Tag: Menopause

Why Is It Different Here ?

How come infant adoption doesn’t exist in countries with social safety nets??

Because women don’t willingly give up babies without coercion and desperate circumstances.

The point above is that many countries outside the US have less than 200 adoptions annually…some only a handful. WHY?

  • Because they don’t allow it to be a multi billion dollar industry
  • It is NOT privatized
  • It is illegal to adopt on your own – no internet/friend matches
  • They have a social support system to help families stay together.

Some additional comments –

The social nets in the US need serious overhaul. I work in a hospital and some of the situations I’ve seen people in are heartbreaking, infuriating, sickening. It makes sense that countries with ACTUAL support see fewer broken families all around.

It was sad to see this one – I wish it was like this everywhere. I’m from Ukraine and it’s a sh*tshow – lots of kids abandoned, horrific dysfunction, zero support. It’s terrible.

Safety nets include but are not limited to: proper science based sex ed, access to birth control of the patients choice, access to medical care, plus abortion accessibility. Access to housing and therapy. I have found a lot of people assume support is $$$ and while that is true to a degree, it is not the whole picture. Building community is the best thing we can do. To which someone else noted – but realistically money solves a ton of issues.

From an adoptee – Safety nets and social resources are so important. It is deeply disturbing that we pay so much lip service to “children are our greatest resource” and pretending that we are all about “family values,” but when push comes to shove, it’s really about greed and selfishness. We need to elect politicians who are more interested in people than money and power.

A transracial adoptee notes – I hate it when they try to make it seem like there are soooo many abandoned babies. Even if there is an expectant mom who wants to give birth (which how many pregnant people are truly willing to give birth, especially in a country with a high mortality rate, to just relinquish the baby) but does not want to parent (as in they have the ability/support/the means to parent but truly do not want to & wouldn’t/couldn’t abort), then what about the father? And if he really absolutely does not want to parent, do they really not have a single family member or honestly even close family friend who would take in the baby? Like the leap to having absolute strangers adopt the baby is just too much for me honestly. I frankly find it a bit hard to believe that there are so many situations where there are 2 capable expectant parents who simply don’t want parent and for not a single family member be capable/willing to take care of the child.

Another explains –  it’s the private adoption industry taking the foster care statistic of approximately 100,000 post-Termination of Parental Rights youth in this country, and just conveniently not mentioning that almost none of them are babies or toddlers. And then, if challenged, they will say ‘but this prevents them from ending up in foster care, aging out without a family,’ although I imagine that would not be relevant to the majority of parents who relinquish privately.

Which brought this recognition – I’ve actually found it incredibly bizarre how some very educated and intelligent people in my life, people who understand systems of oppression in regards to other demographics, a) don’t seem to get that no one gets pregnant to happily turn around and relinquish and b) refuse to understand that different age groups in the foster care system likely have different needs and require different approaches.

And this story from an expectant mother – I’m 42, expecting my 4th. My 1st, I was a single mother when her father left when she was 15 months old. I was a single mother for 10 years when I met my husband. But I thrived. I had a career, bought my own house, could afford a comfortable life. When I married, we had 2 boys over 8 years of marriage. My husband comes from a long line of mental illnesses, which he inherited. Both our boys are special needs, ASD among others. I’m in the middle of a long divorce as my husband is dragging it out and controlling it all as long as he can. I’m now a single mother for a second time. Eventually started casually seeing someone and got pregnant the second time we were together. He immediately jumped ship and was adamant he doesn’t want anything to do with it. Doesn’t want to be on the birth certificate. Nothing. This pregnancy will make me a single mother for essentially a 3rd time, at the age of 43. I am over being a single mother. I don’t want to do this for 40 years straight. I am older. I have no family that would take a baby. I had zero interest in abortion, I live in a state where it’s still legal, but that’s not something I agree with and I couldn’t live with myself. So, yes, I’m the mom that would carry to term just so I wasn’t killing the baby. I also couldn’t live with the what if’s with adoption. So I’m simply left with parenting. Do I want to? No. It’s simply the only option that doesn’t leave me with what ifs for the rest of my life. I fit everything you said is a far stretch. Father does not want, I would not abort, I have already been a single mother most of my entire adult life, so I know I CAN do it, but I don’t want to anymore. I’ve lived that phase of my life. I’m currently reliving that phase of my life with 2 challenging kiddos. And now, my awful luck has me starting all over again a 3rd time. And being in this position, I’ve come to realize there are lots of older women in my position for different reasons. Thought they went through menopause, Birth Control failed, whatever. Married, divorced, there are lots of us. So many people think this is a “young mom” issue, but there is an older crowd no one considers because we aren’t the norm.

