Last week was a busy week. On Sunday night abortion service providers from Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey arrived in New York City by plane, train and automobile to participate in a two-day intensive adoption training provided by Spence-Chapin, a NYC-based pro-choice adoption agency, as part of our Adoption Access Network initiative.
I wrote about the Network for the launch of this site, but for those who may have missed that piece—the Adoption Access Network is a national coalition of adoption agencies, family planning and abortion services providers, community health centers, academic and professional medical associations, and membership/advocacy organizations with a shared goal of making adoption more accessible for women facing unplanned pregnancy. Bringing family planning counselors to our adoption agency to get a crash course in adoption and work on integrating this choice effectively into their practice certainly sounds great on paper. But, I experienced some anxiety, not surprisingly, around how the meeting would look in real-time.
Indeed it was quite an extraordinary thing to bring this group of providers together to explore, over two days, the myriad commonalities in the services that we all provide to women facing unplanned pregnancy. These commonalities persist whether our clients ultimately choose to terminate, place for adoption or parent. It occurred to me that our discussions mirrored the experience of pregnancy the world over—at turns brilliant, muddled, inspired, messy and emotional. Nothing but blurred lines and questions with lots of equally compelling answers. This was real “Common Ground” country.
Here I will share some of the recurring themes that surfaced over those two days. Perhaps having a window into our thoughts and collective experience will help to balance out some of the rhetoric and policy discussion that are necessarily generated by the idea of common ground.
LOSS
As a family planning counselor, a long time ago in a land far away, I would bring patients at our abortion clinic to our little interview room. And after asking a few questions about the circumstances of their pregnancy and their support system, I would come to “the question,” which was always a variation on this: “So, you basically have three options at this point– you can continue with the pregnancy, you can place for adoption, or you can have an abortion. Can you tell me a little bit about your thinking right at this minute around those choices?” And, 99% of the time, they would say something like “I need to have an abortion.” And we’d go on to talk about all of the reasons why.
And while there is nothing wrong with going about the options conversation in this way, last week we explored some ideas for doing things a little differently– especially with those patients who were facing some degree of uncertainty about their decision. One of the participants suggested that perhaps this question could be about loss, because whatever option our conflicted patient ultimately landed on, she would be facing some form of significant loss as a result, without a way to get around it. We reasoned that it might make more sense to ask our patients which type of loss would be most manageable for them: that of a termination, an adoption or the loss of parenting? For a woman who is pregnant unintentionally, an abortion can mean the loss of her idea of herself as someone who would never have one (or maybe someone who could have one abortion, but not two!); or the grief of losing the pregnancy that is growing inside of her (even if she feels clear about her decision); the loss of a relationship with a partner, parent or friend because of her decision. For the woman who chooses adoption: she loses the opportunity to be a parent in the traditional sense to her child who she carried for nine months and gave birth to; she loses the chance for her children to be siblings and parents to be grandparents in the traditional sense to this child. Adoption can also mean giving up a life unencumbered by thoughts about the child and questions: “Is he happy, healthy, safe?” “Does he wonder about how I could do this?” For those who choose to parent, many grapple with tangible losses—employment, savings, education, a partner. But the other types are less visible and often more difficult to talk about– the loss of a particular future; the loss of one’s very clear ideas about how and when one will have children; the loss of independence and freedom; and sleep.
RESPONSIBILITY
The group also talked about the fact that some “lower” forms of mammals have the ability to reduce their litter or reabsorb a pregnancy entirely during times of stress and famine, and how many women have wished that they had this same ability when faced with the birth of a child that they cannot parent for one reason or many. That one could somehow communicate to the pregnancy that “this was a very bad time to be born,” and that the pregnancy would recognize this and spontaneously abort itself. Charlotte Taft, a well-known abortion counselor and trainer of pregnancy counselors, suggests that we ask women struggling with their decision if they wished for a miscarriage. If the answer is “yes,” this may mean that their struggle is about the responsibility of terminating, not wanting to be the one to terminate a life. Responsibility factors heavily into the decision to place a baby for adoption, as well. The burden of being a mother who has chosen to allow another family to raise her child is immense.
At Spence-Chapin, we recently provided counseling to a mother of three, all of whom had been with a foster family who wished to adopt them for several years. Everything about the situation—the birth mother felt very positively about the foster family, she had ample opportunity and support from the family in visiting the children and continuing to have a relationship with them—pointed to a smooth transition to adoption of the children, except for one thing: the birth mother refused to sign a voluntary surrender. Why? She couldn’t cope with the idea of her children feeling that she had “stopped fighting for them.” This is not an uncommon barrier to making an adoption plan, not being able to handle the immense responsibility of being a “birth mom.” And in an open adoption, not being able to carry the weight of communicating to your child about your decision and having to explain your reasons for choosing to allow another family to raise him or her.
TRUST
Lastly, there is the theme of trust. One of my mentors at Spence-Chapin puts it very simply: “We need to trust that if women are given access to the tools and supports they need and deserve when facing an unplanned pregnancy, they are more than capable of making the best decision for themselves and their families.” One of the things that is most challenging for me about protesters outside of clinics is that there are so many assumptions that they make about the life situation of the women hurrying past them to get inside. A common call is some variation on: “Tell your mother about this, your parents will help you, you don’t need to do this…” But what does that protester know about that woman’s mother or parents? If telling her mother about the pregnancy would make everything okay, don’t you think she would have done that? We see the same lack of trust for the woman’s ability to recognize what is best for her in the world of adoption. Recently, we worked with a 17-year-old birth mother from a conservative religious community in NYC who was pregnant as a result of incest. She was very clear that she wanted to make an adoption plan and managed to conceal her pregnancy from her family and community for fear of retribution and violence. However, when she delivered at a public hospital and let the hospital staff know about her plan, she was subjected to a number of visits to her room by nurses and social workers who urged her to reconsider her decision. One warned that if she placed her baby for adoption, he would grow up to hate and resent her. By the time our worker arrived at the hospital, the 17-year-old was hysterical. Certainly the staff who visited her believed they were acting in her best interest, but none of them knew about the circumstances of her pregnancy or anything about her home environment. If they had, wouldn’t they have understood that this person, even at the age of 17, knew exactly what she was doing?
Thanks to Samara Knox (Preterm, Cleveland) for her considerable help in writing this piece