Paths to Parenthood in Post-Roe America—Navigating the Landscape of Fertility, Adoption, and Human Trafficking
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This essay is available in audio format.
I started this piece when it was first leaked that the U.S. Supreme Court intended to overturn Roe v. Wade. Since then, I’ve hemmed and hawed over whether to publish this. What right do I have, I wondered, to write about a topic so contentious, so heated, when I am neither a parent, nor an adoptee, nor a person who has worked in the business of adoption?
Yet I am a woman who planned to become a mother through adoption. I made decisions throughout my twenties and into my thirties based on this intention. I took my time dating, I invested in my career, and I basked in the freedom of being unbound by the ticking clock of biology. I even wrote a blog post when I was 26 called “Thoughts on Adoption Instead of Reproduction,” sharing the reasons why I wanted to adopt. Then, at the age of 33 and considering marriage, I looked more deeply into the process of adopting a child in the United States. What I found shook my dreams and changed all of my plans.
I write this today as a woman reckoning with how and if she will ever become a mother. At 36, I am far from alone. My girlfriends are either moms already, moms-in-trying, or moms-undecided. It is the undecided like myself for whom I most write this piece, for I cannot be the only one struggling to make decisions in a post-Roe America who realized it may be too late to have children of my own—and that adoption may not be the most ethical path to parenthood.
A tweet compelled me to write this piece.
Daniel shared this when it was revealed that the constitutional right to abortion would be eliminated. Social media feeds then and now, days after this ruling came to pass, depict pro-choicers asking pro-lifers* if they plan on adopting the babies who will be born as a result. His response is one I agree with.
Many Christians are ready to adopt babies who won’t be aborted. And the cold truth is that people will profit from the brokering of these babies. [Click to Tweet]
The Christian Adoption Industry
Did you feel slightly shocked by Daniel’s use of the term human trafficking? I did, but only because I’ve been too chicken to publicly call adoption that myself. Yet Daniel and I aren’t the only ones using this descriptor for the private, and mostly Christian, adoption industry.
Kathryn Joyce, author of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, doesn’t hesitate to place the word trafficking right in her book’s title. She writes in an article for The New Republic that the Christian adoption movement, which she traces to the early 2000s, “... began to refer to adoption as a means of ‘redeeming orphans’—saving them just as Christians are redeemed when they are born again.”
Even in the ’90s, my upbringing in the evangelical church heavily emphasized the divine calling for Christian families to adopt. This calling was not only an opportunity to show compassion to “the least of these,” which Jesus says is to show compassion to him. This calling was to raise up more children in the army of God. When your goal as an evangelical Christian is to win souls for Christ and have the laws of the land reflect Christian values, adoption is a noble way to indoctrinate a new generation of believers and voters.
At least, it appears noble.
Over 8,000 child-placing agencies in the U.S. are faith-based. Of the top nine, more than half are openly Christian or have Christian roots. Holt International, Gladney Center for Adoption, Spence Chapin, Nightlight Christian Adoptions, and more all have their share of dubious practices to uncover if you dig for them. The agency with perhaps the shadiest past to bury is Bethany Christian Services.
Bethany Christian Services is one of the largest adoption and foster care centers in the country. A “well-connected powerhouse of the anti-choice movement,” Bethany is known for a long history of coercing mothers to give up their babies, discriminating against LGBTQ couples, and for its role in separating migrant children from their parents. This led to direct accusations of human trafficking.
Bethany is one of many Christian adoption centers with strong financial ties to Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. DeVos’s mission is, “...to confront the culture in which we all live today in ways that will continue to help advance God’s Kingdom.” Part of advancing God’s Kingdom in political America is through pro-life activism.
According to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), the DeVos family has given over a million dollars to crisis pregnancy centers. Bethany Christian Services runs over 100 of these centers. They pose as clinics and are really pro-life “counseling” offices that deceive and shame people seeking abortions. “Through misleading marketing practices,” NWLC writes, “they target pregnant people—and particularly women of color—and then provide a heaping dose of stigma and misinformation rather than medical care in order to block patients’ access to abortion.”
The alternative to abortion that crisis pregnancy centers urge? Adoption.
Adoption in the United States is a multi-billion dollar industry. The New Yorker reports, “The private-sector and nonprofit adoption and child-welfare-services industries in America generate an estimated nineteen billion dollars a year in revenue.”
