Adoption: A Pro-Choice Option
by Amie Newman
June 22, 2010 - 6:00am (Print)
Susan Dominus' article in the New York Times this weekend, "Campaigning for Common Ground in the Abortion Debate," does not open on a high note. The very first sentence, "What if groups that demanded reproductive options for women actually offered them?" shows a stunning lack of understanding about what some health centers around this country actually do offer women who are pregnant and unsure of whether or not they wish to carry the pregnancy to term, become a parent to the child or not. It's an unfortunate opening because the subject of the article is one that deserves scrutiny beyond laying some sort of ineptness at the feet of abortion providers or reproductive health advocates.
The Adoption Access Network, founded by Corinna Lohser of the New York-based, pro-choice adoption agency, Spence-Chapin, and Cristina Page, author and long-time reproductive rights advocate (and previously a consultant to RH Reality Check), is a project that started long before President Obama was elected. Lohser and Page believe that reproductive justice advocates can - and should - take a greater ownership over the adoption industry, applying a reproductive and women's rights lens to the experience for women and families.
The Adoption Access Network is on the cusp of launching a campaign to "make adoption a subject that patients and social workers alike feel more comfortable broaching in abortion clinics." To that end, the project will be placing posters in clinics and training clinic staff and social workers on how best to discuss adoption as an option for women who come to abortion clinics. But the project is much more than posters and trainings.
According to Cristina Page,
"The whole mission of our project is to bring pro-choice standards to the field of adoption. It’s been difficult for the pro-choice movement to make a claim to adoption. Providers are traditionally only as good as the resources they have available and the truth is the adoption resources haven't been very pro-choice. We decided to address this and have created a network of pro-choice adoption agencies around the country."
So while the NYT article assumes that those who work for reproductive freedom or at women's health centers aren't already either offering information, fully informed of or supportive of adoption as an option for their patients, the network takes a different approach.
Page continues, "This isn’t an alternative to abortion, it sort of minimizes adoption by putting it that way. There are different choices for different women for different phases of their lives. Most women who choose adoption, their intitial choice is abortion but for many, they accessed services too late. I think there is a real onus on the pro-choice movement to serve these women."
At the non-profit women's health center at which I worked not only were we allied with two major adoption agencies in the city--both of which used the open-adoption model-- but representatives of the agencies came to speak to clinic staff women at least twice in the seven years I worked there. This is part of what Page and her colleagues want to see replicated around the country.
"We believe women who are considering adoption deserve high-quality care, accurate information in a non-coercive environment. Because there is a lack of information, as a result of the pro-life movement having a near monopoly on adoption resources, this has been a group of women [women who are interested in adoption] who have been neglected," says Page.
Since open adoption is simply not available to many women, having an agency like Spence-Chapin, fully supportive of women's and girl's reproductive rights leading the call is critical, according to Page.
There is not a well-respected health care provider out there who offers abortion care who would not offer her or his patients information on all opportunities to ensure she is as fully informed as possible regarding her options. Connecting women's health centers that do offer abortion services, with other health providers, and social service agencies in an area is a noble and important goal. Women have diverse needs: they may be victims of domestic violence, pregnant as a result of sexual assault or incest, or in need of mental health counseling. At the health center for which I worked, all staff women were regularly trained, both internally and through representatives of public health centers, domestic violence shelters, adoption agencies, drug rehabilitation centers and more, to be able to speak about the various services available. But, most importantly perhaps, our clinic staff women were trained in Pregnancy Options Counseling, perhaps the most thorough and clarifying counseling out there as it pertains to unplanned pregnancy. That is, before a woman was considered "fully informed" and before a physician would perform an abortion, our staff worked to ensure this was what her client really wanted. This meant engaging in counseling; it meant interviewing the woman and talking to her about her own unique circumstances; it meant uncovering whether this person wanted an abortion, wanted to continue with the pregnancy and parent the child, or continue with the pregnancy and learn more about adoption options. If a woman seeking an abortion expressed the slightest doubt about undergoing an abortion, she was connected with counseling resources that might be able to help her understand what it was she truly needed or wanted at the time.
