In my last post here at GIMH, I posted an open letter to expectant moms who might be considering adoption, urging them to parent if that was where their hearts were truly leading them. Obviously, I am aware that this is a polarizing topic. However, the purpose of the post was to give a voice to the secret hearts of moms who might be wavering, who truly want to parent,  but who are being bombarded with messages telling them no you can’t.

I was disheartened that an anonymous person felt compelled to contact me via e-mail to inform me that encouraging women to parent who might otherwise choose relinquishment means that I must want more children to suffer or even die. This infers, of course, that there are only two possible outcomes for the children of these women: the (good) outcome, adoption, which always equals a happy, cherished child, and the (bad) alternative, being parented by the person who bore them, which will invariably end in abuse, neglect and/or death. I felt it was important to address this issue, since I’m sure “A Concerned Mom” was hardly alone in this belief. First off, I have never indicated that it was better for children to be abused than adopted, or to die rather than be adopted. No one is saying abuse is good or starving is good or homelessness is good.

What I take issue with is the underlying assumption that a woman who has considered adoption, even briefly, but who ultimately decides to parent her child, is automatically a less capable mother, one worthy of extra suspicion. Because she’s young, poor, a woman of color, less educated, single, or any combination of factors outside the approval level of the more privileged majority, she is instantly deemed more likely to abuse or neglect her kid. Let’s get something out of the way here; we all know that there are people out there who should not be given the care of a house plant, let alone a child. Unfortunately, people who abuse and neglect children just don’t come with a sign attached saying, “Hello. I am dangerous. I hurt small things. Please don’t leave me alone with a child.” There are married, well-to-do parents who abuse their kids, and there are single, poor parents who cherish their kids. Basing the possibility for abuse on a family’s socioeconomic status and little else is dangerous territory. I mean, factor in divorce statistics, the crumbling economy, and the unemployment rate, and pretty soon the only people who seem “qualified” to parent are Bill Gates and Oprah. While some women need extra support and resources to be the best parents they can be, we need to stop equating “young mom who needs WIC and some help with job skills training” with “probable child abuser”.

Similarly, proponents of the idea that young, single, poor women who parent instead of placing are incapable of doing anything but being a millstone around the neck of society also like to wave the flag of “babies thrown in dumpsters” a lot. They will loudly proclaim to anyone who will listen that by encouraging women to keep their children with them, rather than depositing same in the arms of the nearest set of married people who passed a home study, we will soon see an alarming rise in the number of newborns and babies killed. As far as I can tell, mothers who murder their children or abandon them to die are not the kind of women who would otherwise be making adoption plans. I am not a psychiatric expert, so I don’t know what the women who commit such acts suffer from, but I’m willing to wager a hefty sum that it’s NOT a case of “I didn’t listen to the concerned adoption agency worker who wanted me to pick this amazing family for my baby because some lady on the Internet told me I should try to parent. But it got too noisy with all that crying, so I just killed the baby instead.”

Certainly, there are women who are unwilling or unable to parent among the ranks of first mothers. I understand that there are tragic stories of children who are relinquished voluntarily whose mothers would not be able to parent them safely, such as active addicts with no intention to stop using and enter treatment. No, I don’t think that children should be left in those situations. Nevertheless, not every mother who considers adoption is doing those things. You can’t just say, “Well, if even one woman who places her child does drugs and would let her baby sit in filth so she can get high, it stands to reason that ANY expectant mother who visits an adoption agency is hell-bent on doing the same thing.” Not only is that not comparing apples to apples, it’s not even comparing apples to oranges anymore. It’s like comparing apples to donkeys. It’s nonsensical. But it happens to expectant moms considering adoption or moms who have placed all the time, regardless of their actual circumstances or abilities.

