Rethinking Adoption: Birth Mothers are People, Too
I've just finished reading a book called The Girls Who Went Away, which is about "the hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade."
Adoption's an issue I'm interested in for a lot of reasons. I know people who were themselves adopted, and women who placed children for adoption. And I'm well aware of the argument that anti-abortion people often make that women with unwanted pregnancies should "just" place their children for adoption--an argument that, after watching a couple of people go through that process, I'm inclined to think is one of those offhand remarks that people make without actually thinking about what they're saying.
For instance, listen to what "Nancy," whose story is one of those told in the book, has to say:
It's hard to convince others about the depth of it. You know, a few years after I was married I became pregnant and had an abortion. It was not a wonderful experience, but every time I hear stories or articles or essays about the recurring trauma of abortion, I want to say, "You don't have a clue" I've experienced both and I'd have an abortion any day of the week before I would ever have another adoption--or lose a kid in the woods, which is basically what it is. You know your child is out there somewhere, you just don't know where. It's bad enough as a mother to know he might need you, but to complicate that they make a law that says even if he does need you we're not going to tell him where you are. (My emphasis.)
Or "Karen":
The only way to heal from this is to be accepted by your child and for the public to know the truth of what's really happened. And understand it's the truth. Instead of always pushing adoption as this loving, wonderful, rescuing thing. Yes, that may be the case for people who adopt. It is not the case for us. You never are whole. Never. It's a hugely damaging thing. It's an enormously injuring, painful, fracturing amputation of families. . . .
We were not criminals. We're mothers. The difference was I was not an authenticated mother. I was an illegal mother. I was a denied mother. And I had to come home and live my life after being robbed of my child. It's as if I was an unwilling accomplice to the kidnapping of my own child. So you have to live with the trauma of losing your child and then you have to live with the trauma of knowing you didn't stop it. How do you do that? (Emphasis in original.)
Moreover, the years between 1950 and 1980, which were the high point of formal adoptions of white babies in the U.S., were atypical in ways that discussion around adoption (and abortion) usually fails to acknowledge. In 1950, 66 percent of Americans were married; in 1960 it was 68 percent. But
in 1980 the percentage of the population that was married was the same as in 1900: 54 percent. In the U.S. Census for 2000, the percentage was also 54 percent.
Also,
the median age at first marriage in the 1980s was the same as in 1890, roughly age 22 for women and 26 for men. However . . . (in) 1950, almost 60 percent of women between 18 and 24 years of age were married.
The point here is that
Even though marriage and child-rearing norms of the time (are) seen as characteristic of traditional American family life, in fact they were abnormal in comparison with marriage and childbearing patterns throughout the twentieth century.
And part of that abnormality was a serious punishment of (middle-class, particularly white) young women who got pregnant out of wedlock. Homes for unwed mothers, which had previously focused on helping young women find stable jobs and social support to keep and raise their children, started becoming baby factories where young women were pressured into giving their children up to married couples who "needed" a child to fulfill the new nuclear family "norm", and told that they were unfit mothers because, being unmarried, they *didn't* fit this model. There was a very, very strong--and abnormal--image of the "proper" family, one that caused a lot of grief to women who didn't conform.
This kind of thing is implicit in any argument about what constitutes a "good" mother, whether or not people "should" have children if they're "too" poor/young/single, and in the flip side "pro-family" pressure that everyone "should" have children and "should" behave in particular, narrowly-defined ways once they do.
And there's a lot in this book to demonstrate the results of this kind of thinking--panicked parents who beat or ostracized their daughters for becoming pregnant, parents who colluded with adoption agencies to coerce women into signing blank papers, girls who were talked into placing children for adoption so they could "get on with their lives" only to find that the emotional trauma of the adoption made doing so impossible, women who lost jobs when their adoptions were found out, women who went to their graves never telling their siblings, parents, husbands, or children about having once placed a baby for adoption.
Crazy, crazy shit. An absolute must-read if you're adopted, if you're thinking of adopting, or if you know someone who is having to think about the options for an unwanted pregnancy. And highly recommended, really, for everyone.
Bitch_PhD isn't anti-adoption. But she can't imagine losing her child, and thinks that calling adoption a "gift" implies that children are the equivalent of, like, a hand-made pair of socks or something.
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Comments
Veloxmortis
USA
February 2006
NOV 20, 2007 01:35 AM
Syal
I'm lost
June 2005
NOV 20, 2007 06:59 PM
Tallboy66
Chicago, IL
January 2005
NOV 21, 2007 09:58 AM
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