As provider education, as another step towards connecting all of women's care, there is nothing wrong with posters on adoption or educating providers more thoroughly about what open adoption looks like. But adoption is not a "distraction" from abortion and, given the option, most women we saw at the health center seeking to terminate their pregnancies did not change their minds, even after being provided with more information about adoption - even open adoption (laws about which vary from state-to-state and is far from cut-and-dried). Most women came to our health care center firm over their decision to terminate their pregnancy.
The Adoption Access Network seeks to look more closely at how to promote ethical and human-rights based adoption services for mothers and their children. Some have certainly taken issue with the entire industry.
Cristina Page acknowledges that this is exactly why creating a trusted, credible network of pro-choice adoption agencies, linked with centers like Planned Parenthood, is so critical:
"Adoption can be a very shadowy, sketchy field in which sometimes people with ulterior motives work under the guise of serving women but really have an interest in what a woman does with her pregnancy. But, here's the thing about the Adoption Access Network. The only interest we have is that she has all her choices available to her."
Page also reminds us that applying pro-choice standards and a women's rights lens to the adoption experience means not just expanded rights and options for birth mothers but for those gay and lesbian parents desperate to adopt but often kept out of the pool by more religious-in-nature or conservative agencies. Developing a network of pro-choice adoption agencies changes family rights. Anecdotally, she tells me, pro-choice adoption agencies have an active pool of gay and lesbian parents wanting to adopt.
The New York Times article also, unfortunately, (and I don't think this is what the Adoption Access Network project does) sets up a false dichotomy that plays on the absolutely wrong notion that those health center and care providers that offer abortion services are simply abortion-mills more intent on providing abortions than comprehensive care for women. Dominus writes,
"Discussing these choices is always delicate, but perhaps even more so in this setting. Social workers in abortion clinics run the risk of sounding as if they’re offering a refutation of the service they are there to provide."
In fact, most providers who offer these services (like Planned Parenthood but including the non-and for-profit health care centers around the country, independent providers and hospitals), provide a full range of health care services for women's reproductive and sexual health. They offer abortion services because they understand that this is a safe, legal medical option for pregnant women who do not wish to carry their current pregnancy to term; they offer abortion care as one type of service not because they believe abortion is the only option but because they believe abortion is an option.
So while the New York Times article pits adoption against abortion, as if they are opposite sides of a coin, the Adoption Access Network acknowledges that this is exactly what reproductive rights and health advocates and providers do not do. In fact, what reproductive justice advocates and providers know--and carry forth in their vision and their work with women--is that respecting women's bodily autonomy, ensuring women's rights is about not elevating one option ahead of another. It's about integrating them all as full-spectrum, comprehensive women's care.
It's why training providers at Planned Parenthood (PP) and connecting them to pro-choice, supportive adoption agencies in a network organized by geographic region, could be--and is--extremely successful. Page told me that, recently, a woman who came to Planned Parenthood was able to place her child up for adoption with the help of newly trained PP staff women. The process was so seamless that the woman--and Planned Parenthood staff--barely needed the assistance of Spence-Chapin at all.
Where the Adoption Access Network does not want to go? Political. Using adoption as solely a common ground tool or, worse, as a wedge-issue between anti-and pro-choice advocates is unfair most of all to women but it also does nothing to further the discussion on either side of the debate.
Page responds to the idea, "We're not responding to the other side, with this project. This takes place outside of the culture wars. It wasn’t born out of a need to appease any culture war and was created long before Obama’s common ground efforts."
She even recalls Dr. Tiller to make a point:
"Dr. Tiller stepped up three weeks before his murder at the NAF (National Abortion Federation) conference, at a presentation I gave on adoption, and made a plea to his provider colleagues that they take a more active role in caring for women who are choosing adoption. Was that a political strategy? No. He said some of the most fulfilling parts of his career were about helping women place their babies up for adoption."