Furthermore, there are a great many of us who are maybe one or two catastrophic events away from being in a serious financial bind, including adoptive families, particularly in the economic climate of today. Let’s examine one possible scenario. Maybe your spouse dies with no life insurance even though you thought the policy was current, leaving you scrambling to get a job that pays enough to support you all. If you’ve been out of the workforce for a few years, and you’re in a state that’s been hit hard by unemployment, good luck with that. Assuming you find a decent job, now you’ve also got to worry about daycare, the mortgage, insurance, groceries, household bills, and everything else on one income. Your parents are far away, and have their own woes, so they can’t help you out much.

You do the best you can for a while, but you’re losing ground every month. Finally, when it’s time to buy school supplies and clothes, you realize you don’t have a single dime to spare.

Nothing.

Unfortunately, it’s your kids who are suffering, so of course, the first thing you do is head in to the local adoption agency. Your kids deserve a family that can provide a better lifestyle, and two stable, married parents. What’s that? No, adoption would never cross your mind? But you are struggling to feed and clothe them! You are three months behind on the mortgage! Don’t your kids deserve better?

Wait, you’re right. That does seem a tad extreme.

Maybe the sensible thing to do is to look for all the help you can get until you’re able to get back on your feet again. So you apply for assistance programs. You still struggle a bit, maybe even for a few years, but things slowly improve. And nobody ever suggests that you’re probably going to abuse your kids or you’re a bad parent because you don’t have a spouse anymore, and you have to work and the kids are in daycare and money is tight. Yet the majority of agencies are fully comfortable suggesting to 99.9% of pregnant women who visit or call them that their babies are far better off being adopted merely because the mothers are currently in similar circumstances as the ones I described above. It’s presented as a choice, but when only adoption is ever discussed in any depth and praised as loving, sensible, unselfish, and desirable…it’s not much of one, really. It’s like being asked to choose between being shot in the face or shot in the foot. Sure, you get a choice, but wouldn’t it be better not to get shot? Only “not being shot” mysteriously isn’t on the list of options. Then, when the women who buy the cleverly marketed party line and DO relinquish their children dare to express remorse or anger, they are often hit with the reverse myth, “You obviously didn’t want your baby, or you would have tried harder! You would have found a way!” Wait. What? First we were loving and unselfish, now we’re unloving and selfish? It’s not win-win-win; it’s no-win.

So, I’m proposing something that may seem radical here: the women who approach adoption determined to make the right choices for their child are the SAME women who would be determined to make the right choices while parenting that child; in most cases if they had just a little support and encouragement. Except that’s not the message they’re getting. These women trust the ideals they are reminded of constantly by agencies and lawyers; that they are doing the best thing for their child by giving them up; that their own lives will move on and they will suffer no lasting ill effects, and in fact, will probably be better people for it. Unfortunately, these same women often find that they can barely get up in the morning, let alone live this fulfilling life they were supposed to have, unencumbered by that bothersome infant. The reality is, adoption doesn’t create a magical life where everything is suddenly all better for first moms. Their lives aren’t really richer for the experience; how can it be wonderful to be separate from your child? We need to start critically examining the standards by which a woman is deemed “unfit” or even “less fit”, and exploring ways individual women can parent FIRST, with adoption as a final back-up plan.

Honestly, I’m not here to debate whether there is loss in adoption, or whether adoption is sometimes the best available choice for a particular child, or whether most adoptive parents love their children, or whether most first parents love their children, or whether adoptees’ individual experiences with adoption, be they good, bad, or somewhere in between, are valid. All of those things are true, in my experience. The point I’m making is that there are still far too many women who are fully capable of parenting (and being amazingly good at it) who are being divested of their babies under the heavy burdens of guilt, shame, and lies (either outright or by omission), and that is a tragedy – one all of us who have been impacted by adoption should feel compelled to speak out against.

*For the purposes of this post, I am speaking specifically about domestic infant adoption where the mother’s relinquishment is at least presented as voluntary.

Coco Rogers lets her blog languish most shamefully these days over at Mommyhood and Life.