Adoption? Abortion?

[juliagoolia]

Whelp, in time for Christmas I found MS Reed and now she can know the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1959.

And I also found Ms. Perry in time for her to enjoy the birth-family she lost when she was born in 1966. They plan to meet this weekend.

These are typical of the cases I work on in my "hobby job" when I am not working on enterprise unix systems!

Ms Reed from OK born in the mid 30s. Never did marry, and had no other children. Her birth-daughter long ago lost her adoptive parents who were almost a generation older than her birth-mother. The adoptee now had her medical history!

Ms Perry married and no longer a Ms Perry found out she has a mother only 16 years older than herself, and a grandparent still living. She never had one before. After being given to a "nice" family that broke up when she was age three, and later ending up in foster homes. She finally has siblings and a young mother who really wants her and her children to be part of a family.

Of course relationships will have to be worked out as they always do. Some will work some wont. The answer is not always abortion, and its not always adoption either. Being someone involved in all aspects of the "touched by adoption" community, I can say that no-one ever escapes adoption without scars. Neither does a woman have an abortion without some leftover feelings as well.

There are no black and white answers, but tonight MS Reed, and MS Perry have both found the other halves and four people have a chance to start something that could make a difference in their lives.

Regardless of what happens they are no longer looking.

I strongly encourage us to work to build stronger supports for young women in situations where they are faced with these horrible decisions so they have more choices.

There is no right or wrong decision sometimes, and often when this happens to a young girl all of her choices stink. There is no financial support for her should she decide to keep the baby, and often families abandon them and offer no emotional support either.
Forcing a young woman to give birth and then give up the baby is also not an easy answer. This does not leave an unharmed mother, nor does it create a Father Knows Best life for the child. Regardless of how wonderful the adoptive family is there is always a scar. I am an adoptive mother as well. Walking away and leaving a child you give birth to can leave a HUGE void in a person's life.

I guess you can only imagine the tearful conversations I have had with hundreds of people on all sides of this issue over the years.

When I hear the "pro-life" people talking, and the adoption proponents like DR Laura Schlessinger trying to convince young women to give their babies away I want to puke for the lack of insight they seem to have about what they are asking people to do. I also see people that have full lives that if they were aborted would not exist. It is just not black and white. Its so much more complex and JOhn Kerry is right, its not something that you can legislate for someone.

Anyway, MS Reed, and MS Perry and their families will have a much fuller Christmas this year than they had hoped for.

And it did my heart some good too!!!

Both Ms Reed and Ms Perry are fictional names, but are representative of the two cases I did solve today.

[Sandpiper]

1. The pro-life adoption movement is a crock

There are plenty of orphaned/abused/neglected children in the world in need of adoption, but most people don't want anything other than a shiny new baby from their own racial background.

[juliagoolia]

2. Thats true.

There are plenty to adopt. I often ask the pro-lifers if they are going to go get one. Some of these babies/children/teens adandoned sit in foster homes waiting on some "good moral" people to come get them.

Are we going to get them?

[TaleWgnDg]

3. Choice. A Women's Right to Choose . . . it's all about

personal autonomy. It's all about whether a State or federal government can force a woman to carry to full term. It's about Roe v. Wade. And about a woman's fundamental constitutional right to choose what she wants to do with her own body.





.

[juliagoolia]

4. Its also about the child

If she has the baby and gives it up, the child deserves heritage, health history and openness too.

I am NOT opposed to choice. I want choice for the child too if it is born. I want an adoptee to have the right to know whether they need to have extra blood tests. To be able to know what kinds of medical problems they need to be aware of. The know their own heritage and famly history. The story of their beginnings. This helps a person know who they are.

I am pro-choice for all parties.

[REP]

5. Adoption: Safe, Legal and Rare

J Obstet Gynecol Neonatal Nurs 1999 Jul-Aug;28(4):395-400

Postadoptive reactions of the relinquishing mother: a review.

Askren HA, Bloom KC.

Deer Valley OB/GYN, Mesa, AZ, USA.

OBJECTIVE: To review the literature addressing the process of relinquishment
as it relates to the birth mother. DATA SOURCES: Computerized searches in
CINAHL; Article 1 st, PsycFIRST, and SocioAbs databases, using the keywords
adoption and relinquishment; and ancestral bibliographies. STUDY SELECTION:
Articles from indexed journals in the English language relevant to the
keywords were evaluated. No studies were located before 1978. Studies that
sampled only an adolescent population were excluded. Twelve studies met the
inclusion criteria and were included in the analysis. DATA EXTRACTION: Data
were extracted and information was organized under the following headings:
grief reaction, long-term effects, efforts to resolve, and influences on the
relinquishment experience. DATA SYNTHESIS: A grief reaction unique to the
relinquishing mother was identified. Although this reaction consists of
features characteristic of the normal grief reaction, these features persist
and often lead to chronic, unresolved grief. CONCLUSIONS: The relinquishing
mother is at risk for long-term physical, psychologic, and social
repercussions. Although interventions have been proposed, little is known
about their effectiveness in preventing or alleviating these repercussions.

I'm all for preventing as much of this as humanly possible, through greater access to safe, effective, non-controversially-available contraception and abortion.