Page feels that the Adoption Access Network, if used as a tool to expand women's access to information and resources when faced with an unplanned pregnancy, can be useful. They hope to ignite deeper discussion about the ways in which we can and should be furthering reproductive and sexual health and pregnancy options in equitable, just and rights-based ways. It's what reproductive and sexual health and rights advocates have been doing for years.
Thank you, Amie, for writing such a wonderful response to a disappointing article. The first line was SO off-putting for me, I could barely force myself to read the rest of it. Not to mention that the title is completing misleading - as you point out above, ensuring that adoption is a dignified, real option for women is a way of expanding reproductive options. Adoption is NOT the opposite of abortion, and it is certainly NOT about finding 'common ground' on abortion! It felt like such a missed opportunity to promote the groundbreaking work that the Adoption Access Network is doing, so I am deeply grateful that you wrote this piece. Thank you to the Adoption Access Network for being there for women and for providers who are committed to ensuring that women can find the honest, respectful, compassionate and pro-choices services they deserve.
"But, here's the thing about the Adoption Access Network. The only interest we have is that she has all her choices available to her."
The very name BELIES THAT! You are adoption advocates offering options of various types of adoption! You are just as bad as any pro-life crisis pregnancy center. While they are concerned with preventing abortion, you - with your connections to Spence and other adoption BUSINESES - are pushing women to that option, even if just subtly.
Any implication or comparison that lead smothers to see adoption as "best" for them or their baby is fraudulent coercion, because adoption is not always best for everyone. Adopted children suffer to from the separation and feelings of rejection and abandonment, that all the love in the world sometimes cannot erase. Adoptees are over-represented in special ed and all facilities for adolescents, as well as prisons and mental hospitals. Adoptees...NOT children of single mothers!
It is abundantly clear that the new program you are launching is straight from the NCFA “Good Mother – Birth Mother” propaganda publication instructing social workers adoption facilitators, and all health professionals how to CONVINCE expectant mothers to relinquish because even non-profit and religious adoption agencies rely on relinquishment of babies to place for adoption to pay their overhead and salaries.
Do not hold yourself as superior to pro-lifers unless you are giving these women the help they need to keep their families intact. Real help, like providing them with housing and medical without a single string attached.
Mothers who relinquish children for adoption have been recognized in multiple studies as suffering lifelong irresolvable grief, PTSD and other symptoms: physical and psychological. See http://tinyurl.com/universal-grief. That is why
The Uniform Adoption Act calls for the protection of "minor children against unnecessary separation from their birth parents."
Adoption should be a last resort after all measures to keep children safely with their parents or extended family have failed. States that offer in-home foster care for mothers AND their babies, instead of separating them, offering them rehab and parenting classes and whatever they need, are more cost effective and have far better results than traditional foster care. If you were truly altruistic in helping women that is what you would provide. But you are not. You are in the business of adoption because babies are in demand and it is VERY lucrative.
Open adoptions are UNENFORCEABLE promises that are often broken. To “sell” that as an option for mothers without letting them know that is deceitful fraud. To involve mothers in an adoption where those adopting have attorneys protecting their rights and mothers don’t, to allow prospective adopters pay their medical and housing expenses, to allow them in the delivery room…are all coercive.
And now, to see if you print this.
Mirah Riben, author, The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Indusrty
"The Adoption Access Network seeks to look more closely at how to promote ethical and human-rights based adoption services for mothers and their children."
This states quite plainly that your purpose is to PROMOTE ADOPTION for the agencies you are connected with and is a direct and blatant contradiction of: "The only interest we have is that she has all her choices available to her."
"Most women who choose adoption, their intitial [sic] choice is abortion..." is a vile, repugnant smack in the face to every woman who was ever persuaded that adoption was a loving choice not to mention how offensive and cruel it is to all adopted persons to read such pejorative, prejudicial, judgments with no substantiation. If you have a reference for this allegation, I'd greatly appreciate you sharing it.
