We Adoptees are not your mascots for the abortion debate.

Started by Sapphire, Jul 10, 2022, 06:23 PM

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Sapphire

https://medium.com/@redbyrde/we-adoptees-are-not-your-mascots-for-the-abortion-debate-bfd2a5a0da89

We Adoptees are not your mascots for the abortion debate. 

"How many babies are you going to adopt?"

"Just give it life, and put it up for adoption"

"Those babies get to live, live live."

"Just think of all the infertile people waiting for a baby, and now they can finally adopt one"

I have heard all of these arguments. The first one is being made from the pro choice side of the abortion wars. The rest is from the pro-life side. And we adoptees are like drive by shooting victims, caught in the middle. I hear things like, " Well, aren't you grateful you weren't aborted" or "Well, you could have been thrown in a trash can", and "you are so lucky, your mother at least gave you life" as well as a host of other ignorant comments.

The fact of the matter is, we are no more likely to be aborted than any other segment of the population is. The alternative to abortion is not adoption, it is parenting the child.  Would it suprise you to know that most abortions are not the teenage unplanned pregnancy of an unwed mother?

They are because of financial despair. Stagnant wages, lack of medical coverage, lack of affordable child care, lack of insurance covering birth control, and lack of affordable housing is a large driver of many abortions. Colorado made birth control free, and the abortion rate dropped dramatically.  This new movement has nothing to do with "life". It is simply pro birth. No one cares if these children are born healthy. They just want them born.  And we adoptees do not want to be the mascots for this movement for either side. We are already traumatized. We are not a pro life or a pro choice trophy. For the record, most of us are pro choice. (Not all, we are not a monolith). But most of us. Even puppies and kittens are allowed to stay with their mothers for a good portion of their infancy because science recognizes it is harmful to remove an infant immediately from the mother. Why can it not be recognized that it is harmful to do this to humans?

It is empirically proven that a human child connected to the mother through the umbilical cord knows it's mother.  I have always said that adoption is an amputation. We are amputees. We were a part of our mother's bodies. We grieved for our lost mothers. We have had our soul and psuche amputated. No other person, no matter how well meaning can ever heal that amputation, any more than a physical amputee can grow a new limb.  Get over it?

I don't think so. There is a severing that has taken place that all the good intentions in the world can not heal. And that is for the adoptees that go to good homes. For those of us that were adopted into hell, and there are many of us, the result is insult added to injury. It has shaped us and formed us, just as the bandaging of little girls' feet in China used to shape their feet and cripple them for life. We were not born that way, it was done to us. Whether we were abandoned, relinquished by a koolaid drinking but well intentioned mother, or sold, or just plain stolen or cooerced from our mothers, we still experienced the rejection and the severing of that part of ourselves that was critical.  As far as being silenced, we can be successful, have happy meaningful lives, yet have a missing part of ourselves. We are missing such a serious part of who we are. And when we speak about that part of who we are, the amputated part of our spirit and our psyche, we are gaslighted. We are told, "buck up, little camper. you have so much to be happy about."

We know we have things to be happy about. We ARE happy about those things. Yet we still grieve for what we have lost.  Try going to someone who just lost a son or daughter or a parent, and telling them to rejoice, they still have their other parent, or their job, or their spouse, or fill in the blank, Or, say, " I know so and so, who lost their parent, and they are happy and well-adjusted".

So why do people do this to adopted people?

We lose our entire extended family with the stroke of a pen. Adopted doesnt mean better, just different. And now we are to be the mascots of opression of women, NO THANK YOU. We dont want to be the mascots. Don't ask pro life people how many babies they are going to adopt.  Leave us out of this and find another way. Many of us want to be allies in this fight.  My next article will be on the money in adoption and why this rabid movement got started.