious bigot. What about the millions of women who regret killing their baby for the rest of their lives??? What about all the of women that are maimed and ruined for life by being pushed into killing their own child? Do you really think mass abortion is a sound choice for birth control when so many other methods are available? I think you hate yourself and other women.”


Birth Parents in Adoption: Research, Practice, and Counseling Psychology

Mary O’Leary Wiley; Independent Practice Amanda L. Baden; Montclair State University This article addresses birth parents in the adoption triad by reviewing and integrating both the clinical and empirical literature from a number of professional disciplines with practice case studies. This review includes literature on the decision to relinquish one’s child for adoption, the early postrelinquishment period, and the effects throughout the lifespan on birth parents. Clinical symptoms for birth…


Adoption Speech:”Mothers Without Their Children”

The Association for Research on Mothering York University  Karen Lynn  2001 Good afternoon. This speech is a message from the mothers of the Canadian Council of Birthmothers, mothers who have suffered the trauma of having lost a child or children to adoption and who are learning to understand what happened to us and our children. Much of what I say here is a collection of thoughts shared by the members…


What’s Wrong With the Adoption Tax Credit?

While the original adoption tax credit was created to benefit the adoptions of special needs children, successful lobbying from adoptive parents and the adoption lobbyists have increased the credit by both the amount refunded and the range of adoptions covered.
The Adoption Tax Credit now covers expenses paid in an unsuccessful attempt to adopt an child before finalizing the adoption of another child can qualify for the credit. The Adoption Tax Credit now applies to domestic and international adoptions.


Birthmother, Good Mother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption

The Family Research Council claims to have conducted MORE research for the Birthmother, Good Mother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption, but after reading the two of them entirely, I believe that this new publication is still coming off of the original study. Both reports use the same copy for the methodology and both have the same research group, with the same number of participants in the same age ranges. I see Birthmother, Good Mother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption as a modified piece that demonstrates the actual twisting of the mind of a women experiencing an unplanned pregnancy. It’s really like a “How to Create an Kool-Aide Drinking Happy Birthmother” guide. It’s really rather frightening. I’m not sure whether women are really that easily manipulative or we are just really stupid for falling for this. Or maybe it’s just all internal and they have managed to tap into it. All I can tell you is that this feels like reading the inside of my brain during the whole adoption process.



When Only the Rich Deserve to Have Sex

Rye is a news junkie and sometimes I just have to be a pain and make him turn it off. As much as I love a good Rachel Maddow snarky fest, sometimes I just cannot take how incredible STUPID our elect politicians in Washington can be. It’s almost harder to watch their antics on TRMS or on Jon Stewart because it’s then so damn obvious how unrealistic and ideological and…


Adoption Commentary Craw Exposed

AKA How to Piss Off a Claud I haven’t felt the need to do this in a while. Usually, I don’t let other people’s comments get under my craw. After all, I have been online talking about adoption issues for ten years now and I had a rather thick skin to begin with. Rather than beat a person over the head with my beliefs, I would rather calmly state the…


Birthmother, Good Mother

“In choosing adoption they can now see themselves as good mothers, the highest form of motherhood – the mother who chooses what is best for her child regardless of sacrifice it requires of her. In doing what is best for her child, she fulfills her need to see herself as a good mother and accept the pain of relinquishment. In this way, she transforms agony of the entire story into a redemptive experience where she becomes a heroine in her own eyes and in the eyes of others.”


The Missing Piece: Adoption Counseling in Pregnancy Resource Centers

Current rates of adoption at most pregnancy resource centers are extremely low. Although no formal statistics exist, spot-checking adoption rates at larger centers indicate that it should rates commonly are below 1%. In 1999, the Family Research Council undertook further research to understand complex array of factors involved in considering adoption and how best to present adoption as a viable option for women.The research is designed to identify underlying factors that either inhibit or motivate the consideration of adoption in both single, pregnant women and in pregnancy counselors. The research focused on discovering the most basic impressions that women in counselors have about adoption and on the psychological dynamics of decision making concerning adoption.