Whats More Evil? The word “Birthmother” or the fights caused over it? So, while I hate, hate, hate, the adoption terminology wars and refuse to participate in them, I’m going to break my rules because I also hate, hate, hate assumptions and all the rest too. And since I was literally forced to deal with this today, rather than just enjoying the printed thrills of having my book come in the mail, I’m going to go there.
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.
I feel COMPLETELY different when it comes to adoption. With abortion, I trust a women to know what she wants and exercise her right to make an informed choice. With adoption, I feel like she has no clue, cannot know what she wants and is not making an informed choice. This has plagued me. Why are my feelings different?
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.
I opened my email box this morning to receive this note from Marcie Cheney, whom, until she found it necessary to email me, I had no idea who she was at all.She shared her generous critique of how I am ineffective, a liability, preaching to the choir and damaging. Oh, and the standard implication that I have to learn to deal with my “stages of grief.” I love getting unsolicited advice from unknown people even if it does feel like beating a dead horse.
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.
To each and every one of us who has known the pain of empty arms, I am sorry that you have been hurt in this way by the adoption industry, but let us keep focus on those who have hurt us, the adoption industry, not those who suffered the same fate. Yes, you have your own feelings, your own story, your own truth and your own beliefs. They are yours, they have a place and you have a right to share them. However, we cannot dilute the strength of one, but should add to it. We should not be screaming to be heard, but taking turns lifting each other up in support. We should not be angry when another’s views are different, but understand that each mother has different resting places along the journey. We should not begrudge mother who chooses to use different tools or uses different language especially when we have the same common goals, a share vision.
Forced adoption is a drastic step; there aren’t words to express the trauma it causes to all concerned. It surely should be preserved as a last resort, a final call for those cases where children are in grave danger and need a fresh start. In the case of loving parents who also happen to use illegal substances there are almost certainly much more appropriate methods to help, if help is required.
“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.
She is not a saint. She is not a whore. She is a woman faced with one of the most awful concepts a mother can imagine: the willing separation of one’s child for life. Saints or sluts are not real. They are labels use to dehumanize the relinquishment experience. Both are used to separate the birthmother form the rest of the population and create impossible social contracts from which any person, birthmother of not, cannot continue to love within. The saint cannot admit to the pain and the slut does not deserve to feel the love. Polar opposites and not realistic for anyone. Not helpful for anyone. Not healthy for anyone.
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.
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.
As a country, we need to accept that no matter how much an individual might “want” something, it doesn’t mean it is ethical, moral or right to create people and then transfer their basic ties to their identity. The biggest losers here are the children.
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.
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!