I don’t think profiting from adoption is the reason many Christians are pro-life—most of them won’t share in the profits. Yet I do find it convenient that the adoption industry is set to boom now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. And it’s not just Christian adoption agencies who will benefit.
Adoption in the United States
I used to want to adopt. It was a goal of mine ever since I saw Penny cry into her stuffed bear in The Rescuers, afraid she’d never get ’dopted.
My desire to adopt slowly changed the deeper I looked into adoption. Specifically, independent and agency adoption, as opposed to adoption through the government foster care system. These are the three most common ways to adopt a child in the United States.
I’m selfish, guys. I wanted to adopt a baby. Why? Because I spent time talking with parents who adopted older children and felt daunted by their stories. Because I wanted to mitigate my risk of having a kid with “issues.” Because I wanted the milestones of seeing my child’s first crawl, first bite of food, first steps. Because I love babies and the way they smell and have dreamed of one of my own since I can remember. Because I’ve learned about attachment theory and don’t feel equipped with a heart big enough to support a child whose early years are imprinted by the trauma of attaching and detaching over and over and over.
And so I planned on adopting a newborn. This, I learned, was most likely if I pursued adoption through an independent attorney or an adoption agency. This is where I learned I may not adopt a baby at all.
Independent adoption, also called private adoption, is the kind we’ve seen romanticized in films like Juno. The expectant mother either places or answers an advertisement for adoption. She interviews prospective parents, selects a family she likes, and then the adoptive parents hire an attorney to transfer legal guardianship to them once the baby is born. Typically, the adoptive parents also pay for prenatal care as well as housing, clothing, and other expenses for the birth mom. They may even be present when the baby is born.
Agency adoption is also a form of private adoption, as opposed to public adoption through government foster care. Unlike independent adoption, where parents manage all aspects of the process themselves—from advertising to finding a lawyer to arranging background checks and managing expenses for the expectant mother—an adoption agency handles these for you. They operate like parent-baby matchmakers with websites depicting wholesome-looking family portfolios for pregnant moms to browse through. When she selects a family she likes, the agency handles the rest.
There are two reasons it is very unlikely that I will adopt an infant through the private sector.
The first reason is that there aren’t as many infants needing adoption—and this is good news—although that is bound to change with the overturning of Roe. Today, domestic infant adoption comprises around 0.5% of all live births in the U.S. compared to 9% in the early ’70s. The lessening stigma of single motherhood, the availability of contraception and abortion, and an increased push to keep children with their biological families are largely to thank for this.
If you’re a prospective parent hoping to adopt a newborn, these numbers may feel discouraging. An estimated 1 million U.S. families are looking to adopt at any given time, most of them seeking infants. Only about 18,000 infants are available for adoption. Not only are my odds of adopting a newborn low—my competition is stiff. Agency websites depict hundreds of married couples in front of spacious houses on tree-lined lots with hefty annual salaries and promises to raise children in the Lord’s loving church. I’m an unmarried renter with an unstable job and an atheist to boot.
Practicing Christians are more than twice as likely to foster and adopt as the general population. Before you pat Christians on the back for walking their talk about being Jesus’s hands and feet, consider that they may be the most likely to adopt because it is Christians who are most allowed to adopt in the first place.
Atheists and other non-Christians have lower chances of adopting because religious freedom bills allow adoption and foster agencies to discriminate based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.” These agencies are taxpayer-funded. You are right to question if this violates the separation of church and state, and a growing number of parents rejected for adoption are fighting back. It may be futile.
Just last Sunday, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert declared that she’s, “...tired of this separation of church and state junk.” Her words only give voice to the intentions of the GOP we’ve seen play out this past week. With conservative Christians making up more than half of the Supreme Court, we are likely to see more of this rhetoric in action for years to come—and it will be done in the name of religious freedom.
The second reason I am unlikely to adopt an infant through the private sector goes back to the dark side of adoption.
Is the brokering of children a form of human trafficking?
I now struggle to see how it isn’t. At best, the private adoption industry has win-win goals: a child gets adopted by a loving family and the facilitator thrives as a business. At worst, the private adoption industry is a coercive enterprise preying on underprivileged mothers and infertile couples while profiting from the exchange of human children.
The average infant adoption in the United States costs $45,000 or more. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services quoted a price range of $20,000 to $45,000. Today, American Adoptions, one of the nation’s largest private adoption agencies and one of the few that is openly secular, says adoptive parents, “...should be prepared to spend between $60,000-$70,000 or more.” That’s just for domestic adoption. International adoption can almost double the cost.
