Abortion, Adoption, and “Birthmother Amnesia”
by Rob Schwarzwalder
January 4, 2011
On Sunday, the New York Times ran a piece called, “Meet the Twiblings.” It’s an autobiographical account by Melanie Thernstrom about how she and her husband Michael obtained donor eggs from two women and then had them implanted in two different women. Thus, the article’s striking subtitle: “How four women (and one man) conspired to make two babies.”
The moral and ethical issues involved in this couple’s decisions are genuine. That two beautiful, God-beloved children resulted from them does not make the path pursued by this couple ethical or wise.
Yet woven into the larger story is one about adoption. Consider just two quotes from the article:
Abortion’s Affect on Adoption
Quote #1: (I)n the 1970s, there was an abundance of babies in the United States in need of homes, but the widespread use of birth control and abortion, among other factors, has caused the supply of infants available for adoption in the subsequent three decades to plummet to a fraction of what it was then.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that about ten percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 wrestle with infertility. Adoption would be so much more streamlined, less agonizing, less of a desperate quest, if there were more babies to adopt – something that abortion and abortifacient drugs are efficient in preventing.
There are roughly 7.3 million infertile couples in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, there are about 1.7 million adopted children in our country.
While not every infertile couple wants to adopt, many, perhaps the majority, does, and yet strives to find a child to love, from the county foster care center to nations as obscure as Nepal.
“The paradox of America’s unborn,“ as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has called it, is this: “No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.”
Honoring Birthmothers
Quote #2: “You won’t have anything in common with the carriers,” a director of a Los Angeles agency (which we decided not to work with) insisted dismissively. The gestational carriers at their agency were mainly white, working-class women, often evangelical Christians — “the kind of girls you went to high school with,” he said, managing to give “high school” an ominous intonation. He waved his hand. “You may think you want to stay in touch now, but trust me, once you have your baby, you’re barely going to remember her name. I call it surrogacy amnesia.”
Were I to meet this man, I might have difficulty being civil. To catalog the offenses laced like cyanide throughout his comments would be almost too onerous (they include religious bigotry, social snobbery, and elitist pomposity). Yet one phrase – “surrogacy amnesia” – is especially remarkable.
My wife and I remember the biological mothers of our children. We recall their names, their appearance, their stories, the way they sounded. We are grateful to them beyond words or human memory. Our thankfulness to them will remain eternal. This, not some “amnesia,” is the common experience of the adoptive parents we know.
Forgetting about a birthmother might be a form of psychological protection for some adoptive parents who find it too painful to think that their children are not theirs biologically. I cannot cite statistics about how many such persons there are, but would say pretty confidently it is a small number.
This is not to say adoptive parents are preoccupied with thoughts of their children’s birthmothers. But we do not forget them and, in an era of abortion-on-demand, the sacrificial love they have shown.
Here is how one writer describes the journey of a woman who decides to give her child to another family:
Why would a woman make this decision? Sometimes it is because of her religious beliefs, sometimes it is because she recognizes that this child is a unique little person who will never exist again in the history of the human race. Although she is not in the position to raise this child herself, she wants him/her to have the best possible life. She is aware that there are many childless couples who would love to give her baby a home and that they are carefully screened before being approved.
About such women there is no amnesia, only gratitude.
***Dr. Pat Fagan, director of Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute, recently authored a new study, “Adoption Works Well,” which documents how effective adoption is and how it transforms, for the better, the lives of both parents and children. A free download is available here.***
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Comments
I would like to add that the term “birth mother amnesia” is particularly disturbing as it sounds not like the birth mother is forgotten and tossed aside as she is after she has given what was wanted, but that SHE forgets!! I can assure that no woman – except one with REAL amnesia – forgets a child she bears.
I also invite readers to share my thoughts on the Twiblings article, here: http://familypreservation.blogspot.com/2011/01/human-ability-to-rationalize-normalize.html
I think this is the only time I have seen someone try to argue that unwanted pregnancy is a good thing.
By: Mirah Riben | January 5, 2011 at 12:43 pm
Having researched adoption issues for more than thirty years I disagree with your assumption that very few adoptive parents disregard their child’s mother as simply the wrapper their gift came in.
It is changing slowly for a VERY SMALL number of adopters who participate in domestic infant OPEN adoption. The majority however, who adopt transnationally (as you may have) offer among their reasons for doing so a separation from the birth family to avoid ‘”intrusion” in their lives. This is not amnesia. This is intentional “bigotry, social snobbery, and elitist pomposity” mixed with a huge amount of ENTITLEMENT and ownership!
It is with far too much regularity that i hear form mothers who signed away their rights ONLY because they were promised openness only to find out it was a pack of lies! Doors were slammed and barred and even phone calls unanswered, leaving them betrayed and USED! many of those fortunate enough to have the promises of openness kept, report feeling treated like an outsider always subservient and having to walk the line to maintain access to their child or just to receive crumbs of photographs.
I have walked in the shoes of a mother who lost a child to adoption for 43 years and can tell you of the “bigotry, social snobbery, and elitist pomposity” I have experienced first hand! I can tell you that every time I share that I am an author and am asked what I write about, i say “adoption” I am then asked if I am adopted. “No.” Are you an adoptive parent? “No, again.” Then what, people wonder in amazement, is my connection to and interest in adoption? Even in the enlightened 21st century the public still cannot wrap their minds around the fact that “birth mothers” do not remain eternal teenagers or crack whores!
I have heard every insult a human can withstand – after having been pressured into beleiving that relinquishing my child was a loving and unselfish act! Only recently I was presented – once again – with the words: any dog can give birth!
Bravo to you that you actually remember your children’s mothers.
Amnesia is not the problem. The issue is one of disrespect, disdain, being humiliated, degraded and disregarded. This is the legacy of a mother who makes the ultimate sacrifice. Sometimes we are thanked, but in the most sanctimonious and SOLICITOUS manner imaginative as if we intentionally got pregnant to offer up our child as a gift! Some tell us it was god’s will that they, not us, got to watch our children grow up – as if God puts babies “in the worn tummies” as Rosie O’Donnell once said, and ordains such lifelong loss and grief on some of us.
Bravo! You remember these women. But do you treat them as extended family as the mothers of your children? Do you share photo, invite them to soccer games or graduations?
Divorced mothers and fathers who share children are expected to do more than remember one another. Family court judges and therapists knows it is in every child’s best interest to know and have a relationship with both of their parents.
By simply “remembering” your children’s mothers as figures from the past – those whose role was to carry and deliver the golden egg to you and then to disappear – you have removed them from your children’s present and future. They have no place in their lives as a relative, an extended family member. This is not just cruel to those mothers, it is contrary to the best interest of your children. Shame on you. And you come hear and brag that you did not forget them as if that, like adopting domestic infants, as opposed to one of tens of thousands of special needs kids, is somehow noble. As if it makes you superior to Melanie Thernstrom or any others who create designer babies. It does not.
You want applause for not forgetting them? You get none from me. Embrace them. if you love your children, embrace THEIR roots and heritage as well. And that means far more than eating Chinese food or attending heritage camp! They need to know their kin for their self-esteem, self-identity, and they may need it in case of medical emergency. It is their mother’s and father’s blood runs through your children’s veins, not yours! You can take the child from it’s mother, but you can never take a child from his genetics…they go with them, eternally and spiritually.