From "Being adopted has shaped their views on abortion — in different ways" by Olivia McCormack (WaPo).
August 11, 2022
"Amanda L. Baden... called the emotional impact of adoption 'complex.'"
"Baden, who is a psychologist [and a professor at Montclair State University who specializes in transracial adoption, multicultural counseling competence, identity and racial and ethnic issues in adoption], says that adoptees are often told and feel 'their adoptive parents did a wonderful thing and they rescued them.' But some can still have 'really strong traumatic reactions' because of the loss of that relationship with their biological parent, she said.
'Everyone shares this common theme of loss and can feel some of the things that come with that, some of the core issues of adoption, like rejection, guilt, shame, intimacy issues,' she added.... Sarah Meadows, a 40-year-old living in London... was adopted through the Catholic Caring Society when she was about 1-year-old, after living with a foster family for a short period of time. She views adoption as a 'painful' and often corrupt process, even when everyone involved has the best intentions.... 'Many adoptees have their whole identities changed and lives hijacked by adults with their own agendas. I had my name changed — many have this and their whole cultures erased,' said Meadows, who is now a mother of two...."
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"Many adoptees have their whole identities changed and lives hijacked by adults with their own agendas. I had my name changed — many have this and their whole cultures erased"
Does a one-year-old have a culture that can be erased?
The intent of this article is truly vile. It wants babies murdered instead of adopted.
A truly disgusting piece of writing from a truly disgusting publication.
Anyone associated with or supporting the WAPO should look in the mirror and pray for forgiveness.
Culture is learned, if your less than a couple of years old you don't have a culture to lose.
Wow.
It's undoubtedly true that some adoptees feel conflicted or even straight-up angry about the loss of their birth mother or birth "identity" - bring surrounded by people who have these things, with no effort, is going to spur resentment in some. But is this piece really, as it seems to be, trying to make the point that these adoptees would have been better off if never born? I wonder what they think about that co-opting of their experience?
Yay abortion, the gift that keeps on giving!
I grew up in a family with 5 kids. Two of us were biological and three adopted. Yes, adoption can be a traumatic experience for older kids. My adopted siblings were 5, 11, and 14 when my parents welcomed them into the family. All of us had two loving parents, a roof over our heads every night and a full belly when we went to bed. There are a lot things that happened to children that are less than perfect, but I find it difficult to believe being adopted into a loving home comes anywhere close to being the worst thing. So bad that being aborted would be preferable.
Why is WaPo so obsessed with abortion? If there really are adoptees who wish their birth parents chose abortion instead of adoption I don’t want to hear from them. Now if being adopted makes them view Trump differently let’s hear all about it.
The wicked solution is a viable salve for a woman's self-esteem.
The intent of this article is truly vile. It wants babies murdered instead of adopted.
Dr. Baden and WaPoo offer religious sanction to human rites. Dr. Gosnell was sacrificed to protect the nominally secular cult. Weinstien, him too. Epstein, in a planned pedophilehood.
these adoptees would have been better off if never born
Better a fetus than a baby, yes. Downs Syndrome babies, too. Don't harsh their mellow.
What Achilles said.
My mom was adopted out of a terrible circumstance. Her birth mom fell, 4 days post-partum and died. She was the 4th child in 5 years. Her mom was 25, in 1927. A distant second cousin, came to the house to help. She and her husband adopted my mom. My mom had a hood life compared to her siblings. She knew about the adoption and her bio siblings after age 18. She was forever grateful that her parents took her and raised her. Not all adoption stories are happy, but with perspective they can be inspiring. We seem to have lost that perspective.
One of my best friends was adopted into a very wealthy family. He knows he hit the lottery. His father had a son by a previous marriage yet my friend ended up being much closer to his adoption father than the biological son. He doesn't have any curiosity about his biology parents. He is very thankful they gave him up. He would like to think they were too young and poor to raise a child and they made the choice out of love for him.
On the other hand, my Mom was on her second marriage and tried to give my father children but had several late term spontaneous abortions before and after I was hatched. I don't know if I have survivors guilt but I do think about my dead siblings and the sacrifice my Mom and they made so that I might live.