You are basing your opinions on a select population you saw while working at a crisis pregnancy clinic where you counseled victims of DV or rape, etc. Not all expectant moms are Juno and go there first. Many do not even know they are pregnant until abortion is no longer an option, not to mention those who are opposed to abortion for religious or personal moral reasons. Others are trying to make plans to parent and find themselves unable to without some help or encouragement. Today, a majority of children are relinquished because of poverty, many of whom are born to married couples, some who already have siblings to the child they are carrying. Yet you do not mention the most basic difference between relinquishers and adopters - finances. Instead you feed the myth of adoptees being “unwanted” and far more lucky not to have been aborted than others. Desperation – not unlike what drove Moses’ mother, Jochabed - to let their children go is a far cry from deciding between abortion and adoption.
What you want to ignore are those who want desperately to keep their babies because you do nothing to help them fulfill that choice.
Mirah Riben
thank you for commenting but you do make a lot of allegations and assumptions - and some plain wrong statements - that I'd like to address.
First of all, I did not work at a crisis pregnancy center. FAR from it. I worked at a non-profit, women's health center with physicians and nurses on staff. The center was 33 years old at the time, and we provided a full range of health care from annual exams, family planning, contraception and abortion care to STI checks and treatment. It was not in any way a "crisis pregnancy center."
Second of all, the statement about the idea that women who decide on adoption often first consider abortion, was meant in reference to the women who, as you yourself wrote, may have considered abortion first but were too far along to terminate the pregnancy to do so. I do not think there is anything wrong with this and it does not make adoption any less of a loving, wonderful choice in the least. In fact, what the AAN is trying to do is to make the experience as compassionate and loving as possible.
Lastly, the Adoption Access Network is just that - a network to access adoption. It is not a for profit adoption agency. It's not an adoption agency at all. It has no stake in this beyond wanting to ensure that women's health centers are as fully informed about adoption and to make sure that women receive unbiased information.
Thanks for your comment.
<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} -->
/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}I want to thank you for this article, as it goes a long way in clearing up some of the misconceptions readers had after reading about the AAN in the NY Times. But, as Assistant Director of Birth Parent Services for Spence-Chapin (and participant in the development and implementation of training for the AAN), I wanted to clarify a few things, so that readers are not left with other misconceptions. The AAN is a collaboration between Spence-Chapin and a number of reproductive health centers. Part of that collaboration has been providing training to Counselors and Social Workers who have been designated by their clinics as Adoption Specialists. These Specialists receive training regarding issues and practice specific to adoption so that they are better able to discuss adoption in the context of the options counseling that Counselors and Social Workers at these clinics already provide. If a client gets to the point of planning an adoption, the collaboration continues with a Birth Parent Social Worker from the adoption agency assisting every step of the way. This was true in the cited case that resulted in an adoption as well as in six other cases in which clients chose to parent their children.
Ultimately, we hope to expand this project into a network of pro-choice Adoption Agencies working with reproductive health providers throughout the country. Pro-choice in adoption includes unbiased counseling around the decision of whether or not to continue a pregnancy. But it also includes support for client decision making throughout the pregnancy: assisting her in exploring resources in her family and community that might enable her to parent; supporting her right and ability to choose the adoptive family; providing her with families to choose from that reflect diversity of ethnicity, religion, race, and culture; facilitating decision making around ongoing communication and contact between birth parents, adoptive parents, and their children; and ensuring that counseling continues after birth so that no one signs legal documents surrendering her right to parent her child without exploring all alternatives. There are many such agencies around the country. The goal is for reproductive health centers to have access to and support from these agencies, so that there is an adoption resource these clinics can trust when providing services to their clients.
Adopted children suffer to from the separation and feelings of rejection and abandonment, that all the love in the world sometimes cannot erase. Adoptees are over-represented in special ed and all facilities for adolescents, as well as prisons and mental hospitals. Adoptees...NOT children of single mothers!
You are NUTS. Absolutely NUTS.
Amy,
Having a birth mother, selected by AAN or Spence or the NCFA speaking is no help unless the expectant mothers are told all the facts. Of course you will select a birth mother still glazed over and justifying that she did the right thing - like a sufferer of Stolkholm Syndrome they are indebeted to their child's adoptive parents and live in fear of doing anythign that might upset them or you. They're out there and not all that hard to find. Like cult members recruiting newer members to drink the kool aid with them.
