Not ALL Adoptive Parents Are Adoptoraptors. Now is this an insulting term? Most definitely. It is actually supposed to be an insult. One really does not want to aspire to sink to the depths of a true “adoptoraptor”. If you happen to find that fit into the actual description of the term, then you should probably go sit in a corner and rethink your life.
“This Support Group is SO Negative!”
Lately, it seems that someone who feels “Ok’ about their choice, will express displeasure at what they see as lack of support. Which pretty much ends up being another long drawn out discussion where the Polly Positives complain about the Negative Nancys and the Negative Nancys defend their right to be negative. Rinse, wash, repeat.
How can we be “good” if we do relinquish, but “bad” for considering the act that would eventually be “good”? Does not the final goodness cancel out the bad?
Sometimes, I literally surprise myself when I say things. I did that while on the show. If you note, I did mention the “skeleton” in the closet in my “before” writing. Rather expected and cliché, I know, but when I took it literally, as a real set of bones, which did mean that something died in the closet; then the visual became, I think, a powerful truth. If there is a real place called the birthmother Adoption Closet, then what really died inside was the mother we were supposed to be before surrendering.
Stanley Milgram’s controversial yet ground breaking experiments in the 1960′s on authority figures study findings can be applied to coercion within the process of a single expectant mother making an adoption plan. And the results are chilling.
I know many birthmothers who have “chosen” to relinquish a child to adoption have great difficulty explaining the very subtle coercion and thought process that goes into it. It’s not so obvious to be called brainwashing. It is often not forceful enough to be openly accepted as coercion. We don’t even know or want to call ourselves “victims”. Is it the sophisticated manipulation tactic known as “Gaslighting”?
If there are other options that CAN BE sought BEFORE adoption, then the adoption itself, not matter how happy anyone claims to be, is a tragedy. “What about the mothers who truly aren’t able to parent?” If we want adoption to really be a good thing, ethical, and used as it should then we have to then ask, ‘What is the obstacle in her way that is making it less than idea for this mother to parent this baby?
In many ways, you are restarting your life from scratch. You were not a birthmother before. You did not have this child before. Now you do. You are newly born as a mother, as THIS mother, for THIS child and that mother has been relinquished as well. She is gone. You mourn not only your child, but the mother you would have been, the girl who did not live with this sorrow, the woman who didn’t hold sadness in her eyes.
US Adoption Agencies routinely defraud Medicaid for birthmother medical expenses, then double bill adoptive parents and keep the profits. The cost of adoption is taken on by the American tax payer to the tun of 200 million a year!
If children are a gift from God then the Birthmother is a regifter!!! Now I don’t know about you, but when you consider adoption to be regifting what God gives you, then I dare say it’s a bit tacky and, again based on my limited churchgoing self, might annoy him when he finds out ( as is unavoidable) that you went and regifted your baby.
We are the kept children, the siblings of the one that got away. We didn’t experience the trauma. We are not the rock and we are not the water. We are THE RIPPLE EFFECT. We are the ones who grew up with damaged parents and phantom brothers and sisters.
It’s bad enough that the adoption industry is still promoting that somehow it is OK to relinquish a baby to adoption and that the long term effects of relinquishment on birthmothers does not exists despite all the scientific research to the quandary. But by putting the impossible task to “healing from relinquishment” on the actual birthmother; they are also setting her up to fail.
I read that YES, wanting to become a mother and being infertile IS a path to adoption, though interestingly, often not the first path to resolving the “childless” issue. The chicken really wants an egg, preferably their own egg.
I feel COMPLETELY different when it comes to adoption. With abortion, I trust a women to know what she wants and exercise her right to make an informed choice. With adoption, I feel like she has no clue, cannot know what she wants and is not making an informed choice. This has plagued me. Why are my feelings different?
I noticed most of the open adoption information is very general. Then I noticed the language that was being used – and it was manipulative. Lastly, I noticed how the information was being presented – and again, it was manipulative.