The point being is that many people have imperfect origin stories and manage to accept fate and move on with their seemingly impossible opportunity to seek their fortunes.
Do people’s feelings of satisfaction and attainment of happiness generally have any bearing on whether or not other people should be permitted to murder them?
If no, then why should this be relevant to killing in utero?
Jamie said...
"...But is this piece really, as it seems to be, trying to make the point that these adoptees would have been better off if never born? I wonder what they think about that co-opting of their experience?"
That is the point. Pro-abortion is pro-population control. It's not about the adoptees.
Some people in this world like to put up on the pedestal weak people who seem to revel in their unfortunate circumstances. What would a world look like where, instead, we gave more attention to people who project resilience over victimhood?
I am adopted. I quite like being alive. Adoptees who think otherwise should do us a favor and make good on their convictions.
But some can still have 'really strong traumatic reactions' because of the loss of that relationship with their biological parent,
I have a second cousin that is adopted. She saids that ALL adoptees have 'really strong traumatic reactions' because of the loss of that relationship with their biological parent.
Her biological mom was a white drug user (no one knows who the dad was).
My Cousin loved her adopting parent (my 1st cousin once removed), but tracked down her birth mom Anyway, so that she could get a sense of her past. She now helps other adoptees do the same.
I asked her once, if she thought that she would have been better off with her birth mother?
GOD NO! she replied
This is an offensive article. Its subtext is that abortion is better than adoption.....More kids are left dazed and confused by their parents' divorce than by adoption. Fairy tales don't speak highly of stepmothers. Life is frequently an unpleasant experience. I think only a small minority have had an idyllic childhood, but it's better to be young and alive than prenatal and aborted.
"More kids are left dazed and confused by their parents' divorce than by adoption."
This. So this.
The article is a way to justify adult's decisions not really concerned about kids.
Let's find a bunch of adoptees who hate themselves and would rather have been aborted. Truly inspiring stuff.
Ha. I could tell it was about abortion before I got anywhere near the bottom with the headline. I guess she wishes she had been aborted?
"I was born a poor black child."
Unless it's an interracial adoption, maybe it's best not to tell...
"Its subtext is that abortion is better than adoption."
It's a little subtler than that. It's that when you weigh the positives and negatives, and first there's the idea that the pregnant woman is not able to provide and care for a baby at this point in her life, that leads to the response that she could give the baby up for adoption. This article is a response to that response. If the woman who doesn't want a baby is trying to decide whether to endure pregnancy and childbirth anyway, and to give up the child for adoption, she might want to assess how good adoption really is. If the truth is that there are wonderful, well-vetted families eager to embrace your child and children in this situation are especially fortunate, the analysis is different than it would be if the truth is that adopted children are thrown into a life of confusion and angst.
Notice that the article is particularly focusing on children of mixed race. Does it suggest that a woman pregnant who is with a nonwhite child has more reason to abort?
You can be in favor of abortion rights and still strongly support encouraging women to have their babies and give them up for abortion. But if that's what you want to do, you need factual information about how good adoption really is. I can see opposing pro-adoption propaganda and wanting to get accurate information to women who are making their own decisions.
Now that abortion rights are a matter of legislative choice, an accurate picture of adoption is important background information. If the truth is that adoption is not so great, then you might put more value on the woman's access to abortion. If adoption is actually great, that could be used in arguments on both sides. If adoption is bad for some reason, whether abortion is legal or illegal, you can argue for improving it.
"Its subtext is that abortion is better than adoption."
It's a little subtler than that.
Only if one intentionally makes it so.
The whole reason for the piece - which is surrounded by a ton of other pro-abortion pieces published the last several weeks by the Post - is as subtle as a two-by-four smashed between the eyes.
Now that abortion rights are a matter of legislative choice
Do you really not see the oxymoron you wrote here?
Abortion is not a right.
This sounds like a total lack of gratitude on the adoptees part. Were their adopting parents abusive, neglectful or otherwise evil? You have something to complain about.
They raised you in their culture rather than your bio-parent's culture? That's not a sin.
