Is Adoption Reform Common Ground on Abortion?
Yes, of course. Adoption reform is an issue on which those who oppose abortion and those who support a woman’s right to choose abortion should be able to work together to forge common ground for policies that make adoption a genuine choice.
See there, Steve Waldman and I have found common ground already. So now let’s get to the points of contention Waldman, the editor-in-chief of Beliefnet raised in response to my last post, referencing a proposal he made, intended (though I doubt it would) to reduce abortions. The exchange came about as part of RHRealityCheck’s “On Common Ground” convo.
I do appreciate that Waldman acknowledges his suggestion that women be paid to “give their babies up for adoption instead of having an abortion” was a “half baked idea”. Unfortunately, he then leapt to a wildly incorrect assumption:
Gloria Feldt, in her post, “Possibly the Most Idiotic Common Ground Discussion I’ve Ever Heard,” writes, “Remind me, how do you spell “c-o-e-r-c-i-o-n”? How much money would it take to make you carry a pregnancy to term against your will?”
Feldt’s comment implies that a woman would invariably prefer having an abortion to placing a baby up for adoption.
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Whoa horse, let’s stop right there. Not only do I imply no such thing; my entire point is that women faced with unintended pregnancy should not be coerced, urged, or even encouraged in any direction. They should be supported in making their own childbearing decisions and the playing field should be leveled so that they have full access to exercise their options.
To suggest that women need to be steered in any direction, whether with financial incentives, social approbation, or laws, is to imagine that women have no brains, no hearts, and/or no consciences. It is utter disrespect for a woman’s moral authority…for her very humanity, actually.
You will not likely find one person in the pro-choice world who opposes adoption or who would not work to make sure women have access to all the information, counseling, health care services, and social supports they need to be able to make free and uncoerced decisions to relinquish for adoption. But the conversation, unfortunately, often breaks down there—by those opposed to abortion, as historian Blake Ellis describes here.
Because to be able to make an informed decision, one must have unbiased, unfettered access to all the information, counseling, health care services, and social supports she needs to consider each of the choices available to her: adoption, parenting, and abortion.
None of these choices is easy. A woman knows full well that she is giving up something profound in return. Choice, you see, is sacrifice as well as freedom.
Which brings me to my second point that engendered Waldman’s contention:
And I disagree with the apparent inclination of some on the pro-choice side to minimize the adoption question entirely. “The real common ground is preventing unintended pregnancy, and it is logically incorrect not to start with that framework,” writes Feldt.
Actually, that would be called “our team winning,” not “common ground.”
This is where Waldman and his partner in pontification, Will Saletan truly earned the title given their Bloggingheads conversation about the pay-for-pregnancy/adoption scheme: “Two Men, No Uteruses”.
I have a birds and bees news flash for you, gentlemen: if there were no unintended pregnancies, there would be precious few abortions, and we could all save our breath for other debates. That’s why preventing unintended pregnancies is the widest swath of common ground. It’s about making real people’s lives better, not some zero-sum notion of winning and losing a political game. Prevention offers the abundance of future life choices that most of us want for our daughters—or ourselves.
On the cusp of Independence Day, these words from the Declaration of Independence are a good example of how easy it is to miss an injustice:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
Without taking anything away from the great document, when we look at those words with our 21st century sensibilities, even most of the men among us probably observe that the female half of our nascent country was left out, invisible in the culture of the day.
Unfortunately Waldman’s framework leaves women out of the picture just as clearly. All I’m asking is that women’s inalienable rights be respectfully placed, at last, into the ranks of citizens deemed equal, and justly empowered to give their own consent.
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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Waldman’s blog infuriates me. His idea about paying women for choosing adoption completely leaves the complexities of women out.
Let’s think about this. It leaves the pregnant woman out. A pregnancy changes a woman– it affects you to the core, to your soul– whether you are continuing the pregnancy or not. If a woman finds herself in the gut-wrenching position of having to deal with an unintended pregnancy, there is no mathematical equation you can prescribe for her to come to the “right” decision. Only she knows the right decision, and she should be supported in WHATEVER that decision may be. Only she is in the position to determine her ability to raise a child, choose adoption or abortion. These decisions are not simple, and implying that making adoption easier, with or without some kind of financial compensation is insulting. “It was in thinking about how to help birth mothers that I wondered about paying them if they choose to put a baby up for adoption instead of an abortion. We’re asking them to go through the extraordinary sacrifice of continuing a pregnancy knowing they might end up making the wrenching decision to give her baby away. There are health risks. More important, there are deep psychological risks. And yes there are even financial risks. Women who carry a baby to term may have to take sabbaticals from work or drop out of school.” says Waldman. Wow he makes it sound simple– yes there are all these things to consider, but if we pay her $X then she will carry her pregnancy to term for someone else.
