Abortion As An Ethical Decision

#1 – never pair the two issues. Adoption as a counter to abortion. Pro-Life should be positive in the support of keeping babies with their mothers.

Honestly, many adult adoptees will say “if I had a say in my birth mom doing it over again – hell yes, I wish she’d never had me.” That may be hard to understand, if you were not adopted but this is the truth.

An abortion makes life going forward easier. If someone doesn’t want to be a parent, then putting themselves through a pregnancy and birth makes no sense. If someone does want a baby, then they’d regret adoption forever, if they chose that as an alternative when what they really lack to enable them to keep their child is the emotional or financial ability to parent that child. This is also the truth.

An adoptee is forever the child whose mother gave her to strangers and all the emotional wounds that come with that.

If society were willing to make it more feasible for underprivileged mothers to keep their own babies by providing financial and other supports – then the truth also is that adoption and abortion rates would both likely drop.

There are options other than adoption for infertile couples to conceive children. It is known as Assisted Reproduction and that entails a variety of potential treatments that may prove successful and be a better choice than creating huge psychological problems for adoptees and their original mothers, who are separated at birth, and under the best future possibilities, will still have a painful road to reunion.

I Am Not An Accident

I had a very deep realization yesterday. My earliest conception may have been viewed as an “accident”, an unintended consequence of my parents going too far in youthful hormonal impulse.

And on a very deep level, I felt what many adoptees probably feel as well – as though we weren’t mean to be and it is hard and deep and an important healing I believe.

When I counted the months back from my birth to the date of my parents’ wedding anniversary, I knew the truth and it troubled me. I have always thought what troubled me was my mom’s “good girl” lectures but I understand in maturity, she wanted to spare me her young experience while yet a student in high school.

I was angry with her at first and didn’t want her to touch me. Eventually, I forgave her because I loved her, not because the reality didn’t remain a troubling paradox for me.

I know I’m not a mistake and I do know my life has purpose – my life has many purposes actually. I’ve become a mother 3 times. I’ve been there to handle my parents’ estate after they died. I’ve been the one to uncover our original grandparents after my adopted parents died knowing next to nothing themselves.

And I have a “voice” and courageously (or foolishly, depending on whatever external judgement of my own voluntary behaviors) and I use it to promote and defend issues that are important to me because if not me, then who ? Yes, someone else might come along . . . but if everyone were to hide their own truths, what would that accomplish ?

We are all important to wholeness and I know that my ancestors suffered emotional and mental anguish, in order for my parents to be raised by the people who adopted them and in the place where they grew up, which enabled them to meet and my own self to be born.

Torn Apart

I was really out of it when my daughter was born. Thankfully, though I had a c-section with each of my sons, I was at least awake from the very first moments they drew a breath.

The feeling of becoming a mother was amazing. I’m certain it was the same for both of my original grandmothers who had months with each of my parents before their first born child was taken from them. I’m certain my own mother experienced the same amazing effect – a kind of euphoria that comes with giving birth to a new human being.

Everything changes for a woman when she becomes a mother. Everything is taken away when she loses her child. I struggled for years to come to terms with not raising my daughter. I don’t know if I have fully overcome the feeling of not being there for her as she was growing up. For years, I could not find a commercial birthday card that could express what our actual relationship was like.

I continue to progress in tiny steps but I don’t think I will ever forgive myself, even if I know all the reasons why. So, I can only imagine the pain my grandmothers felt or my sister feels. It is like not feeling worthy of having one’s own child. It is horrible.

Labor Day

Globally, today is known as Labor Day (although celebrated later in the year in the United States). I know that usually, Labor Day, relates to paid work but women do the work of Labor all the time.

Every child at this time in human evolution comes into the world through a woman’s womb. Aldous Huxley in his book Brave New World anticipated huge scientific developments in reproductive technology. And in fact, in my lifetime such developments made it possible for me to give birth at ages 47 and 50. In Huxley’s novel, citizens are engineered through artificial wombs (which I am happy we have not evolved to yet) and childhood indoctrination programs that sort them into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labor demands.

I found pregnancy mostly delightful. Not everyone does. And always my labor was not unfortunately memorable. With my first pregnancy at age 19, my water broke and I was taken to the hospital quickly. My doctors were busy in surgery at a different hospital. I was managing my labor just fine but they knocked me out. I woke up in the delivery room briefly to see my doctor putting on his gloves. The next thing I knew, I was being wheeled down a corridor and a nurse was showing me a baby and telling me that I had a daughter. I was so certain I was having a son, she had to tell me three times. I did see my family’s resemblance in the tiny infant.

Because the experience I had with my daughter was unsatisfying, with my oldest son’s pregnancy I took Bradley classes, wanted to give birth naturally at home with a midwife (which at the time was illegal in my state of Missouri). It was not to be because just before he was conceived, I also learned I was positive for the hepatitis C virus. Research had determined we could prevent transmission with a caesarean section. With both boys, that is what we did and they both tested negative at 18 months old. A mother does what a mother has to do for her child, not for her own gratification.

For some mothers, going into labor ends their relationship with their child – either because the baby is stillborn (a real tragedy but nature’s way in some cases) – or because the mother is surrendering her child to someone else to raise (also a tragedy but of a different sort).

There are many adoptive parents who celebrate receiving a child in this manner and they would not agree with my perspectives but every adoption begins with a loss for someone else.

Prenatal to Postnatal Life

What the child is missing is the security and serenity of oneness with
the person who gave birth to him – that continuum of bonding from
prenatal to postnatal life. This profound connection is one that the
adoptee will forever yearn for.

That period immediately after birth, when the infant has made the
transition from the warm, fluid, dark security of the womb to the
cold, bright, alien world of postnatal life is a crucial period.

~ The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier

Both of my parents were adoptees but they did have that advantage – they each had months of that transition time with their natural mothers, before they were handed over to strangers.

With both of my sons, they were placed immediately to my breast. This is how nature intended a fetus to become a separate person – incrementally.