by Maria Keller
Originally Published 2012-12-31
“Adoption, not abortion” is a sign often seen at abortuary pickets. Do we, as prolifers, understand adoption? Are we aware of all that pro-abortionists are doing to undermine the institution of adoption?
In its most simplistic sense, adoption is the process whereby a couple (or single person) agree to take and raise a child who is not their biological child, and become the legal parents of that
child. Another way of putting it, as a U.S. government publication states, is that adoption “is a process through which parental ties between biological parents and child are severed and a new family unit is created.”
LOVE VS. VIOLENCE
Adoption is the antithesis of abortion. Both an adopted child and an aborted child are, supposedly, unwanted or inconvenient. The difference is that in adoption the solution offered to deal with the unplanned child is one based on love; abortion is based on violence.
Despite the positive aspects of adoption as a solution to the unplanned pregnancy, the solution of adoption is rarely seen or offered as an option. Witness this: for a sample year of 1982, the Centers for Disease Control reported that there were 1,303,980 abortions during the various stages of pregnancy. During that same year, the National Committee for Adoption tells us that there were only 17,202 adoptions of healthy infants. With less than 1 percent of abortions owing to fetal defects, there is a gamut of other “reasons” for adoption to have a prominent place as a positive solution to an untimely pregnancy.
Unfortunately, there is a bias against adoption. The main line of anti-adoption thinking is brought to us courtesy of the pro-aborts. Kristin Luker, in her book ABORTION AND THE POLITICS
OF MOTHERHOOD, states that “having a baby and giving it up for adoption, as pro-life people advocate, is not seen by most pro-choice people as a moral solution to the abortion problem.
To transform a [fetus] into a baby and then send it out into a world where the parents can have no assurance that it will be well-loved and cared for is, for pro-choice people, the height of
moral irresponsibility.” That rationale certainly explains why Kate Michelman of NARAL [National Abortion Rights Action League] proclaims the abortion of her fourth, and most inconvenient,
child as the most “moral” decision she has ever made!
Norma McCorvey, alias Jane Roe of ROE V. WADE, whose legal victory came too late to facilitate an abortion for her, has searched for the child she relinquished for adoption. According to the June 20 article in the NATIONAL ENQUIRER, her 19-year-old biological daughter was located. (Allegedly, she is pro-life, but prefers not to reveal her identity.) One can only imagine how devastated that child was when she discovered not only that her mother wanted to abort her, but that some 20 years later she is still sorry she didn’t have the choice to abort her. McCorvey stated in a NEW YORK TIMES interview that just as it was her right to abort her child, it was also her right to search for her. As Olivia Gans, director of American Victims of Abortion so poignantly put it, “I can never search for my child. My child is dead.” Ms. Gans can thank “Jane Roe,” her lawyers and her many feminist supporters for that state of affairs. True choice would have meant that Ms. Gans would have been given information about adoption. But, as we can see, information about adoption is in short supply in the abortion industry.
In a Planned Parenthood newsletter, a column written by the editor stated that “in our childbirth preparation classes, there have only been two instances in which the babies were put up for adoption.” This is hardly surprising! There’s plenty of money to be made for their organization via abortion, but none for adoption. The editor goes on to say: “In fact, it is adoption which is now often perceived as cruel and unnatural.” One can safely assume that the editor of the newsletter feels that abortion is the “natural” solution for a young woman in a crisis pregnancy.
TWISTED LOGIC
Feminist psychotherapist and pro-abortionist Phyllis Chesler believes that most adoptions are entered into under duress and most should therefore be considered illegal. (Chesler ignores
the fact that most abortions are entered into under duress. The only difference is that with adoption there is a live child; with abortion there is a dead child that doesn’t have to be dealt with
anymore.) Chesler states in her book SACRED BOND: THE LEGACY OF BABY M (where she takes on not just the subject of surrogate motherhood, but adoption as well) that “a child’s own birth
mother is meant for that child; [and] that premature physical separation from that mother … will cause trauma and injury that should be avoided.” Interestingly, but not surprisingly, Chesler’s dreaded “premature physical separation” applies only to the issue of adoption, but not to abortion. Such is the twisted logic of feminists, who feel that their sacred bond to the children they conceive entitles them to murder their children before they are born.
Chesler feels adopters are immediately suspect in their motives to seek adoption of a child because it is THEIR need to have a child that is their catalyst to search for an adoptable child (a formidable task these days). That logic is as bizarre as stating that the motives of pregnant women who eat are suspect, because it is their search for the food that nourishes both them and their babies. The feminists have taken a solution to the problem of abortion and twisted it into a problem! Interestingly, Chesler calls for an end to surrogacy as a “safe, sure, respectable industry.” Her criticism of surrogacy would be a lot easier to swallow were she not among the many women who call for the continuation of abortion as a “safe, sure respectable industry.”
GOOD NEWS IS NO NEWS
Contrary to the popularly held feminist belief, happy adoptive placements do abound. We just never hear about them, because they don’t make “good copy.” Rather we hear about pseudo-adoptions, such as Baby M’s, child-abuse adoptions (such as Lisa Steinberg, who was not even legally adopted) and the local axe-murderer who kills his adoptive parents. We never hear about women who come back to their social worker a year or two after placement of their children “to let me see how well she is doing, that her self-worth is intact, and that she is becoming self-fulfilled,” as a social worker for Children’s Home Society so wonderfully put it. We never hear about happy, healthy, well-adjusted adoptees, making their way through life, simply glad to have had their chance at life. We know better than anyone the precariousness of life in an era where no child is safe, particularly in his mother’s womb. I know whereof I speak, for I am an adoptee.
I was conceived, carried and born an unwanted child. Unwanted by my birth parents, that is, but very much wanted by my adoptive parents (I didn’t know that I should have experienced trauma and
injury until Phyllis Chesler told me so!). I was lucky to have made my appearance in the year 1955, long before the travesty of ROE V. WADE took its toll on 25 million others like me. It tends to cut one to the quick to realize that there are so many people out in the world who believe it would have been “more merciful” had I never been born. If I had been conceived in the 1970’s instead of the 1950’s, I might have been just one of the many sacrificial lambs offered up in the name of reproductive freedom.
I, for one, can say wholly and without reservation, that I am glad that I was adopted and not aborted.
Maria Keller was a homemaker, a freelance writer, and a dear friend in Jackson TN. She died in October of this year. This article first appeared in the November/December 1989 issue of ALL
About Issues and published by the American Life League and may be reproduced by permission.
