I Want to Talk About Abortion

I know the adoptee community is tired of talking about abortion and adoption in the same breath. I know and I get it, but I'm gonna do it anyway. 

For my fellow adoptees, content warning: I'm going to repeat the super triggering things people say to us all too often. 

Mostly, adoptees are sick of being the pawn of anti-choice activists or the pawn of abortion rhetoric, and I am too. If I had a dollar for every comment from a stranger that's some variation of: 

"Well you should just be glad you weren't aborted!"

Or

"Just be glad your birth mother chose life!"

Or 

"You're so lucky you weren't aborted."

I've addressed these comments so many times that now my reply is: yeah well you clearly don't understand adoption trauma and suicide rates, Susan. 

And so a lot of adoptees will tell you that we shouldn't conflate abortion and adoption, that abortion is a solution to pregnancy and adoption is a solution to parenting. And I don't disagree! That is true. But I also think that abortion needs to be part of the conversation, because I believe that safe and accessible abortion (among many other social factors) will reduce adoptions. 

Yes, I want to reduce adoption. I want to make it exceedingly rare. 

I see this comment a lot too:

"Well what should someone do who finds themselves pregnant but doesn't want an abortion and doesn't want to parent?" Or "Is there an ethical way to relinquish a child you don't want to parent?"

And I just want to say: just get the damn abortion if you can. 

I don't want to take anyone's choices away. I don't believe it's ethical to force abortions on anyone, but I want people to see abortion in  different way. In this scenario, I think it's cruel to carry a pregnancy to term if you have no intention on parenting. That child will live with the trauma of that choice forever. You've sentenced them to a lifetime of insecurity and pain just because the idea of abortion is so scary. 

I don't want to take anyone's choices away, but I also want people to know the weight of adoption. Choices don't happen in a vacuum. The choices adults made for me when I was an infant are now MY burdens to carry and I'm angry about that. I do wish my birth mother had chosen abortion. 

Abortion is the ethical choice. Abortion is the kind choice. 

I also don't think that anyone who carries to term and relinquishes does so in such a flippant way as those above comments suggest. Either that person likely didn't have access to abortion for whatever reason or probably they do want to parent and cannot or have been convinced they cannot and coerced into relinquishing their child. I just think that if a person exists who carries to term and really just doesn't want to parent, that has to be a really rare circumstance. 

Again, I don't want to imply that every parent who relinquishes had choices in the US. We have pathetic sex ed here. We don't make family planning accessible. We have no social safety nets. We have no universal basic income. We have no paid maternity leave, let alone a mandated minimum maternity leave. We have terrible health care and mental health care. Pregnancy and giving birth is incredibly expensive and dangerous here. And then we have terrible resources for housing or feeding your children or affordable daycare so their parents can work to feed and house them. We've created poverty and then punished it by taking away people's choices to parent and then we make abortion inaccessible too. It's systemic and it's beyond unethical.

BUT ALSO, a big part of the reason adoption is so prevalent in this country is because anti-choice advocates have also played a part in not only reducing (or even eliminating) abortion access, but in the very pervasive programs and propaganda that manipulate and coerce vulnerable pregnant people out of abortion and toward relinquishment. 

You know crisis pregnancy centers? The highly misleading and unethical "clinics," which don't actually offer any medical services, but just serve to pull in the newly pregnant seeking abortions and terrorize them into not terminating? If you don't know these places and how unethical they are, look it up (and beware, when I googled the term to get a link, the first Google result was "pregnancy crisis centers near me." Fucking yikes!).

From the AMA Journal of Ethics (link):

Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations that seek to intercept women with unintended pregnancies who might be considering abortion. Their mission is to prevent abortions by persuading women that adoption or parenting is a better option. They strive to give the impression that they are clinical centers, offering legitimate medical services and advice, yet they are exempt from regulatory, licensure, and credentialing oversight that apply to health care facilities. Because the religious ideology of these centers’ owners and employees takes priority over the health and well-being of the women seeking care at these centers, women do not receive comprehensive, accurate, evidence-based clinical information about all available options. Although crisis pregnancy centers enjoy First Amendment rights protections, their propagation of misinformation should be regarded as an ethical violation that undermines women’s health.

Well, a vast amount of pregnancy crisis centers are funded and run by adoption agencies, which are for-profit companies, serving a $16 billion industry. They have a financial incentive to prey on vulnerable people in order to eventually take and sell their babies. 

I am not exaggerating. 

If you have someone who knows they can't parent and knows they can't afford to give birth let alone provide for a child and you take all their choices away and point them to the only "option," which is giving their baby to an agency who will traffic that baby to a stranger for tens of thousands of dollars, that's not a choice. 

I WISH I were exaggerating. 

It's a funnel that targets vulnerable people to take their babies for profit.

So, yeah, abortion is a huge part of that equation. Because even if we created an optimal society that eliminated poverty by taking care of people and helping them plan their families and choose the timing of when they brought children into the world and helping along the way with every facet of the cycle, from pregnancy to health care to housing to daycare, etc., we'd still have occasional unwanted pregnancies. Then those people would be fully equipped to make an actual choice in whether they actually WANT to parent/feel ready to parent or terminating their pregnancies if it's not something they want. 

That's what choice is, not being funneled into a trauma everyone suffers from, except for the fat pockets of the adoption agencies. They're doing just fine. 

Then, I think adoption would be incredibly rare and saved for actual orphans (not just paper orphans) or for those who genuinely aren't safe in their biological families (most children in the system are there due to poverty, not abuse, but that's a post for another day). Or we shift our society to guardianship over adoption, but that's another another post for another day. 

I want adoption to be rare and only in absolutely necessary cases. And abortion is part of the equation to achieve that. We can't pretend it isn't.

I, for one, am going to keep talking about it.