If you had 3 squares and a cot, secure housing and leisure time, you are doing far better than the majority of people in history. Be grateful for that.
If you are 1 yr old, you do not have a culture. Should your white parents teach you to hate cops and shoplift and love rap? Culture is not genetic.
Of course adoptees wish they had their birth parents, but in general babies are given up for adoption because of something bad (parents dead, mother druggie, mother 15 yrs old, mother in jail, mother mental illness) so they are better off being adopted. Is your life perfect? ahahaha of course not but no one's is.
The parade of neurotics continues in NYT and Wapo. This time it's about people saying "boo hoo" instead of, "Thank you for giving me a hope instead of leaving me in a foster care system."
In a phony victim culture, "boo hoo" always trumps "thank you."
Often the 'thing' doesn't actually matter, it's just that some people go through life happy and grateful for their things and other people are unhappy and blame their things. But it could be the same things.
"an accurate picture of adoption is important background information. If the truth is that adoption is not so great . . ."
Because the adoptees tend to grow up as whiny, ungrateful bastards that give you nothing but headaches? Better to abort them then.
Althouse: "But if that's what you want to do, you need factual information about how good adoption really is."
Funny. I would have thought the choice is "death or life," not "good abortion or bad adoption."
Obviously, adoptive parents are like natural parents, some good, some not. Risk notwithstanding, "good" would be the upside for the baby. What, exactly, is the upside for an aborted baby?
Did Amanda get to shower with "the Big GUY' too?
Adoption may not be great, but I suppose it's better than being pulled apart limb by limb.
"You can be in favor of abortion rights and still strongly support encouraging women to have their babies and give them up for abortion." Did you really mean to say "give them up for abortion"?....I don't object to first term abortions, but there's a point where a fetus becomes a baby and deserves protection. The mother bears primary responsibility for providing that protection. That's unfair like so much in life.
My wife and I are about to adopt our fourth child, from the same birth mother, all them from different fathers and with their own individual problems. I can say that these issues do arise. Although I'd suggest that emotional issues need dealt with should not be a surprise... especially as the child grows older and can understand the implications of adoption. They begin to question their self worth. But since these issues aren't a surprise adoptive parents need to provide a way for the family to work through the questions and feelings that surface. In our experience honesty and openness are the best tools when helping your child work through their feelings.
Adoptive children sometimes can fantasize about the unlived life they might have had should they have not been adopted. Often those fantasies are just that... a too perfect longing for a too perfect life that no one really lives. It's easier to do that than actually live and love the imperfect people around you including your flesh and blood parents.
I have met many people who as children fantasized about being adopted into a different family to escape the deficits of their own family.
I also have met many biological children who suffer from a sense of loss. Life is like that.
Only the unhappy people complain. Most of the ones that are happy that they were adopted by loving parents don't feel the need to talk about it. If most of what we hear are unhappy adoptees, we will (wrongly) assume that most adoptees are unhappy.
"I can see opposing pro-adoption propaganda and wanting to get accurate information to women who are making their own decisions."
Sure you can. You've got excellent vision. You can probably "see" burning pregnancy-counseling centers, too. Can't you.
I first realized how sick and disgusting the "pro-choice" had become, when they opposed the law requiring ultrasounds before an abortion. If you are concerned with "a woman's right to choose", then presumably, you would have no position as to what information should be available to her at the time she makes her choice. The more the better, right? But they aren't "pro-choice". They are pro-abortion. They want dead babies! And they hate anyone who comes between them and their chosen prey.
I wish I had appropriate time to address this topic, but I am at an all week camp for foster kids , phone time is limited . My 6 anecdotes don’t line up the theme of this article
Two of my best friends in high school were identical twins (really identical) who were born to a Catholic mother named Collins and adopted by a Jewish couple. Both the twins were big and arrogant but afraid of their father. They had red hair and were probably the toughest kids around. One problem that led to this was the tendency of one to mouth off and then have a gang come looking for him and find the other twin.
Eventually, one twin went off to college and founded an engineering firm in Colorado. He used to sponsor an annual golf tournament. When I was first in college, that twin was in Marine basic and came up to LA for parties when he could get off. I lost track of the other twin.
