I have been closely involved in supporting a young woman who made the brave choice to give her beautiful and healthy baby girl up for adoption. Truly, her courage amazes me. Much to the surprise of her theologically-liberal friends, she never once considered abortion. She toyed with the idea of trying to raise the child as a young and still-in-schooling single mother, but realized she could never provide her daughter the high standards of material and emotional support and stability she wanted. Thus began her involvement with a local adoption agency.
If 40-year-old men were the ones giving birth to the prized commodity that today's healthy newborns are to the vast ocean of prospective adoptive parents, surely they would find themselves at the pinnacle of concern and control. Unfortunately, the adoption industry (and make no mistake, it is a BUSINESS, even when so-called non-profit agencies are involved) dances to the tune of the buyers, namely the prospective adoptive parents who pay agency and lawyers' fees. The birth mothers, generally very young, naive, unassertive, and scared, are the bit-players to be managed and moved off-stage as quickly and quietly as possible. Clearly, the social workers are not accustomed to birth mothers thinking that they deserve respect--and demanding it.
I watched a birth mother, less than a day after giving birth, politely listen, through her Percoset-induced haze, to a social worker's 25-minute harangue to sign away the child to the anxious prospective adoptive parents. I watched the birth mother's agency-assigned (almost) attorney speak as if she wasn't even present in the room. I watched self-centered prospective adoptive parents attempt to convince the birth mother that OF COURSE she could make the necessary 10-hour journey to the prospective family's home state so that they could complete the necessary paperwork, no matter that she was especially sore from stitches, had developed a fever, and needed to make frequent trips to the bathroom, something that would never be possible on the airplanes. I watched the social worker that was supposed to be her especial advocate try to tell her that the sort of open adoption she wanted would never be acceptable to prospective parents, and that she needed to be more realistic (the social worker would be proven wrong--very wrong--on that count, and many others).
Although the particular adoption I witnessed had a happy ending, it was only because of VERY assertive interventions that prevented various self-serving (or institution-serving) individuals from doing the things they otherwise would have gotten away with.
Abortion opponents take note: if we want to promote adoption as an attractive and workable solution for birth mothers who can't keep their babies, we must reform the process of adoption so that it is child- and birthmother-centered, not payer-driven.
To be continued.
1 comments:
Long gone are the days when friends, distant relatives, or homes for unwed mothers (yes, we had one of those in my home town which my mother would have to explain to me in hushed tones), would quietly arrange adoptions without the need for the state, the attorneys, etc that have taken over the process. As a result, you get what the state and attorneys are best at, taking money and making more rules. "We are doing this to protect the child!" they claim. Maybe that was the intent, but the result is that adoptions are difficult, expensive, impersonal, and out of reach of many worthy prospective childrearers.
What a mess people create. What a stark contrast to the beauty of God's creation we see in that newborn child.
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