Because of the social pressures that shaped notions of “appropriate” pregnancy and “respectable” motherhood, the decades between World War II and Roe were dubbed the “baby scoop era.”...
I didn't remember ever seeing that term before and couldn't even understand it. What was "scooped"?
The shame associated with “illegitimacy” was so intense, and the efforts of institutions like Catholic Church-run maternity homes to pressure young women into giving up their parental rights were so concerted, that nearly 1.5 million American infants were relinquished for adoption during this time. Conservative advocates promoted adoption as not only for the good of the child but for the redemption of the mother: Through adoption, young women could easily move past the presumed sin of premarital sex, forget their child and go on to have another family under more appropriate circumstances.
In reality, these adoptions — often coercive and highly secretive — led to trauma and a sense of ambiguous loss for a generation. “The grief doesn’t really subside,” one mother told me, 40 years after she relinquished her child in 1968. “There’s no peace.”
The adoption rate dropped precipitously soon after Roe and continued to decline gradually in the following years; in recent decades, it’s remained at a stable, low level. It is easy, then, to think that abortion replaced adoption as a pregnancy outcome — and to surmise that women facing unintended pregnancies choose between abortion and adoption.
I'm still not sure of what "scoop" refers to. Is it that people who wanted to adopt babies were able to "scoop" them up from women who were more or less forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term? I say "or less" because, as Sisson notes, there were always plenty of abortions, and even when abortions were illegal, they outnumbered adoptions.
[M]ost women making pregnancy decisions are not choosing between abortion and adoption....
Then what was the "Baby Scoop Era"? According to Sisson, who did a study, 91% of women who didn't want to get pregnant end up keeping their baby. Only 9% give up their baby, and it was only 9% pre-Roe, according to Sisson.
Most pregnant women are not weighing abortion and adoption as if they are equally likely or substitutes for each other.
Yes, I see that point, but I think Barrett is suggesting that the law shouldn't take into account the burden the woman chose to take on, that the liberty interest of the woman is only in avoiding the burdens of continued pregnancy and childbirth.
I'll add that one might say that there's a burden in having to choose whether to keep your child and in having to live with that choice. I can see that there's also a burden in choosing whether or not to have an abortion. That choice is similar to the choice whether to keep a baby that you've give birth to, that you can see and hear and hold. But when abortion is legal, you have the choice about when to make this choice whether to keep it or give it up, and if you proceed to childbirth when you don't want to keep your child, you are choosing a very different experience — for yourself (and for the child!).
Posts
44 comments:
So giving up your baby for adoption is more traumatic than killing it?
Maybe it stands for when they "scoop" the body parts out to be sold to the highest bidder???
In reality, these adoptions — often coercive and highly secretive — led to trauma and a sense of ambiguous loss for a generation.
Unlike Abortions; right? i mean, Right?
“Baby scoop” might refer to football. When the football is fumbled, the defense sometimes scoops it up and runs with it.
There’s a lot wrong with how we approach pregnancy and there is plenty of destructive behaviour to go around. People who support abortion rights like to pretend that pregnancies are mysterious accidents, that women, through no fault of their own, somehow are afflicted with pregnancy. The (obvious) reality is, abortion is not about choice, sex is about choice. Abortion is about accepting responsibility for the consequences of the choice to have sex. Only rapists are anti-choice. Literally no one else.
While it is a bit of a smear to claim that only religious people are against abortion and that simple human reasoning cannot lead someone to that position, it is a fact that most of the energy in the pro-life movement comes from religiously motivated people. And many of those same people also oppose family planning, sex education, easy contraception. They are actively setting the conditions for the unwanted pregnancies that they then want to deny women the ability to abort their way out of.