No one has commented on AA's (Freudian?) slip "encouraging women to have their babies and give them up for abortion" (emphasis added - 10:16am). Am I the only one who noticed, or is everyone else being polite? (Politeness has never been my strong point.)
If the truth is that adoption is not so great,
Good God, compared to what?!
...then you might put more value on the woman's access to abortion.
Oh right. That.
So the question is what's better for the birth (or non-birth) mother (or non-mother), not the child (or fetus) - even though if she gives the child up for adoption, the child is no longer her problem.* Or maybe you could extend it to society as a whole - if society is littered with horrible, abusive adoptive parents whose poor victims end up passed out in gutters or prostituting themselves for crack, then maybe abortion is better for society.
But I'm gonna say that's not the case. And any individual or organization that spends its 501(c)(3) money going around convincing adopted kids who now live in interracial families that their parents have murdered their innate "cultural identity" is evil.
Because the kids are getting that idea from somewhere.
* Stark contrast to the "unwanted fatherhood" situation, isn't it? Adoptive parents cannot seek any sort of remedy from a birth mother, no matter how irresponsibly she may have behaved while pregnant. But the man who didn't want a child, and perhaps behaved irresponsibly by knowingly having unprotected sex or perhaps believed the woman who said it would be protected sex, can be on the hook for two decades. Weird.
“ "You can be in favor of abortion rights and still strongly support encouraging women to have their babies and give them up for abortion." Did you really mean to say "give them up for abortion"?.”
No. Sorry.
“ Funny. I would have thought the choice is "death or life," not "good abortion or bad adoption."”
Actually, it isn’t funny at all.
If you can’t imagine someone weighing the decision whether to get an abortion or not, you’re just not trying. What sacrifices have you made to save others from death? Have you always chosen to give up your interests for others whenever a death was involved?
Go donate a kidney to a stranger.
Putting abortion politics aside for the moment.
Journalists currently have a template for the telling of personal histories. People are encouraged to see their own life stories as departures from some hypothetically ideal set of circumstances that would have existed, but for someone else's incorrect actions. It is a template built upon self-delusion, one that strengthens the cult of victimization.
The programs of the left would come to naught without victims and emergencies, so victims and emergencies must constantly be manufactured.
A baby properly prepared could be analogous to a kidney bean served with a nice Chianti in a clinic. That said, there is no mystery in sex and conception.
"If you can’t imagine someone weighing the decision whether to get an abortion or not"
I can. I can imagine that it can be hard. I can easily imagine that a woman might not want to go through with a pregnancy.
But precisely because these are hard issues, or should be, as they are for Althouse, I can also imagine women weighing the decision whether to have unprotected sex or not. That's when you have autonomy. That's when the stakes are highest. If you have unprotected sex, you willingly risk giving up some of your autonomy. Weigh that first.
Judging by the 100s of thousands of abortions still taking place every year, a lot of people, not just women, are not carefully weighing the decision whether to have unprotected sex. The stakes for them are not very high. There's always abortion as birth control after the fact, celebrated by the culture at large as a rightful exercise of autonomy.
"Have you always chosen to give up your interests for others whenever a death was involved?"
Well. Have you always killed everyone who got in your way?
What lasting impacts are there on women who have chosen(or been forced) to abort their child?
Having never been in that position- this thread is suggesting(sorry, Althouse) that I can have no meaningful opinion as I’ve never considered such a sacrifice.
Am I understanding the undertone correctly?
Any loss is sad.
The narrative in society states degradation of character in anything less than murder, it seems.
I wish I was never born is a 10yr old’s mantra.
Grow up.
Donation of a kidney to a stranger is arguing by the singularity straw man.
One of my daughter's classmates was adopted from China. When she was a teen, she discovered she had cousins here in the U.S. Their story is told in the Netflix documentary Found. It's well worth watching.
I know a number of adoptees who searched for their biological parents: One hired a private detective. They felt a need to know. But they also felt very lucky to have been adopted. Two were in touch with half-siblings considered too old for adoption, who'd bounced from relatives to foster care to relatives to foster care. Sometimes the family culture is addiction, alcoholism and incompetence.