Where does the money go?
According to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, “Overall [adoption] costs may include the home study, court and legal fees, preadoption and postadoption counseling for birth parents, birth parent medical and legal expenses, adoptive parent preparation and training, social work services needed to match a child with a prospective family, interim care for a child, and postplacement supervision until the adoption is finalized.”
Other fees that can raise the price to the higher end include vaguely worded service fees, travel fees, advertising fees, matching fees, and more. Then there are fees for media services like photo shoots for family portfolios and documentary-style interviews. As sellers of these services say, if you’re a hopeful adoptive parent, why wouldn’t you give yourself every opportunity to stand out among your competitors? Oh, also—the fee may be lower for a non-white baby.
Finally, we have the “one-time agency fee.” Here, perhaps, is where there may be the most variability driving up the cost of adoption. Adoption.com says this one-time agency fee is charged regardless of how much or little time is spent on the adoption, saying, “It’s important to note that when you choose an adoption agency, you are simply paying for the service, not ‘buying a child.’”
That this even needs to be said tells you how many people must wonder if they are, actually, buying a child. It’s not only adoptive parents who question this.
When Shyanne Klupp began placing her baby for adoption, “She remembers thinking, ‘I’m not trying to sell my baby.’” Her story appeared in Time magazine’s “The Baby Brokers: Inside America’s Murky Private-Adoption Industry.” Shyanne says her adoption facilitator, Adoption Network Law Center (ANLC), encouraged her to write down how much money she’d need for expenses throughout her pregnancy. After coming up with a modest list of essentials, like gas money and food, her counselor said, “That’s not enough,” encouraging Shyanne to ask for more because the adoptive parents were rich. So she added other items like maternity clothes and a new set of tires.
Shyanne signed the legal paperwork for adoption with the option to revoke. All throughout her pregnancy, she wavered on her decision. Tik Root writes (emphasis mine):
When [Shyanne] called her…counselor to ask whether keeping the child was an option, she says, “They made me feel like, if I backed out, then the adoptive parents were going to come after me for all the money that they had spent.” That would have been thousands of dollars… She wasn’t aware that an attorney, whose services were paid for by the adoptive parents, represented her. “I’ll never forget the way my heart sank,” Shyanne said. “You have to buy your own baby back almost.”
So Shyanne placed her son for adoption. She hasn’t seen him since he left the hospital 11 years ago.
Other birth mothers who worked with ANLC report similar stories of being told they’d have to pay back any funds received if they didn’t go through with their adoptions. Former employees confirm this, adding that in at least one instance, a birth mother was threatened with child protective services if she didn’t relinquish her baby. These employees describe, “...a pervasive pressure to bring people—whether birth parents or adoptive couples—in the door. This was driven, at least in part, they say, by a ‘profit sharing’ model of compensation in which…employees could earn extra by signing up more adoptive couples or completing more matches.”
ANLC isn’t the only adoption facilitator scrutinized for its financial practices.
…a facilitator in California, made a payment of roughly $12,000 to a woman after she gave birth… The lawyer…says they told [the] owner, “You should not be paying lump sums. It looks like you’re buying a baby.”
If it looks like agencies are helping adoptive parents buy babies, then it also looks like agencies are helping birth parents sell babies. This graphic, citing multiple sources, shows how pregnant parents are enticed with offers of everything from paid bills to free laptops to free housing.
One private adoption facilitator called Love Adoption Life has an entire page titled, “Can I Get Paid For Giving My Baby Up For Adoption?” The answer is yes. “Compensation varies depending on the arrangements agreed upon between the birth mother and the potential adoptive family,” the organization says, adding that the state of Florida, where they are based, limits the amount a birth mother can receive to, “help prevent the illegal selling of babies.” They take a pro-life stance, stating, “Abortion may cost you money, put your life in danger (PTSD is very real), and ends the life of the unborn child. Adoption provides you paid health insurance, food, and housing during your pregnancy, costs you nothing, and saves a life.”
Instead of offering support for birth parents to raise children themselves, thousands of dollars are paid upon the condition that parents give up their child for adoption. I struggle to see how this exchange isn’t at least bribery if we’re unwilling to call it trafficking.
I haven’t shared with you the anecdotal stories of birth mothers misled into surrendering their children, nor the stories from adoptees themselves. They are too numerous, and pro-life hole-pokers are too eager to discredit such personal narratives often shared with hashtags like #AdoptionIsTrauma and #AdopteeVoices. Either you believe these birth parents and their children or you don’t.