“But for women who choose not to parent and would prefer not to have an abortion, is it really c-o-e-r-c-i-o-n to make it easier to do so?” Waldman. I think we need to make something clear– NO WOMAN PREFERS to have an abortion. I have worked in a clinic for 8 years, and I have never had a patient say to me “I am here to exercise my constitutional right to have an abortion.”
I think in trying to reach common ground we should be careful about the language we use.
I just feel like so many of these discussions about common ground come from the assumption that women don’t understand what an abortion is, or what they are doing.
Trust me, women know what they are deciding when they choose abortion.
As a long time adoption reformer I can tell you that those of us interested in improving adoption practices see no connection whatsoever between adoption and abortion, and find the bringing together of these two topics offensive, objectionable and wrong-minded.
No matter what poisiton one takes on abortion, it does not involve a living human being as does adotpion. Adoption is a preocess that aims to find homes for children – already born and here – who need care that their parents ar eunable or unwillign to provide, despite receiving resources to do so.
Inferring a connection assumes that people who have been adopted need to feel “grateful” that they were not aborted – as if the mother of all such children ever considered that option any more or less than the parent of any child not adopted!
As the trailer for the movie “My Sister’s Keeper” states: Most kids are born by accident. That means most ALL! those raised by their families and those who wind up being placed out of their families – voluntarily or involuntarily.
What is most disturbing about all of these adoption.abortion dichotomy discussions is the devil and deep blue sea aspect for expectant mothers and the omission of the most moral and most loving, most difficult choice of all: parenting.
The best way to eliminate abortion is through access to birth control and sex education. This has been proven over and over in studies comparing abstinence only programs with more comprehensive sex ed – both within the US and in Europe where the levels of teen pregnancies are considerably lower.
Let’s please remove the myopic blinders and open up real discussion. There are more than two option, folks! And less think about the consequences of these comparisons to the most vulnerable people of all – those who have to live with one of these titles defining their lives and do not need to be compared with an abortion!
Jennifer and Mirah, these are two awesome comments. The bottom line always comes down to the individual woman’s story, doesn’t it? When I wrote “Behind Every Choice Is a Story”, which is a compilation of women’s, and some men’s, stories about every possible reproductive issue and discussion, I thought I could make this obvious to the world. Alas, there are always people who just can’t see the woman in the picture. Just can’t see her. I don’t get it, do you? is is all about power? Lack of compassion? Lack of experience?
Gloria (and friends), as a historian of the Christian Right I have grappled for years to answer that question: Is it all about power? It boggles the mind how people can discuss issues that directly touch women as if the women are not in the picture at all.
I’ve come to conclude that, with some exceptions, the anti-choice movement never was about “saving babies.” I think if they could wave a magic wand and make the US like the Netherlands (a very pro-choice country with very few abortions), they would NOT do it. Why? Because at the end of the day, it bothers them that women have the ultimate power to decide when and where children come into the world. This explains why anti-choicers are so obstinate in preventing measures that would actually reduce the abortion rate like real sex education, government funding of birth control, and universal health care. They would rather obsess over the legality of abortion than have a conversation about how to reduce its incidence.
That’s why I think we have to be careful about this common ground talk. I’d hate to see us cede so much ground that we sacrifice women’s health and still find the anti-choice crowd asking for more. To my mind, now is a time for resolve not for concessions. This is particularly true after the murder of Dr. Tiller.
Blake, this point that you make gets to such an important leadership issue. Especially now that the public is paying sympathetic attention and we have a relatively prochoice president and congress–opportunity and need converge here.
Why do you think the prochoice advocates tend to be so open to these common ground conversations and the antichoice groups stick to their principles? Ar we so morally ambivalent? I don’t think so, but wonder what your research finds.