Giving up a child for adoption is very difficult for the mother, and it's not easy for a child to know that the people who are supposed to love you the most gave you away. But it is a responsible, loving choice.
Ann Althouse said...
“ Funny. I would have thought the choice is "death or life," not "good abortion or bad adoption."”
Actually, it isn’t funny at all.
If you can’t imagine someone weighing the decision whether to get an abortion or not, you’re just not trying. What sacrifices have you made to save others from death? Have you always chosen to give up your interests for others whenever a death was involved?
Go donate a kidney to a stranger.
We note your condescension.
The time for thinking heavy thoughts was back when you decided to have sex and risk pregnancy or at the very least the first weeks of being pregnant.
We know that you think only splooge stooges should be held responsible for their decisions and women must never be held responsible if they don't want to be.
You are pretending the people you are arguing with are not as smart as you or don't think as much as you do.
We all understand that these are not easy decisions. You pretend we don't
But past a certain point in time you are murdering a baby for your own convenience.
And this article trying to trash adoption is just fucking gross. As a society we should not accept killing babies out of convenience.
Althouse said:
If you can’t imagine someone weighing the decision whether to get an abortion or not, you’re just not trying. What sacrifices have you made to save others from death? Have you always chosen to give up your interests for others whenever a death was involved?
No I haven't always chosen to give up my interests for others whenever a death was involved. I don't suppose I ever have--one is so rarely put in the position.
But what I can say is that if a woman decides to let the pregnancy proceed instead of aborting, she will never have to feel guilt for having deliberately ended the life of her child when there were reasonable alternatives.
YouTube is full of heartwarming videos where a child realizes that he or she is being adopted by a loving couple. Saying that the kids are thrilled does go nearly far enough! Seems clear that Amanda Baden has cherry picked a few negative outliers and built up a pro-abortion theory around them. Junk science at its worst.
" If the truth is that adoption is not so great, then you might put more value on the woman's access to abortion."
Well we certainly aren't going to get the truth about adoption from the media or the other all-in-on-baby-murder pro-aborts such as our hostess. All we'll get from them is, "Abortion is great! Best thing ever! Think I'll have another!"
As we all know, there have been many large twin adoption studies, where twins had different adoptive parents. The conclusion has been that, by adulthood, the adopted parents were influential in sustaining the adoptee and teaching ethics etc, but did not influence general behavior. The twins were similar and did not take on the characteristics of the adopted parents. See Pinker in Blank Slate.
I would say, wait til the children are 30 years old, then ask them if they were better off being alive and adopted, adolescent angst must be lived through. Everyone plays the hand they were dealt.
I suspect a lot of the concern is that if white people adopt minorities they feel like they lost their ability to learn minority culture and are not truly minority anymore. If so, then get it out in the open and only let a person adopt a child of the same race.
If this WAS about choice, then the pro-abortionists would be much more in favor of assistance and policies to better allow women to choose birth and life. But they are not. Not to mention laws that protect informed consent. But they are not.
Meanwhile, the history shows that in times of economic crisis, the abortion rate goes up. That's not choice. That's women (and men that demand that they abort) thinking that they have no other choice.
These companies saying that they will pay the travel costs for women to abort SOUNDS like they are in favor of choice, but it is the exact opposite. A few hundred dollars in travel costs is a lot cheaper than the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars it will cost companies in birthing costs and infant/child healthcare. It is choice in the same way that they will put assisted suicide drugs on the health plan while limiting certain medical procedures.
But past a certain point in time you are murdering a baby for your own convenience.
That would be at the point that the baby is a living being.
And this article trying to trash adoption is just fucking gross.
From the same crowd that tells you that restrictions on abortion are racist, and that it is to the benefit of persons of color that abortion clinics be located in Black neighborhoods.
Althouse said: Go donate a kidney to a stranger.}}}}
Perhaps it's a bit more like this scenario:
Your aunt has offered to pay your way through college if you agree that you will donate your kidney to her should she ever need it. You are in fact the only person in the family who has the requisite tissue match to provide a kidney and sustain her life. You know your aunt has had a few health issues but the odds are great that it will never come to her actually needing a kidney transplant, so you have accepted her offer. Because you have agreed to this arrangement, your aunt ceases to search for another potential donor.