Are the moms-to-be told that open adoptions are not enforceble?
Are your expectant clients told about the irresolveable grief mothers who relinquish experience - universally - and that it does not diminish but increases with time ?
Are they informed that adoptees are overpresented in all types of facilites for mental health, sustance abuse and crime, and are also over-represented among serial killers? And told that being adopted is a risk factor for suicide?
Does anyone tell them that relinquihing mothers suffer a higher rate of secondary infertility than the genral population and that the child they are placing may be the only child they'll ever have - and that they should make their decision based on that possibility?
Or do you stick to the NCFA paty lines and tell them how wonderul adoption is for everyone? Only then can anyone truly make an informed CHOICE. It's like knowing the side effects before taking a medication.
Great article, Amie, and interesting discussion that follows. I agree with so much of what you said and thank you for sharing the experience at your clinic surrounding your training in Pregnancy Options Counseling and your willingness to provide in-depth support on all pregnancy choices to your clients. I do think that abortion and family planning clinics often set the gold standard for patient support and counseling, but would push back a little bit on your assertion that "There is not a well-respected health care provider out there who offers abortion care who would not offer her or his patients information on all opportunities to ensure she is as fully informed as possible regarding her options." It has been my experience that many abortion providers, while well-intentioned in supporting women in whatever choice is best for them, often do not have training in talking about adoption, or do not have access to legally-accurate and up-to-date information, or may have their own biases about adoption that prevent them from speaking to patients in a value-free way about this choice. When Backline co-hosted the Adoption Dialogue in 2007, specifically aimed at giving pro-choice healthcare providers a place to learn about adoption, explore their values and talk about their questions and concerns openly, what we often heard was that providers DID feel that adoption was a coercive movement lead by religious, pro-life organizations, that much of their information was out of date, or that there was a strong feeling that adoption was too traumatizing for women to be advocated for except in the most extreme circumstances. I am not saying this to fault providers, but I think that it is important to acknowledge that the reality of the political divisiveness around choice has often put adoption and abortion advocates at odds, and while many pro-choice people may WANT to support all pregnancy options they may be ill-equipped to do so. In every clinic that I worked in prior to starting Backline, I could answer any question about abortion, address the emotional concerns that women may have had, correct misinformation, help women build support networks ... and then if they asked about adoption, I would hand them a referral sheet with some phone numbers, often of agencies I had no relationship to or no idea what their philosophies and practices were. The more that I train professionals on this issue, I find that my experience was not unique. Again, I am not writing this to fault the pro-choice movement, but to highlight how powerful and important the work of the Adoption Access Network is in helping the pro-choice world stand up to the principles that we know it holds most dear - truly supporting women in making the complex decisions that are best for their unique lives. I would also make a plug for the two conferences I am facilitating this fall, both sponsored by the Adoption Access Network: The Pregancy Options Dialogue in Portland, Oregon and "Building Connections Across the Pregnancy Spectrum" in New York, NY, both of which are open to reproductive healthcare providers and advocates wishing to learn more about building true and strong connections between the adoption and abortion world. For more information on either of these, please feel free to email me directly at graysondempsey@comcast.net.
Thank you again Amie for your powerful article and important perspective on this work!
How about a poster in an adoption agency suggesting that there is a better option--abortion--than the lifelong grief of surrendering a child to genetic strangers? How about having an abortion/adoption counselor on staff to talk to young women about the fact that you do not surrender a child to be adopted and "get on with your life" as before? I volunteer.
It has been more than 40 years since I surrendered my daughter to be adopted by strangers, and though I found her when she was fifteen and we had an open adoption after that, I never got over the deep loss and emotional trauma of giving her up. Were her adoptive parents bad people? No. Was she anything like them? No. Did a sense of abandonment infuse her life, despite everyone's best efforts? Yes. Did she feel second best after her parents had biological children? Yes. Did she look like them? No.