OB docs sometimes call birth “catching babies.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Scoop_Era
"The term Baby Scoop Era is similar to the term Sixties Scoop, which was coined by Patrick Johnston, author of Native Children and the Child Welfare System.[24] "Sixties Scoop" refers to the Canadian practice, beginning in the 1950s and continuing until the late 1980s, of apprehending unusually high numbers of Native children over the age of 5 years old from their families and fostering or adopting them out.[25] A similar event happened in Australia where Aboriginal children, sometimes referred to as the Stolen Generation, were removed from their families and placed into internment camps, orphanages and other institutions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Scoop_Era
"The Sixties Scoop was a period in which a series of policies were enacted in Canada that enabled child welfare authorities to take, or "scoop up," Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes, from which they would be adopted by white families.[1] Despite its name referencing the 1960s, the Sixties Scoop began in the mid-to-late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s.[1][2]
It is estimated that a total of 20,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families and fostered or adopted out primarily to white middle-class families as part of the Sixties Scoop.[3][4]
The term "Sixties Scoop" itself was coined in the early 1980s by social workers in the British Columbia Department of Social Welfare to describe their own department's practice of child apprehension."
Any reason why the mother can't auction-off the baby to the highest bidder and make a killing?
Sometimes David French says something intelligent.
"The last thing we should take from our nation’s debates about abortion is that adoption is a problem."
Admission (2013) with Tina Fey is good, an old given-up baby being the plot point.
Because of the social pressures that shaped notions of “appropriate” pregnancy and “respectable” motherhood...
Are these social pressures any less today or are they just coming at women from a different direction?
I've long wrestled with issues associated with this post, having acquiesced in 1970 (and under great pressure from my fiancée) to the abortion of my first child. She would have been 51 this month, but I'll never know what was lost. I still wonder, and as the father I sometimes still cry, even thoug there was possible medical justification because (due to an instrumentation flaw) my fiancée routinely had been receiving near-daily and non-trivial x-ray back-scatter directly into her uterus during the first two months. Lots of gnarly and intercalated issues. We went on to have two fine sons, and parted ways after they were grown. Yet ... we had also wished to adopt one or two others, but abandoned those efforts because the bureaucratic hurdles -- Roe was not valid -- were absolutely daunting, and the social workers were lording it over us, clearly enjoying their power over our lives.
This in the alleged "baby-scoop" era. Fast-forward 40 years...
My second wife and I could not conceive, and eventually sought adoption. All government agencies refused to deal with us because our combined age was >100. Yet a million babies a year were being aborted. Eventually we found a private agency for whom age was not an issue, and we adopted a baby girl, holding her only two hours after birth.
But it was such a near-run thing. The birth-mother (then 22 yo) was about to enter her third trimester, and all her friends were pressuring her to "make it go away". Fortunately, the grandparents who had raised her finally convinced her to adopt out. My daughter is very musical, loving, kind, thinks like an engineer, and extremely creative. I shudder to think that she was just a couple of weeks away from being carved up in pieces and sold for parts. We have a close relationship with the birth-mother's grandparents, even though the birth-mother is disinterested, and HER parents were never in the picture.
This is all descriptive, not PREscriptive, but it illustrates well the tremendous complexity of the issues, and Barrett is correct to focus on the LEGAL side for exactly that reason, and I shall therefore address the legal issues apart.
Baby scoop at the chicken coop.
Link to Reddit video
When people who are polled say they favor abortion in cases of rape or incest, I think they mean it is something like self-defence. When laws allow abortions up to a certain number of weeks gestation (what some are calling the European approach), the thought is surely to allow for such cases, along with medical emergencies, and to give women some time to decide. Pro-choicers sometimes say women have a constitutional right to relieve themselves of a burden, and only pregnant women themselves can say what the burden is, how serious it is, and how the burden of abortion compares to the burden of giving birth and/or the burden of putting a baby up for adoption. With all this weighing of burdens going on, it seems the women have to have all their choices available all the way through pregnancy--until so-called viability. This all sounds subjective or wishy-washy, or in fact it seems a move toward saying some individual's pure assertion about reality is what counts.
I would guess Barrett is thinking that there were more actual burdens on pregnant women, medical and otherwise, in the 50s than there are today. Less of a stigma no matter what you decide, etc. These are facts that legislatures and courts might consider, and it might seem unlikely that the Constitution makes one particular person the ultimate decider of all these facts, no matter what.
Legally, I believe we have gone into an oozing swamp by framing the issue as "CHOICE", and then proffering that such "choice" eliminates the aspect of consequences for having chosen badly. I have the choice of whether, when, and where to heave a brick. With thousands of bricks on my farm, i can choose to throw them all day long. However, if a chucked brick injures another individual or another person's property, I quite rightly face consequences for that tortious behavior.