Gloria,
There is no easy answer to your question (Why do pro-choice advocates so easily fall into the compromise trap?). But my experience and research indicates that the primary impetus for these compromises has been political expediency. Too often, we’ve failed to remember that ours is the moderate position that is held by a majority of Americans. To win elections (particularly in the South), we’ve allowed anti-choice candidates to join our party and to push the debate away from women’s autonomy and towards more tangential issues like tricky exceptions or rare circumstances. In short, we’ve allowed the other side to frame the terms of the debate; no wonder we get frustrated!
I do think there is something inherent in the pro-choice position that lends itself to compromise. Perhaps because we recognize the moral complexities of the issue (thus our desire to let individuals work it out on their own terms), we tend to be able to see their side of the issue. This isn’t a bad quality, but we ought to be intellectually rigorous in how we examine potential compromises and how we craft rhetoric about an issue that, at the end of the day, touches women far more deeply than the men who often push for this elusive “common ground.”
But as a historian, I have to say that our minds should never be far from the history of women’s experience in this country. The minute that we forget what life was like for women pre-Roe is the minute that we lose the moral imperative to avoid needless concessions. We don’t avoid compromises because we value winning esoteric arguments; we do so because, unlike the anti-choice side, we have a memory that is longer the last election cycle. We know that to compromise even on minor issues is to walk down a road that we as a country have traveled before. Before Roe, historians have documented the horrors women endured just to control their own reproductive destiny. I’d hate for good, pro-choice people to wake up one day and realize that we compromised our way to a future that is dangerous to women’s health and imperils the progress we’ve made towards social equality. I also have to say that all the compromising in the world is not likely to appease most members of the anti-choice movement. At the end of the day, they have a different view of women’s rights than we do. I, for one, would rather spend my time fighting for the lives and health of women than trying to win over people who don’t share our vision of what the world ought to look like for women AND men.
Just my humble opinion, of course!
Blake, thanks for this thoughtful and multifaceted reply. As someone whose task it was to lead prochoice constituencies forward to define the debate and set the agenda, I can attest that was much harder than fighting with our adversaries. I had to spend endless time pouring starch into prochoice spines, explaining why being proactive was more effective than reacting to attacks, and generally revving people up to go forward with optimism and moral certitude. Within the prochoice coalition, there was constant pressure to use the smallest and safest arguments and much resistance to framing reproductive rights as the human and civil rights they legitimately are. On the other hand, for those who oppose reproductive rights, the issues are simple black and white, unquestioning moral zeal is part of the package, and women’s real life experiences nowhere on the radar.
I hope you’ll keep researching and writing this topic. Your perspective as a historian is so valuable.
In my experience it is about power. I agree with Blake’s assessment. Being antichoice has not ever been about saving babies, and there is an overwhelming pool of evidence to look at. Speaking in generalities– these are also the same people who do not support public welfare programs. Once that child is born, sorry momma, you are on your own. If these groups were so concerned about the child, wouldn’t they do more to advocate on behalf of that child for things like health insurance, public welfare and support mechanisms– and what about the children in the foster care system?? How cares about them?
Why are prochoice advocates open to common ground conversations? That’s an excellent question. I don’t think it has anything to do with being morally ambivalent. I think at some level it is desperation, which is sad. I think it is about trying, really really trying to get people to listen to us. Listen to these women. In my mind, of course, abortion– safe and legal– IS the common ground. We are here, providing abortion services, because life doesn’t always happen the way we plan it. And life isn’t always a happy and smooth sailing ride. Things happen, and bad things happen. And I help women get their lives back, get their power back, and remind them– you are a GOOD woman, and you are a GOOD mother– just trying to do the best you know how.
I think that the anti movement cannot hear these stories because if you just LISTENED to women, really and truly, and heard their stories, you would be very very hard pressed to deny that abortion must remain a legal safe alternative.
It is my view now, in the wake of Dr. Tiller’s murder, that the most effective way to get across the prochoice voice is not through people like us, advocates and providers, pundits and the like, but from the women themselves. What I have learned, in a very hard way, is that protesters are not at abortion clinics because providers are there– protestors come to clinics because WOMEN come here to have abortions. If there were no women at my clinic, protestors would not come.
It is time for women to speak out about their abortions, and not be shamed.