Putting up "consider adoption" posters in abortion clinics is absurd. The woman or teenager is at the clinic seeking an abortion because she has already made that choice and to force her again to confront it is no better than the unnecessary medical procedure Oklahoma forces on pregnant women choosing an abortion: that they have a sonogram. They do not have to look at the picture. This is unbelievable--a forced medical procedure in America, the land of the free?
After reading comments here and elsewhere it appears that those who think pro-adoption posters in abortion clinics are a great idea are anti-choice people, hoping for a last minute change of heart, or those eager to supply the market maw of those who would adopt. After all, available white infants are in short supply.
They should spend some time reading about what life after surrender is like for first mothers, whether in open adoptions or closed. And the woman/teen who is considering adoption for her child should be counseled that this child is quite possibly the only child she will ever have. A large percentage of women who surrender a child to adoption never have another.
Lorraine from
I have all the sympathy in the WORLD for you, Lorraine, and am very sorry that adoption worked out to be such a terrible experience for you, but your insistence that adoption will therefore be terrible for EVERYBODY else and that women should never have the option presented to them or should be talked out of that option is as absolutist and patronizing as the rabid ProLifers here who insist women can't be allowed to have abortions because they might be 'sad' later.
There are no 100% guaranteed 'solutions' to the problem of unwanted pregnancy that can be applied across the board and will result in 100% satisfaction for every single woman, but that does NOT mean that the women who need to make decisions shouldn't be fully informed about all of their options and able to make their own choices.
Women are not all the same, they do not all make the same choice, and their reactions to those choices are not all the same. A person cannot undo a decision that they regret in their own past by making other people their proxy and using control of the choices of strangers to 'make things turn out right this time'.
It's so obvious to me that a bias FOR adoption instead of abortion has, at its root, (1) a desire to punish women who are sexually active outside of religiously-approved strictures, and (2) the objectification of such women as nothing more than exploitable incubators.
Thank you Lorraine for speaking not only for me but for the hundreds of women on various blogs who were coerced into surrendering their child believing the rhetoric that they would be able to "get on with their life" all the while suppressing their grief and living an unfulfilled life in denial.
Society must understand that infertility is a medical issue and sadly it does not entitle women to become mothers any more than losing a limb entitles one to the limb of another. The grief that infertile women feel should be handled as a loss in therapy.
As it was in my era, young women are still being encouraged to surrender due to finances and lack of support. This is not choice. Barring resources is coercive and is employed by religious groups and groups like the federally funded National Council For Adoption. Adoption is big business with their own lobbying firm.
Natural mothers are exploited and expendable. Does anyone tell them this prior to relinquishment?
As it was in my era, young women are still being encouraged to surrender due to finances and lack of support. This is not choice.
I absolutely agree. What I said, however, was that surrending for adoption does work for SOME girls and women who do NOT want to keep and raise the child, because ALL WOMEN ARE NOT THE SAME.
There probably are a handful of women who are satisfied with losing their child although I find that unimaginable. Appearances can be deceiving. For a period of time post surrender I am sure girls attempt to convince themselves that they have done something very altruistic and take to self glorification. That helps I suppose in the short term. But I will repeat that I believe most surrenders occur due to lack of familial support and financial support. Not reasons to lose one's child. I was so busy pretending that it didn't occur and covering up my lies and not letting new acquaintances get close less they find out my deep secret and being sub clinically depressed for some 'unknown' reason (I didn't even tell therapists about my loss. But you would have thought had you known about it that I was getting on with my life. Yeah, right.
You know, aside from the ProLife 'women who have an abortion will feel life-long anguish and guilt and if they don't they SHOULD' meme, this reminds me so, so much of those who want to spend their entire lives focusing on their handicap/disability/mental illness, their tragic loss, their drinking/not drinking, their drug use/being clean, their PARENTS' drinking/not drinking, the codependent relationships in their family, whatever, and who insist that anybody else who doesn't must be in DENIAL, because every other person alive probably really truly is just like them, even if that person doesn't know it.