Choice and consequences are two different questions, addressing two different issues, and I thoroughly reject the pro-abortion that the doctrine of "choice" removes the burden of consequences. The responsibility for redressing that imbalance -- which is almost unique to abortionn -- should lie with State legislatures, not Congress or the courts.
For that reason alone, Roe -- and some other "federalizing " decisions at SCOTUS should be reversed.
I thought "Baby Scoops" might be a reference to Oxbridge's neocon Henry Jackson Society.
"Baby Scoop Era" might more logically be applied to the today's post-Roe era if you want to conjure up a few graphic images in your mind.
But no, it's another example of a writer or academic creating a pejorative term and the media foisting it on society.
This period of history has been documented in scholarly books such as Wake Up Little Susie and Beggars and Choosers, both by historian Rickie Solinger
Wake Up Little Susie may be a serious history, but it sounds funny to refer to a book with that title as "scholarly."
" “The grief doesn’t really subside,” one mother told me, 40 years after she relinquished her child in 1968. “There’s no peace.” "
Have we made so much progress since then that there is no grief and lasting peace from killing a child in the womb?
Progress is a funny (odd, not ha-ha) thing.
I had a close relative who gave up her one-year-old child for adoption. I'm sure that was very difficult but I admire her for making that choice for the good of the child. It's probably no easier to give up a baby after you have just given birth to it.
The entire effort of the pro-abortion movement is to infantilize women,
Women are naturally driven to seek comfort and security.
Responsibility is uncomfortable. Shame is uncomfortable.
They are what you feel when you know you do not do the right thing. They are what you feel when you can no longer look in the mirror and honestly say what you did.
It is a powerful thing to say and believe in what you know is right, and to actually follow through and do those things. It is hard to find sometimes.
But when a woman has an abortion it does damage to them.
The left's ghoulish obsession with glorifying abortion and trying to separate the ability to take responsibility from women is truly evil. It takes the ability to be truly happy with yourself away.
The shame does not go away. Not unless you become psychotic or sociopathic.
" I'll add that one might say that there's a burden in having to choose whether to keep your child and in having to live with that choice. I can see that there's also a burden in choosing whether or not to have an abortion. "
If we focus solely on the "burden" of having to make choices in life, and the regret or remorse we feel over choices made in the past, how is abortion/adoption/keeping the baby qualitatively different from than a lot of other life decisions? I don't see how this focus really adds to the debate.
The issue for the SCOTUS isn't whether abortion should be an option for pregnant woman. It's whether the Constitution REQUIRES it to remain an option notwithstanding an individual state's decision to outlaw or severely limit it. From what I heard of the oral argument, much of the pro-abortion case rests on the supposed hardships poor women, in particular, will face in Mississippi if abortion is restricted to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. Justice ACB point about adoption was an attempt to clarify the nature and extent of that claimed hardship. But, IMO, that issue is a distraction, because whether something is a Constitutional right doesn't hinge on whether, in its absence, there are people who would experience a hardship. By that reasoning, anybody could claim that anything they want or "need" is a constitutional right, regardless of what the Constitution actually says about it.
"In reality, these adoptions — often coercive and highly secretive — led to trauma and a sense of ambiguous loss for a generation. “The grief doesn’t really subside,” one mother told me, 40 years after she relinquished her child in 1968. “There’s no peace.”
I have no doubt whatsoever that the grief of giving up a child for adoption, especially when done secretively and under coercion, can be deep and enduring.
The same is true for untold thousands of women who grieve the loss of their unborn child as a result of their decision to abort.
So these monsters are claiming it is coercive and traumatic for a woman to give her baby up for adoption but not to purée it in the womb?!? Do they even realize how they sound? Any excuse to keep appeasing Moloch. Sick.
"the liberty interest of the woman is only in avoiding the burdens of continued pregnancy and childbirth"
Sure, women should be able to choose to avoid the burden of pregnancy and child birth. But when they choose to have unprotected sex, they are choosing to accept the possibility of both. Of course, voters can give women the right to undo the consequences of their own free choice, for their own convenience and at the expense of the baby growing within, but "liberty interest" has nothing to do with it.