You are in your Junior year when you receive the unwelcome news that your aunt now needs an immediate kidney transplant. The operation comes at an inconvenient time for you, will interfere with your ability to graduate in four years, will involve some pain and a period of recuperation, poses a small but real danger to your present and future health, and will leave you with a noticeable scar in your young nubile bikini years. You want no parts of that, but you also feel bad about your aunt dying if you don't fulfill your promise. And there IS that inconvenient fact that no one forced you to make that promise or to accept the financing for college.
Let's list a couple of adoptees who changed the world
Let's make a little list
Moses.
Gerald Ford
Steve Jobs.
And did the article mention the teenagers taken in by relatives or friends who helped care for the teen and their baby until they finished school? This is very common:
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama fit into this category.
I was adopted as was my 80 year old half brother (whom I only met last year). My stepson is adopted from Korea.
Our families were drastically different, but we all dealt with the uncertainty about whether we were truly loved by our adoptive parents. That came out mostly when we were teenagers, the same as with other children.
We are all relatively normal, productive members of society with zero sense of victimhood (i.e. not Democrats).
Joanne Jacobs said...
I know a number of adoptees who searched for their biological parents: One hired a private detective. They felt a need to know. But they also felt very lucky to have been adopted.
My daughter was contacted by a guy who was adopted 50 years ago. She came up as a relative on a DNA site. He just wanted to know about his biological mother who was my wife's sister. She had gotten pregnant as a teenager. He had been adopted by a nice family and was a successful TV producer in LA. My daughter worried about it for a short while and then put him in touch with his biological mother who was very ill. He wrote her and talked to her on the phone. He may have visited. She died last spring.
Roe was not overturned, but rather the standard of life was adjusted to where baby meets granny in state, if not in process.
That said, what happened to the fetus now baby when she reached the age of convenience under the progressive standard? Was she adopted or left a fetid mass on a slab to be cannibalized or sequestered?
No, not killing your baby is not an altruistic act like risking your life donating a kidney.
Women who think that way are too immature to face the potential consequences of sex. There's iuds we can implant in women like that, consentually, before they conceive a life.
"If you can’t imagine someone weighing the decision whether to get an abortion or not, you’re just not trying. What sacrifices have you made to save others from death? Have you always chosen to give up your interests for others whenever a death was involved?
Go donate a kidney to a stranger."
I think the abortion debate in the last few months has been incredibly important. There are really complex issues surrounding the unique biological reality that during pregnancy there are 2 lives to weigh in the balance - with one temporarily dependent on the other. But this comparison doesn't seem like a close one at all to me.
Even straight up refusing to donate a kidney to someone who needs a new one is not the same thing as killing someone - or hiring someone else to kill someone, as the case normally is in abortion. Direct action vs inaction are two very different things - and ending someone's life vs not saving it aren't in the same ballpark to me. And abortion deliberately someone else's life every time. It's not a side effect - and it leaves no second chances or other options available.
As for the whether adoption is ethical: I'm sure some adoptees do regret being born. Personally, as someone with a mother who should not have had children but did, I can completely understand the pain of being abandoned by a parent who had a duty to love and care for you but didn't or couldn't for any reason. But the fact that someone is a bad parent (or a bad person) does not give them a license to murder a child that already exists, even if it is their own child.
The question you're asking by weighing potential misery to be to me: is it justifiable to end someone else's life if you personally have reason to believe they will be unhappy with that life? At some point? For how long? How unhappy? And how sure, how much proof do you need in the eyes of the law to justify you taking action to that other person's life?
What sacrifices have you made to save others from death? Have you always chosen to give up your interests for others whenever a death was involved?
I stayed up all night many times to "save others from death." I ran a Trauma center for 7 years and finally quit when I had two 40 hours stretches with out sleep in one month. I can't count the times I rinsed out my bloody undershorts before going home in the morning.
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