It gets worse with international adoption. From horror stories of orphans who weren’t orphans adopted after the 2010 Haiti earthquake to Chilean adoptees stolen at birth during the country’s military dictatorship, the international adoption industry is rife with deception, financial gain, and blurred lines. Reporting from CNN says, “Brokers who source children for agencies can earn as much as $5,000 per child—five times the amount they might expect to earn in a year.”
Fortunately, there is a more ethical way to adopt than through the private sector. No doubt more parents will be considering this option as prenatal care and fertility treatments are rolled back in the wake of statewide abortion bans.
Adoption Through Foster Care
Adoption through foster care, in my opinion, is the most ethical way to adopt a child in the U.S. It is also the most affordable. Average fees rarely exceed $2,600 and many of these fees, which primarily go to background checks and legal paperwork, are offset by federal and state subsidies. This can make fost-adopting essentially free.
There are currently 407,493 children in United States foster care. According to the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the average age of these children is between seven to eight years old. 54% are being fostered temporarily with the goal of family reunification. 28% are being fostered with the goal of being adopted.
I live in Los Angeles, California which has the largest child-welfare system in the country. Nearly 30,000 children are in the care of L.A.’s Department of Children and Family Services. Mothers and fathers here whose baby or child is removed from their home are given two years to prove they are fit to parent. This is true of most places in the U.S. which means that for two years, foster families feed, bathe, and care for these children, and then give them back to the child’s family of origin if a judge so decrees.
In a Los Angeles Magazine article called, “L.A. Foster Parents Face an Agonizing Reality,” Degen Pener writes, “...the two-year plan has been embraced because of a widely held belief that a child should, at some point, have permanency; in other words, biological parents don’t have the right to disappear indefinitely and then reappear.”
Children should be reunited with their families whenever possible. Most counties in the U.S. endeavor to exhaust these efforts before a child is eligible for adoption. This is right. This is just. This is in the best interests of both children and their parents. And this makes the odds of adopting a newborn through foster care very low.
I could foster a baby hoping to adopt them. For up to two years, I would care for them as my own. I’d rock them to sleep, change their diapers, teach them to walk and talk and play and shower them with hugs and kisses, all the while knowing I may need to give them back after their second birthday. Maybe an extended relative would decide they want to raise the child after all. Maybe the child’s biological mother or father would finally be deemed fit to parent. No matter how right this is, the child I mothered for two years could be taken from me. I ache at the very thought. I am not ashamed to admit that my heart is not big enough for that kind of love.
Like I said, I’m selfish.
I have considered adopting older children. This may very well be the path to parenthood I take, and it’s certainly the adoptive path that most aligns with my conscience. But adoption through foster care isn’t without its own share of ethical shadows.
The anti-adoption movement is equally critical of both private adoption and adoption through foster care. Some of these critics prefer to call themselves adoption reformers or adoption truth advocates. Others will declare plainly that they are anti-adoption. The flaws of the foster care system are egregious and many, and the anti-adoption movement—laregly made up of birth parents, former foster children, and adoptees themselves—takes a socio-economical and psychological approach to its critique.
Proponents of the anti-adoption movement argue that any time a child and its birth parents are separated, trauma ensues for both parents and child. One might counter-argue that it may be equally or more traumatic for children to stay in abusive or neglectful family environments. Yet who gets to determine what constitutes neglect?
A Wired article on the anti-adoption movement points out how poverty, which disproportionately affects non-white families in the U.S., can wrongfully give social workers the impression of parental neglect.
[Neglect] can mean that a child was alone at home while their mother worked an overnight shift or went to the store, or that there’s not enough food in the fridge. In other words, poverty can create conditions that lead to neglect, and the exigencies of poverty can also be interpreted as neglect.
Children are more often removed from their homes due to perceived neglect than abuse. Instead of removing them because their parents are impoverished or struggling with addiction, Wired writes, “Many anti-adoption advocates, as well as some experts in child-welfare reform, argue that helping families get what they need—rehab, food stamps, child care subsidies—should be prioritized over permanently removing children from their parents.”
$30 billion a year goes to foster care or adoption systems. Might this money be better spent keeping families together?
Another reason some take an anti-adoption stance is less obvious. Relinquishment trauma is the neuropsychological trauma infants experience when separated from their mothers at birth. Marie Dolfi, a licensed clinical social worker, writes on her website, “It is not the adoption that causes the trauma, it is the relinquishment and the loss of the familiar that is traumatizing.”