But is there a similar burden in the choice to not have sex, thereby rendering moot a possible conception and then having to choose between abortion and carrying to term? Nobody seems to talk about that choice any more. I wonder why.
If you choose abortion, you are choosing certain death for your unborn child.
If you choose adoption, you are choosing life.
It is really that simple.
There is a well written, haunting essay in today’s NYTimes Magazine —THE ABORTION I DID NOT HAVE—by Merritt Tierce—delineating how an unplanned unwanted and unaborted pregnancy at age 19 derailed the author’s life irretrievably. She, at the time an articulate bright 19 year college senior admitted to Yale Divinity School for graduate work, blames everyone, including her own naïveté. But she might as well blame Mother Nature. Two healthy 19 year olds are primed to procreate—what was she thinking as she engaged in unprotected sex time and again.
I feel the author’s anguish. I would like to point out that all actions have consequences. Sex has consequences. Abortion has consequences. Adoption has consequences. Giving birth and raising a child at 19 has profound consequences.
None of this is easy.
Althouse said...
I'm still not sure of what "scoop" refers to. Is it that people who wanted to adopt babies were able to "scoop" them up from women who were more or less forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term? I say "or less" because, as Sisson notes, there were always plenty of abortions, and even when abortions were illegal, they outnumbered adoptions.
The Body, Public Image Limited
Cathy, go home without your daughter
In a welfare state, she'll be well looked after
And it's easy now this other person
Is off your back, not a burden
We want your body, we want
We want your body, we want
We want your body, we want
We want your body, we want
Oh, when you run about without precautions
And you'll get disease and need abortions
Up till now, no vaccination
Can give you back your reputation, yeah
There was an interesting social science study about abortion vs. adaption. It's talked about in this paper: Abortion: The Least of Three Evils.
I think there's no question that giving up your baby is an unhappy experience for mothers. But aborting your baby is also stressful. Think of all those men coercing women into having abortions.
So weird for the feminist movement to assume that men coerce sex but would never coerce an abortion!
The father plays absolutely no part in this.
That's pretty much feminist dogma now. Pregnancy is a woman's issue and it has nothing to do with men. It doesn't concern us at all!
Feminism has been isolating women for decades. Women impregnate themselves, apparently. "I'm just removing a little tissue from my body and it has nothing to do with a baby or a man or anything like that."
Do constitutional lawyers deal with this gobbledygook all the time? No one sane thinks any of it is in the Constitution anyplace anyone could see it. Play Let's Pretend, because it's _important_.
I'll be glad when this nonsense is out of the Supreme Court and back where citizens can try to weigh and work through these difficult issues. Like everywhere else in the civilized world.
Life happens. Events come out of no where and knock us sideways. To complain that “I didn’t choose this” is a dead end. To complain that “it isn’t fair” is ridiculous. It happened—you can deal with it positively or negatively.
My husband and I have a child who sustained a serious brain injury in an auto accident—a true accident, no drunk driver, no reckless driving, an accident. It changed his and our lives dramatically. We and he didn’t choose it, and it wasn’t fair. But it WAS. His rehabilitation was and is hard, but rather than bemoan the situation, we chose to focus on the future and how best to help him have a productive and meaningful life. Although he is still handicapped, he is employed and lives a “normal” life.
My husband and I had a child born with a severe heart defect. It changed her and our lives dramatically. We and she didn’t choose it, and it wasn’t fair. Her prognosis was death. Well, yes, we bemoaned the situation, but we chose to focus on the future and how best to help her have a meaningful and productive life. As a result of many surgeries and excellent medical care, she lived a “normal” life, graduating college Phi Beta Cappa, and doing a year at Georgetown law before her inevitable decline resulted in her death.
We had a child born 5 years after my husband had a vasectomy. Sure enough, tests showed that the vasectomy hadn’t been successful. We didn’t choose that! We already had three children! This would change our lives dramatically! But we chose to focus on the future. That child is a blessing on our lives, a young man we love and are thankful for.
This is all to say—life happens. There are no guarantees. All kinds of events create sadness and regrets and difficult choices. We have had our share of difficult choices, and we have always decided to choose life.