Another agreed – the majority from the statistics I’ve seen who are getting abortions are married or divorced older women. I don’t see many choosing adoption at that age.

And a perspective from the United Kingdom – The UK has plenty of adoption, largely because our social services and safety net are so full of holes, struggling families don’t get help and their kids get taken away. What we don’t have is abandoned babies or people voluntarily giving up their infants. Because we have free, readily available abortion for people who really don’t want a kid, free healthcare (even if the government is currently running the service into the ground) and enough of a basic safety net (however fraying) that is usually sufficient that people who choose to give birth don’t feel they have to then give away their children due to poverty. I have a mountain of criticism for the ways our society is failing families, and letting them fall apart, but I still look at the United States in horror at how much worse it is.

The Wild Track

I often review books in this blog related to adoption or foster care that I have actually read. I’ve not read this one but will share bits and pieces from a review of this book in The Guardian. I’ve pretty much completed my related reading for now. There is an unlimited number of related books and I’ve moved on to other reading interests such as racial inequality (have pretty much completed that one) and now mental illness with an unusual emphasis on spirituality (now that’s something I can and have really gotten into to!!).

The review begins with this insight – wanting to have children and deciding to have children are acts of imagination that border on egotism. To be a child is to be a particular child but to want a child is not to know who that child will be or how to grant it agency. For Margaret Reynolds these issues were unusually complex because she started grappling with them aged 45 when, single after the breakdown of a relationship, she suddenly experienced the urge to be a mother. She was longing for purpose and joy, for a “commitment that tries and shapes the self”. Yet this was not an urge to procreate. She had already undergone the menopause and wasn’t invested in reproducing her DNA.

And I do get this. In my case, I had already procreated when I was 19 years old. A beautiful daughter who has given me two equally beautiful grandchildren. However, my second husband thought he was happy I had “been there and done that” already when we met because he didn’t particularly want children and didn’t feel financially strong enough to have any children, being the responsible kind of guy he was. When I met him, I knew he was the kind of guy I would be willing to have children with. It took him 10 years to decide that he wanted to and like the author of the book I’m highlighting today, I was also 45 years old. Turns out I had gone past easily becoming pregnant like I could when I was in my late teens and early twenties. Enter medical technology into our picture. That wasn’t the path Margaret Reynolds decided on however.

It took Reynolds 5 years to succeed in adopting a child and becoming the mother to a troubled six-year-old daughter is described as a painful pleasure. Actually – troubled or not – being a parent is sometimes that – honestly. The book is actually about the British adoption system and not the American one that I know more about.

To the book’s credit as an adoption related journey, it is an unusually thoughtful take on becoming a mother, enabled by removing babyhood and biology. Though Reynolds begins by desiring a child, the motherhood that results is a gradual, open process, in which she makes herself available as a mother and waits for Lucy to claim her. At first, they don’t hug and kiss. Reynolds just rubs her daughter’s back at night and it’s Lucy who initiates the process of kissing and cuddling, and finds her own way to calling her “Mum”. I found this moving partly because Lucy is given an autonomy that we perhaps all want our mothers to be capable of giving us and should allow to our daughters.

The question of fatherhood is rightly raised here, given Reynolds was setting herself up as a single mother (a fact that, combined with her previous lesbian relationship, prevented her adopting internationally). There is a long literary history of foundlings – it is peculiarly convenient for children to be orphaned at the start of a story. There’s a touching scene where she reads Anne of Green Gables to her daughter, crying alongside Marilla when she realizes what Anne means to her.

One thing that sets this book apart from other adoption related books is that at the end there are two chapters written by her daughter Lucy. Having heard about their early months together from Reynolds, we hear about them from Lucy, learning, shockingly, that she didn’t yet know when she was driven, crying bitterly, to Reynolds’s house from the foster parents she had grown to love, that this was a permanent move. Lucy’s sections are a testament to the joy of finding home and belonging, but also a reminder that the pain of early separations is perpetual. A few days before collecting Lucy, Reynolds had to remind herself that “my happiness is her sadness”. One of the strengths of the adoption system is that it sends potential parents on courses to think through how to parent children who have trauma ready to be reignited at any moment.