Research has shown that babies in utero learn their mother’s characteristics… The greater discrepancies between the adoptee’s prenatal and early life (sound of the mother’s heartbeat, language, sounds, facial features, smells, the personal gait of walking…) the greater stress on the child. When a child is not with their first mother…the newborn frequently becomes anxious and confused causing the infant’s body to release stress hormones. Even newborns that are placed with the adoptive parent within days of their birth can feel traumatized. Newborns know their mother is missing and they are being cared for by strangers.
What are some of the long-term effects of relinquishment trauma?
Relinquishment trauma can elevate adrenaline and cortisol and lower serotonin resulting in adoptees feeling hypervigilant, anxious, and depressed. Difficulty with transitions and separation anxiety are common experiences… The adoptee’s survival skills—hypervigilance, need for control, lack of close relationships—are seen as personality traits rather than a response to a traumatic experience.
Birth mothers can also experience relinquishment trauma. Their symptoms can include lifelong grief and mourning, PTSD, depression, addiction, and suicide. In one study, eight of 20 mothers were so traumatized by signing adoption papers that they couldn’t even remember doing so. This is called disassociative amnesia.
Learning about relinquishment trauma gave me pause not only about adoption and foster care—it deepened concerns I already had about becoming a parent through surrogacy. Surrogacy has been compared to human trafficking. Some of these accusations are accurate. I do not judge the choice of parenthood through surrogacy but it is not one I feel comfortable with myself. There are too many unknowns. Trafficking aside, the long-term effects on children concern me, as well as the effects on regretful surrogate mothers who are discouraged from sharing their stories. The documentary Breeders: A Subclass of Women explores this in-depth.
I’m grateful that altruistic surrogacy is an option for cancer survivors, non-heterosexual parents, and others. Paid surrogacy—commercial surrogacy—simply doesn’t sit right with me.
Everything I’ve learned about adoption, foster care, and surrogacy leaves me wary. I’m uncertain of participating in any of these paths to parenthood, as they all give me a degree of moral discomfort. I permit myself to change my mind. In the meantime, I face two other options: remain childfree, or, try to have a child the old-fashioned way. To do the latter, my window of opportunity is closing. Especially in post-Roe America.
Here’s where it gets personal…
Nature’s greatest injustice is the fertility inequality between men and women. Male fertility starts to reduce around age 40-45, significantly declining at age 50. A woman’s fertility begins declining around the age of 32 and decreases more rapidly after age 37.
I am 36. My partner is 39. We are not yet ready to have a child. Last Friday, the overturning of Roe v. Wade thrust the future of our relationship into an uncomfortable spotlight. Like countless other couples across the U.S., this ruling is forcing us to have heavy conversations. Perhaps these conversations were inevitable anyway, but they were brought up sooner than either of us would have liked and certainly not under ideal circumstances.
My partner would prefer to wait two to three years before trying to have a baby. While that would be preferable to me, too—let’s just say Covid set us both back from where we planned to be financially by this point in our lives—time is not on our side. I learned three weeks ago that my AMH levels, the results of a fertility test, say I have a year-and-a-half to two years to conceive naturally. It’s a rough estimate. Exceptions happen. I don’t make major life decisions thinking I’ll be an exception.
My partner and I wanted to move from California to Texas this fall. Our plan was to save money so that we could start a family and be more financially secure. But that plan would put us in Texas during my last window of fertility. I don’t want to be pregnant in Texas. Not when miscarriages can now be criminally investigated as abortions and, if I have an ectopic pregnancy, I risk bleeding to death when it ruptures before a doctor is legally able to try and save my life. The New Yorker reports tragic situations like these already happening in its widely-shared article “We’re not going back to the time before Roe. We’re going somewhere worse.”
Women over 35 like me have higher risks of complications during pregnancy. These risks include miscarriage, premature birth, stillbirth, birth defects, preeclampsia—and yes, ectopic pregnancy. Women over 35 are also more likely to have successful pregnancies through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and even that is now at risk of being banned.
Fertility is already on a global decline. Maternal health care in the U.S. is already among the poorest in Western nations. For non-white women in America, the maternal mortality rate is 2.5 times higher. Women in this country who desire to become mothers cannot afford the additional setbacks of overturning Roe v. Wade. Yet we will pay the price and so will our daughters. Republican lawmakers have already declared their intention to ban abortion nationwide. We’d be fools not to believe them. Journalist Thom Hartmann lays out how this could happen in his article “Beware: The Supreme Court Is Laying Groundwork to Pre-Rig the 2024 Election.” In short, the GOP will continue overriding the popular vote through the Electoral College. “This scenario isn’t just plausible,” he writes. “It’s probable.”
