Take *adoption* out yer F'in mouth.
Abortion foes need to STFU on this among other things.
There is so much abhorrent rhetoric in the anti-reproductive-rights crowd. I’m going to refrain from the twin extremes of full-on, multi-point rant or speechless apoplexy to focus on the one profoundly personal thing I can say.
As an adoptive mother, I despise and will fight back hard against suggestions that adoption is a “solution” to the “problem” of abortion. Allow me a roundabout explanation.
***
I’m not exaggerating to say infertility treatments almost killed me. In the late 90s, after more than 30 months of trying/failing/trying/failing/ad insanium, I came to the only moment in my life when I’ve entertained suicide-adjacent thoughts. Nothing approaching a plan, no violent visions, but a definite feeling of wishing I could no longer exist. By attempting to force a pregnancy upon my incapable body, by drowning it in pharmaceutical hormones and false hope, I had set myself at war against my own being and was about to lose.
The fact is that I had never really desired pregnancy in the first place. Adults from unhappy families of origin don’t always leap at the opportunity to repeat generational trauma. But also, I’ve always been a very future-oriented thinker. When in a calm mood, I can usually see the short- and long-term implications of today’s choices (even if I then choose to ignore them and leap anyway). The eldest daughter of a workaholic, primary-breadwinning, emotionally volatile mother, I think I understood the gravity of motherhood better and examined it more thoughtfully than many women who’d always wanted babies.
I took nothing for granted—not the future hardships, professional sacrifices, or emotional risks—although I also discounted the potential upside. My then-husband, who lacked any ambivalence on the topic, would sometimes say to me, “You know, Sandy, there are people in the world who actually had happy childhoods.” Out of context, it sounds like an absurd pronouncement, one of Captain Obvious’s finest utterances, but he knew I needed to hear it.
***
One thing that helped me exit the infertility-industrial complex for good was listening to a friend recount her own experiences. She and her husband had just adopted the first two of four children, two girls and two boys, they’d eventually bring home from China.
My friend’s husband had an adopted brother, and her mother-in-law had told her early on about her two sons, one biological and one not: “You love them just the same.”
Once she became an adoptive mother herself, my friend told me, “I spent eight months in infertility treatments. If I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have wasted the time.”
Here I was going on three years of anguish. My friend’s words were the last bit of encouragement I needed to quit torturing myself and revive an adolescent attraction toward adoption. As a teen I’d never dreamed of being pregnant—had no desire to add to the world’s population or to my family lineage—but I’d vaguely thought it would be cool to parent a child already existing.
It wasn’t a rescue thing; I’m not a martyr by nature or even much of an idealist. It may have been a move in the direction of anti-narcissism. I had this notion that if a child wasn’t biologically mine, I’d be less inclined to punish them for being exactly who they were, as I had felt punished within my own family. And in fact, when my husband and I went through the preliminary counseling with our adoption agency, one of the first topics of discussion was: Are you prepared to raise a child who may be nothing like you, in terms of physical features but also interests, personality, preferences, ambitions, or political leanings? (It’s been discovered that even that last characteristic is somewhat genetically determined.)
I remember thinking then, and I still do now: This was a question for all parents, not just adoptive ones.
Because here is the big challenge of parenthood: letting your children become who they are meant to be, with as much support and guidance and as little authoritarian expectation as possible. Removing as much of your ego from the process as possible. Not foisting your unmet needs on them.
“Your children are not your children,” said the poet Khalil Ghilbran, “...they are with you yet they belong not to you”—and how much happier many of us would be if our parents had understood this wisdom.
***
Of course, this idea flies in the face of most human history and most traditional, patriarchal cultures. Maybe it’s even a bit anti-evolutionary to think this way. But it is certainly humanist.
When I listen to today’s abortion foes, at least the vocal political ones, I hear no humanism whatsoever, obviously not about women (let alone the men who may be lovingly involved in the decision-making, too!), but not about the child-to-become, either. Instead, just theocratic nonsense and narcissism.
What if my mother had aborted me? goes a very common cri-de-coeur.
Yeah, what if? Is your life so special that the world would have been harmed by your non-existence? Is anybody’s life so special?
What if Einstein had been aborted, what if Martin Luther King, what if, what if, what it….?
Really? You don’t think humanity would have chugged along just fine without certain specific individuals? You think no one else would have arisen to solve the same problems? Such self-centeredness and myopia, as if the world you happen to know is the only possible world that could have occurred.
And I’m supposed to believe that the same people with such terribly irrational, magical thinking are going to make great adoptive parents? I’m not saying it never happens. But I think the odds may be low.
The only justification for adopting a child is that you know, deep inside yourself, that you are capable of loving that child every bit as much as if you made them with your body.
It is thus entirely parallel to how we should think about abortion.
Women end pregnancies when they know, deep inside themselves, that they cannot carry them to term—and by “cannot” I mean for any reason whatsoever, including the type of “cannot” that simply means “will not.”
In both cases, we are discussing self-knowledge and the freedom to make decisions, even at the risk of feeling regretful or ambivalent one day. Only a certain kind of person never second-guesses all the choices they’ve made in life, and that kind of person often makes other people suffer for the rigidity of their self-confidence. (And of course, in the case of abortion, plenty of women never experience anything close to regret about it. They knew what they knew and they chose what they chose, period.)
The reality is that you make your decisions and then you live with whatever consequences come, good or bad or complicated.
***
Have I never wondered what it might have been like to create a human? As much as I love my son, have I never experienced a dark night of the soul thinking I was not the right person to be his mother, or even—shudder to admit it—he was the wrong kind of child for me? Have I never wondered—during the toughest parenting challenges—if I’d essentially ruined my life by becoming a mother, or his life by doing a less than perfect job of it? Have I never feared that I might in fact be repeating history despite earnest attempts to do things differently and better than my own parents? Would I be human if I hadn’t had these kinds of serious doubts from time to time?
***
Our son’s birth mother had her reasons for carrying a baby to term when she knew she had chosen not to raise him. When we met, I did not ask her what those reasons might be. None of my business—even though K. and I did seek to understand other things about her, things we might like to tell our adopted son one day. She was extremely shy and obviously nervous. This was at the agency’s office a month after she’d given birth, and a week after we’d actually met the baby who was then in the custody of his private foster mother. The birth mother had chosen not to look at the baby at all as it emerged from her body and was handed over to an agency representative. An overweight woman, she had previously also chosen, and managed, to hide her pregnancy inside loose clothing from her family and coworkers.
She was clearly someone capable of enormous emotional compartmentalization. I had hoped she would keep in touch with us as the years went by, hoped she might respond with a card or a letter when we sent our annual birthday pictures to the agency, hoping she would reach out to retrieve them, but she chose not to, and I did not judge her for her choice. She brought a healthy baby to term and then somehow walked away and pretended it never happened. I can’t fathom the particular strength of character that must have taken.
After our brief meeting at the agency, she looked at us and said, I really didn’t want to come here today but I’m glad I did because I think you both will make wonderful parents.
Not a dry eye in the room. But her assurance enabled me to walk away and know I was this baby boy’s mother now.
***
Sad and interesting fact about my friend with four adopted children: Her own mother once had the gall to tell her, at some point in her young adulthood, You know, I didn’t really like motherhood. I probably shouldn’t have done it, but we did it just because it was the thing everyone was supposed to do at that age.
Now there’s some solid parenting right there. /eyeroll/
***
Every child should be a chosen child. Every pregnant person should have the freedom to make their most important, life-changing decisions. Every potential parent should be really, really clear about the consequences of their choices: all the hard and beautiful consequences. We own them ourselves. STFU if you think otherwise.