State and federal childcare programs also enhance the single mother's ability to keep her child without benefit of marriage or spousal support. Some argue that the rate of single parent households is an important factor in multigenerational poverty. But we're taliking about the 2022 elections whenever abortion is mentioned these days, so expect hype to be the primary product of discussions about abortion for the next 11 months.
[M]ost women making pregnancy decisions are not choosing between abortion and adoption....
It's so rare that Hollywood made a movie about it to show all the problems and pitfalls of not just going in and being done with it.
Juno MacGuff: Yeah, I'm a legend. You know, they call me the cautionary whale.
“I can see that there's also a burden in choosing whether or not to have an abortion.”
I would really like to believe this statement, but I think it’s actually 2decades beyond relevance. Maybe longer. Maybe relevancy is the wrong measuring stick-
In a society where the actual “beginning of life”- conception- is denounced as relative(istic) b/c of the ever widening sacraments of the death cult- having wisdom teeth pulled is more of an anguishing decision. Back when I was in high school, sure. Then, it was a whisper and a missed day of school. Now, it’s a right to healthcare, bought &paid for by the charity of our government . Woohoo.
… most likely to morph into an over-the-counter pill to pop w/in a window of the hookup.
I would like to think I’m being factious- angry at the desecration of the gift of life enough to find the most outrageous example and hold it up as a commonality of society… methinks someone moved the goalposts… again.
'I'm still not sure of what "scoop" refers to.'
See my dead baby joke in a previous post...
I’ still wondering, what was the baby scoop era?
All of the considerations and experiences described in the article and your comments are legitimate and real in life. They only underscore why government should take no position on the disposition of a baby to an unmarried woman. The only exception should be to represent the Constitutionally-mandated right to life of an unborn child. Morally, that right is absolute and exists from the point of conception. But social strife is guaranteed from absolute government policies as we witnessed from Roe. So the body politic should engage in a long, detailed and informed dialogue on the issue of right to life even after laws are passed/court decisions are reached so each generation of Americans can find the right balance of interests in laws.
I am reminded of the life of Joni Mitchell. The rationale for her decision to give up her child as an unwed mother boiled down to placing a higher priority on her career (and moving to LA the epicenter of the music scene) than motherhood. It’s instructive that she sought out her daughter late in life and worked to connect with her. She obviously believed she missed out on something meaningful to her. You can’t have it all. That is the human condition.
It is prolly just coasty ignorance. Now scrape would be instantaneously recognized. As in the longstanding "you rape'em, we scrape'em" policy of Planned Parenthood.
We're now in the baby scrape era
There can never be a favorable defense to the option of electing not to parent an unwanted child or kill the unborn child - except to consider finding an alternative such as adoption agencies or exercising "safe haven" options where available.
David French gets it right.
To put the question in plain English, the issue is how much of a burden can the state require a woman to bear. Barrett stipulates that there is an infringement on bodily autonomy in pregnancy, but if no state in the union requires parenting, then aren’t the Roe/Casey emphases on the burdens of parenting misplaced?
She was not arguing that adoption is the answer for abortion. She wasn’t arguing that relinquishing rights to a child was simple or easy or painless. She was making a narrow legal inquiry.
Moving beyond the unfair critiques of Justice Barrett, I feared that we’d see a wave of commentary emphasizing the difficulty and trauma of adoption, and we did. At every turn, the hardship of adoption was emphasized. But what about its wonders? What about its joys? The last thing we should take from our nation’s debates about abortion is that adoption is a problem.
In reality, these adoptions — often coercive and highly secretive — led to trauma and a sense of ambiguous loss for a generation. “The grief doesn’t really subside,” one mother told me, 40 years after she relinquished her child in 1968. “There’s no peace.”
She'd have felt better if only she could be certain that her child had had his limbs ripped apart and his skull crushed, so he could be sold for parts. You get a sense of closure from an abortion, that you can't get from a live birth. It's a chick thing.
