Wishing you peace

By TAO

Today is hard for many…words don’t help very much, but sometimes, just a beautiful picture can make the day a bit better…even for a minute.  Wishing everyone peace today.

 

Promoting adoption…

By TAO

Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine is apparently a Fox News Contributor.  Up until today I had never heard of her but Think Progress has a news clip of her on Fox.  Talking about the need to celebrate the teen and young adult pregnancies and of course the solution is adoption.  She says more than the quote below so go to the link above and listen to the short clip.

“I would say that in addition to deregulating birth control, another thing we need to do is celebrate young women who bring a baby to term and find an adoptive parent. There’s such a stigma today to being an adoptive birth mom that you’re more willing to admit that you’ve had an abortion than that you are delivering a healthy newborn to a loving family.”

Because it is just so easy to give your baby away.  No worries, no concerns, no grief, no loss, no pain.  Just joy!

She is correct that mothers are stigmatized and put down – you just have to read adoption forums and blogs.  They are saints, selfless, brave, and promised open adoptions - until the papers are signed – then far too often they turn into the birthmother who crosses boundaries, can’t be trusted, unstable, contact isn’t in the best interests of the child, she hasn’t moved on, she needs to get over the pain, she has no legal rights…and the adoption closes.

I doubt a mother ever fully gets over the loss of their child to adoption – even in the best of the best open adoptions - they may find a level of acceptance, carry on with life because what else can they do?  But after carrying and giving birth to your child – you are forever changed.  My mother said decades after I was born: “there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about her and wonder“.  Sure, lets celebrate that and encourage more mothers to give up their babies…

Wanting society to celebrate mothers who choose adoption is setting up many impressionable young women and girls to pain they have no comprehension of until it is too late.  It may also reduce the use of birth control if getting pregnant and giving your baby up for adoption is celebrated.  In my mind it is coercive.  There is enough coercion still taking place in adoption today – lets not add to it.

Instead society should be doing what is needed to support motherhood – that starts with creating maternity benefits through employment insurance to allow paid leave for the first year, and a job to return to afterwards.  A society that wants to see mothers succeed even though it’s hard, and looks into ways that training in job skills is accessible to mothers.  A society that works at making sure fathers pay support, are held accountable, are fathers, and the system easier to navigate for all.

Yet her message is that the answer is adoption – that comes without any legal protections with teeth to keep adoptions open that mothers are promised before those papers are signed, or recognition that it is a life-long sentence of being a mother without motherhood.

Oh, and why her interest in promoting adoption, and why she just happened to have all the details to promote it offered at the end of the clip - she’s an adoptive mother according to this story.  No bias there.