Eric Zorn’s Change of Subject column links to a New Republic article on the anti-adoption movement — birthparents who feel they were deceived by adoption agencies, and their supporters. Among the deceptive practices they list are money given them for pregnancy expenses, pressure to decide in the 24 hours after childbirth, promises by the adoptive parents to keep the birth mother in their life, and failure to provide information on the father’s responsibility to provide child support, welfare benefits available, etc. They say that the birthmother’s experience is traumatic and the loss she feels is continual.
I’ve read of a similar movement in Australia, where their ultimate goal was that, in the rare circumstance in which a mother would not or could not parent her child, the new relationship formed with caretakers be that of guardianship only, with the mother remaining, in law, the mother.
But here’s the catch: a part of the argument appears to be that any woman in financial difficulties due to a pregnancy, and who can’t afford to care for the child independently should be given as much State support (that is, welfare) as it takes.
What of the woman who simply doesn’t want to be pregnant?
I suppose if you’re “prochoice” in the sense that you think abortion has no moral significance and is just a medical procedure like any other, than the answer is that a woman who wants her child keeps it and a woman who doesn’t, aborts.
This “anti-adoption” movement has no room for a woman who doesn’t want to be a mother, but likewise feels that abortion is morally wrong. I’m not sure if, in their world, no pregnant woman would ever not want to be a mother, or if they simply take for granted that abortion is the right and proper response for unwillingly-pregnant women, or if they simply believe the genetic connection is paramount, and so sacred that it must never be severed.
What’s particularly sad is that poor women have likewise absorbed this anti-adoption attitude and turned it into, “it’s better to get an abortion than to give a child up for adoption, because at least then you don’t have to wonder about what happened to the baby.” Even women and girls who believe that abortion is killing a human being say that this is a better choice than adoption, “better dead than adopted,” I guess. (– based on articles I’ve read in the past and books interviewing these women.)
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