Bad things happen to people. Sometimes those bad things are something they're born with, sometimes they arise from the situation they are in, sometimes they are a result of their own choices and sometimes those bad things are a result of sheer chance. The thing is, most healthy people recover by COMING TO TERMS with what happened and realize that everybody else also is affected by 'bad things' and it becomes less and less central to their lives as time goes on. This process is known as GETTING OVER IT and although it does take time and scars are left, it can be done.
Sometimes people make the 'bad thing' the focus of their entire life as though it's the most important thing in the universe and the pivot point of existence and what SHOULD define not just them as a person but everybody ELSE as well and instead of continuing to recover, they stay right there forever protesting that their particular bad thing should be prevented from ever happening again/banned/abolished/mourned endlessly. That is not 'recovery', that is being STUCK.
You speak as if losing your child and not ever having the opportunity of knowing if she is alive or well should just be sucked up. And that is just what the social workers asked of us. And you want me to come to terms with this? It wasn't until my daughter found me and I was finally able to grieve my loss that I am even able to speak of this. And you want me to shut up. I am sorry if my pain makes you uncomfortable and from the tone of your post, angry. I know you would like for us natural mothers to shut up, suck it up, go away. Yeah, we've heard that before.
And yet that's not what I said at all.
What I said was, and I will try to be much clearer, a person will never feel better if they attempt to cure their pain, pain which I perceive as considerable, by projecting their own feelings out and insisting that everybody else MUST feel the same way and should be prevented from making any similar decision.
I hear that you feel betrayed and used and marginalized and maneuvered into a position where your other choices were cut off. I believe you when you say that happened and you have every right to feel exactly as you do, even if you were the ONLY person in the whole world to feel that way. I'm sure a lot of other women who were in that situation 30 and 20 and even 10 years ago feel the same way. I found the book "The Girls Who Went Away" really moving.
Where I disagree with you is that logically what should proceed from that pain is cutting off the choices of other women and preventing them from doing what they choose to do.
You were very offended when you perceived what I was saying as telling you to "suck it up". I was not saying that, but instead CONTINUE healing until you are HEALED. I will point out, though, that in your own earlier post you stated "The grief that infertile women feel should be handled as a loss in therapy" which is pretty much what I was trying to state about women unhappy after surrendering to adoption.
I have been to therapists. The first one I went to upon being 'found' by my daughter blurted out that what my daughter did was exactly what her adoptive friends feared from their child as if to say they (the adoptive parents) are not good enough! Professionals in the field of mental health are often the very people who adopt, perhaps out of that sense of altruism.
I agree that the original intent of the posts is lost. When adoption agencies have posters displayed as Ms Dusky suggests, urging women to consider abortion, then I will agree that choice is being presented. In order to receive family planning funding through Title X, clinics have been required to counsel on adoption services. So this makes me suspect of the motives of adoption agencies forcing their presence in such clinics.
Finally there is no equating the loss of potential children that infertile women feel to that of the loss of an actual human being through adoption. I only wish I felt that I could ever be healed as you purport. The presence of my adult daughter in my life while healing will never erase all the years lost without her.
When adoption agencies have posters displayed as Ms Dusky suggests, urging women to consider abortion, then I will agree that choice is being presented.
You seem to be operating on the assumption that at the time when women get pregnant, they aren't aware that any of the options exist. It's my understanding that these days a lot of women who surrender for adoption are in college. I'm sure they're aware of abortion.
Finally there is no equating the loss of potential children that infertile women feel to that of the loss of an actual human being through adoption.
Well, yes, the loss of potential children can be equated, because what matters is the feeling of LOSS. Women who are childless after miscarriage or stillbirths may also feel that they have lost "an actual human being". Women whose children are born with disabilities sometimes have to 'grieve' the loss of the child they imagined they were going to have.
It may take a number of tries to get a good 'fit' with a therapist. I can sure see why you couldn't work with a counselor who doesn't grasp that adoptive and biological parents aren't in a competition to 'possess' the child but rather instead that all the parents involved should be meeting the child's needs.
There may be a support group out there where you'll be comfortable and find help. Hospice sponsors a number of different grief groups or might be able to refer you. Grief is grief. Being guided through it by someone who understands the process really does help.