There's an impact on women from having abortions just as there is an impact from adoption. But the impact from abortion is not yet acknowledged. Moreover, it doesn't originate in what you see of the child. (Althouse is right that this is a crucial difference.) The impact comes later as one gradually realizes that the child was not an undifferentiated mass of cells and realizes that in the major culture no one cares about the child. But though this is all a bit subtle, still this is an emotional reaction whose presence should not escape trained psychologists. They do overlook it and later on in this century, I'm sure, their reasons for ignoring a widespread reaction will be studied and explained. But one reason is apparent now - some women are deeply invested in saying they don't care about ?the abortion? ?the child? They are so deeply invested that it would completely destroy their lives to acknowledge their feelings. They would have to completely change to handle the upsurge of feeling. Many of them are powerful women. It's easier to pretend that their suppressed feelings don't exist - not exactly courageous, honest therapeutics - but an easy way out for all concerned. For awhile. But does the study of any of the social sciences really suggest that massive, society-wide, emotional dishonesty will never present a massive, emotional, society-wide bill?
I love it when decades were "dubbed" something that I, at 68, have never heard of and I can't fathom the meaning of now. Dubbed by whom? Sociologists? When? Do we care what they call stuff? It sounds very convenient to me.
Bart Hall's story is moving, as is that told by CarolynnS. Thanks to both of them. My story is simpler. Two of those babies given up in the 1950's were adopted into a wonderful Midwestern family and became my cousins. My life has been richer for the relationship, and the world is better for their presence. I do not know the circumstances of their birth mothers, but if they did feel a profound loss, it was not in vain, and much good came from their sacrifice.
People who lived though the 1950s are often tempted to view that decade as typical and blessed in comparison to what came later. Certainly conservatives -- and many people who weren't political conservatives -- thought that way in the 1970s and 1980s. Leftist writers who grew up in the Fifties have devoted a lot of time and ink to demonstrating that the decade wasn't typical and wasn't blessed.
They're right that the age was an anomaly in many ways and there was much going on that wasn't benign or praiseworthy, but that could be said of any age, including our own. We can't return to the Fifties or recreate the conditions that made it possible. That's true of the social stability that conservatives admired. It's also true of the egalitarianism that liberals claim was destroyed by Reaganite policies. However much we might want to get back to social stability or egalitarian prosperity, we don't want to put up with the restrictions and limitations the era imposed.
Adoption has been around for a long time. So has abortion. So have weddings people felt forced into by pregnancy. The less constrained sexuality of the postwar era may have resulted in more out-of-wedlock pregnancies than before and more unwanted pregnancies than today, but I don't really see the Fifties as that different from other ages. "Baby scooping" has been going on for some time, whether it's Indian children in orphanages, city kids sent west on the orphan trains, or North Americans adopting Chinese or Indian or Russian children.
I suspect the animus against the "Baby Scoop Era" comes from a hostility to the Fifties and the suburban white bread Ozzie and Harriet or Father Knows Best world. The truth is that for all the changes, affluent urban or suburban life now still has things in common with that era. Many people can't let go of the Fifties for one reason or another. It was when they were happy and felt secure, or when the resented feeling like an outcast and stigmatized. People who make a point of expressing their discontent with the era may be asserting just how different they are from the 50s stereotypes -- or they may be trying to deny that in some ways, they aren't as different as they would like to think.
In one year, in Brunswick Georgia (heard of that lately?) we spent well over 100k on therapy, housing, lawyers and visits to the 8 children these sexually and physically abusive, crack addicted parents had taken away from them. We had to pick the parents up and take them to different towns and states. They often skipped the visits, more often than showing up. But we had a legal obligation to provide them anyway. On several visits, dad, who figured out where the cameras were, sexually molested his 5-year old child during the visit. But they refused to give up custody because doing so would lose them many Section 8 benefits, food stamps, utilities, and more. Plus they got multiple hearings with court appointed lawyers where they played the victim. The kids and foster parents didn’t get publicly funded lawyers, nor were private lawyers permitted to participate. Last I heard they’d had number 10.
Not an unusual case. So how does this fit into choice? I don’t care. Oh, and many of the long-term foster parents wanted to adopt but were not allowed to do so. This is what the foster care system is dealing with, and that’s why there’s a 100% employee turnover some years. So think twice before you lash out at them. Better yet, become a CASA, see it with your own eyes, and lobby to change these perverse ”laws.” You are paying for it. And children are being damaged and suffering, at the very least.
Post a Comment