I have to interject and say that ther is still very little in the way of trully uncoerced decisions to relinquish a child for adoption even these days. In many years of adoption research and insight into acceptable agency practices, plus living it mysleffor over 21 years, I have found only a handful of adoption professionals who bother telling considering mothers about the long term true risks of relinquishment.
There is NO WAY that woman have acess to real information. No way!
Claudia, it sounds like you have a story that needs to be told. Perhaps those who don’t want women to be able to exercise their own choices about childbearing would be better able to understand the problems of implicit and explicit coercion when the situation deals with adoption. And also, perhaps you can offer suggestions for how women considering relinquishing for adoption should be counseled and supported.
I agree with Claudia completely that it is impossible to make an informed decision about adoption, because there are almost no adoption professionals out there willing or able to tell a woman about the life-long losses and damage she will experience as a result of the “miracle of adoption.”
I was pro-life and chose life. I therefore gave birth at 17. I fought the abortion which was pushed on me by my parents, boyfriend and doctor. I chose life, and then adoption was chosen for me. I wish I had been supported and educated about parenting, but parenting was never allowed as an option because I had such a bright college future. Only adoption was pushed at me. After 30 years of experiencing the damage wreaked by the loss of my only child to adoption and after meeting my child and finding an individual very damaged by adoption, I am now pro-choice. Therefore, I don’t agree when you state that “You will not likely find one person in the pro-choice world who opposes adoption or who would not work to make sure women have access to all the information, counseling, health care services, and social supports they need to be able to make free and uncoerced decisions to relinquish for adoption.” I oppose infant adoption with every fiber of my being, and, given the option of aborting my son or losing him to the hell of adoption (since parenting was not supported), I would now choose abortion.
I think everyone who thinks adoption is such a great option should intentionally get pregnant and then relinquish their child in a closed adoption (dripping sarcasm). Let them live the miracle of loss and grief for a few years, then let’s see how many of them still agree that adoption is such a great option. A child is “saved” from the “unfit birthmother” and the mother is sacrificed in the miracle of adoption. Been there, done that, and didn’t even get the T-shirt. Just for clarity: Even though you are viewed as wonderful, mature, life-giving, gift-giving, etc. before and during birth, you instantly become the unfit and unworthy birthmother after signing the relinquishment papers. No one ever tells a mother that before she signs …
Isabo, thank you for sharing your story. It so poignantly illustrates that whatever choice a woman makes, it isn’t going to be easy. I have seen data, for example, that shows the incidence of emotional problems after giving birth, abortion, and adoption are approximately the same. Post partum depression is recognized now and anti-choice groups love to exaggerate the emotional consequences of abortion, but rarely do we hear discussion about the emotional consequences of adoption. I can only try to imagine the intense feeling of loss, especially when there has been inadequate counseling and emotional support during the process.
Not to sound like a broken record, but in my experience hearing thousands of women’s stories and knowing my own (we all have them), the only just way to solve the problem is to respect women enough to provide whatever it takes so that each woman can make her own informed decision from among choices that are real and viable. Enticing or persuading or forcing women in one direction or another will simply never work from a pragmatic point of view, even if you could adopt policies that favor one option over another.
Isabo is speaking the same words many, many birth mothers feel and would say if given a voice. She is also correct in that once the child is placed for adoption the stigma and devaluation occurs to those birth mothers so they have no voice that is heard in the society we live in.
You are also missing the voice of the many adoptees that are from the closed era, who have the need to know where they come from. Those adoptees live their entire life without any knowledge of where they come from, what nationality they are, why they were given away, whether they have siblings, basically just any ‘why’ that answers the question of ‘who am I’. It does not seem to matter if we had the best parents or the worst, that cry of needing to know our identity is never silenced, and compounded by the inability to view, access, and hold our original birth certificates showing who we were born to be.
Then you add the lack of any family medical history that is seldom updated and no matter how much you practive preventative medicine and lifestyle, genetics plays a large part of what your health will be like, not just in childhood, but for their entire life and the lives of their children and grandchildren. Family medical history provides the clues our doctors need to assist in taking care of us before events happen.
Adoption whether it is open or closed affects the adoptee for life, the level of impact it has on the adoptee depends on the individual, but commonalities can be seen in most adoptees. It is a loss that can never be grieved fully.
Adoption reform is far past due and needs to be on the top of the agenda for all concerned. There are very few watch dogs and it is big business.