This new absence of comprehensive and legal prenatal care is bound to deter other women like me from moving to red states. I cannot help wondering if blue states will see hospitals overrun by women fleeing red states for live-saving medical treatment—not only for themselves, but for the unborn and future children they may very much want to have. I suspect most pro-life voters did not think through the consequences of illegalizing abortion to the extent that they realized how gravely it will affect them, too. And it will affect them. Even pro-life media outlets are voicing concern over the unanticipated consequences of outlawing abortion. Only when it affects the wives and daughters of pro-life policymakers themselves may we see any hope of reversing these inexcusably dangerous bans.
I now face staggering life dilemmas that many other undecided moms must also grapple with. With non-biological options for parenthood largely ruled out for me due to ethics concerns, I must decide if motherhood is a life experience I want. If it is, I may need to end my current relationship. My partner is not ready to be the kind of father he intends to be, and I will not pressure him. It wouldn’t be good for him, me, and especially our child.
I’ve never been in a happier, healthier relationship. I’ve never been in love with someone so deeply compatible with me in nearly every way. Our greatest incompatibility is one that cannot be helped—our timeline for parenthood. One could argue that since I am the one with the fertile expiration date, my partner should “man up” and adjust his life goals to accommodate this immovable fact. If he loved me, wouldn’t he be willing to do what it takes for us to be together?
I don’t think it’s that simple. His reasons for not being ready are his and I will not disclose them, but what I can share is this: I will not rush my partner into fatherhood before he is ready. It would feel like an irreparable injustice with lifelong consequences I don’t think anyone should be forced into. He wouldn’t do this to me and I will not do this to him. I do not want our potential child growing up with a resentful father, no matter how he might make the best of it and even delight in fatherhood. Going against a man’s right to choose feels near as important to me as going against a woman’s. In this way, I am an advocate for men’s rights, for I believe in a man’s right to absolve himself of the responsibilities and privileges of fatherhood. Some call this paper abortion.
So do I leave my partner for the chance of finding someone who does want to have a baby with me in the next 18-24 months? That sounds insane. Do I stay with him and say goodbye to my lifelong dream of motherhood? That sounds heartbreaking. Do we cross our fingers and hope I’ll conceive when we’re both ready? Do I take the chance that he’ll leave me if I become infertile, even though he says he won’t? Will I resent him the rest of my life if he doesn’t leave me, or if I don’t leave him, and we are unable to have a kid because we waited too late? Do we ignore our ethical concerns and adopt? Even if my partner did change his mind and decide he can see himself as a dad in the next two years, where would we live? Not Texas. Not Tennessee, where we had also considered moving. Not any of the red states with abortion bans in effect or bound to be soon. California’s too expensive and so is New York. Would we want to start over completely in a place we’d have to build new relationships from scratch?
These are the candid questions I face today. I choose to share this personal information, with my partner’s permission, because we know we are not the only ones wrestling with these difficult decisions. Life-altering decisions. Decisions based in fear as much as they may be based in wisdom. I grieve that these decisions can no longer be based in freedom.
Disclaimer: Every adoption is different. Adoption fees and processes vary widely by county, state, and country. This piece is not meant to be an indictment of adoption. What I share here is the offering of my personal thoughts and research. I do not assume the ill intent of any parent who wishes to adopt through any legal path. Neither do I assume the ill intent of people who profit from adoptions. Lastly, I write this from the vantage point of believing I can have biological children. I am humbly aware this gives me a different perspective on adoption than someone who cannot.
*Many of my pro-choice allies prefer calling opponents forced-birthers. I use the term pro-life because that’s how I used to identify, and I would have felt offended being called a forced-birther. This offense, which I would have perceived as religious persecution, would have made me double down on my pro-life stance. I share why in my article “What Pro-Choice Advocates Might Need to Understand About the Christian Right.”
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When thinking about the ethical concerns in adoption, I wonder if it’s also important to consider that, regardless of how they were taken into these systems, many children just won’t have families if they are not adopted. It’s hard for me to ignore even one of those little lives for the sake of an ethical high ground. Definitely a catch 22, but I think worth noting.
Incredibly, deeply personal.