From my all things adoption group today. In a parenting group, the admin shared a post to open discussion. It was written by a hopeful adoptive parent whose plans fell through shortly after birth.

I was pleasantly surprised that many of the comments focused on the fact that staying with mom is best for baby. Many also expressed empathy for the woman who wanted a baby and couldn’t have one. Knowing my own deep joy at being a mother, I empathize with those who cannot… but not to the degree that it clouds my judgment about what real love for a child is (protecting their relationship with their mother, if at all possible).

I can’t know the pain of infertility, because I’ve not lived that life. I’m sad for those who do. But I HAVE lived the life of someone separated from my genetic mirrors and raised as second class in a family that wasn’t mine. Filling a hole in a would-be mother’s heart doesn’t justify the creation of holes in the child’s. Ever.

One comment in particular struck me. It was disgusting, and I don’t have the ability to respond to it without being very nasty. A woman claimed that getting up a woman’s hopes of receiving a child and then taking it away at birth is the same pain as delivering a stillborn baby.

I am so angry. Just… so, so angry.

Their logic doesn’t logic.

She went on and on about the pain of infertility, which I don’t at all seek to minimize. She wrote about the hopes of carrying her “own” baby. The truth is right there in her words. They know the difference. Given a choice, OF COURSE they’d choose to carry their “own”. But since they can’t, they selfishly want to steal or buy someone else’s for the sake of their own feelings, over the child’s or the true mother’s.

Her words recognize the profound, undeniable, biological, emotional, and spiritual difference of producing offspring versus stealing them. And yet in the next breath, she wants to claim the pain is identical to losing one carried in the mother’s own body. Gross.

One commenter made a strong case –  it’s not always just warped selfishness with humans. There is the component of it being an evolutionary instinct. This doesn’t excuse us from doing the work and therapy to keep from seeking the injury to other people’s children that adoption is. We need to be better than our natural instincts. We can hold people to higher standards, while still recognizing that turning off the deep desire to raise children, for some, is about as easy as turning off clinical depression for others.

Another one admitted – I’m “maternally driven”, and I had an emergency hysterectomy. I have one biological child. I always wanted to have a lot of kids, but it wasn’t in the cards. I went to therapy. I got a dog.  I sought out dogs and cats. Because my inability to have more children doesn’t give me the right to someone else’s children. But my pathological need to care for someone/something makes animal rescue PERFECT for me. And yes, it’s absolutely a pathology. I think that needs to be recognized and openly talked about more. It’s not BAD. It just IS, and there are healthy outlets for it.

One noted – This is such a parent focused view, to equate their loss as a death – when the baby is alive – just shows how much the focus is not on the child whatsoever.

One said – I went through infertility and it never even occurred to me to want to adopt. I wanted my own babies, not someone else’s. The thought of raising someone else’s child is honestly so unappealing to me. I bet it’s unappealing to a lot of infertile women.

To which someone else replied directly – It’s baffling to me that this *completely reasonable and valid position* is somehow controversial to a lot of people. And unfashionable. We’re supposed to think that the ability to pretend a child that isn’t your own, *is* your own, is a sign of being a good person, somebody who has ~evolved~ beyond our ~stupid~ animalistic need for tangible, biological connection. I’ve been told I’m a sociopathic monster, a narcissist, devoid of empathy, just because I feel the same way as you. Somebody else’s baby would not be my baby. It’s not the same as my baby. To deny that is ridiculous, it’s anti-science, it’s an actively harmful delusion. I’ve not been through infertility, but I can say that recently birthing my own first child has cemented this so firmly in my heart. My son is not a token who could be swapped interchangeably with any other random infant and I could not be swapped interchangeably with any other woman to be his mother. Our relationship is specific to the two of us, even six days into his life.