Liberty Lost podcast - the sickening religious underbelly of domestic infant adoption
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Anonymous
Did you even read the rest of PP’s post? She doesn’t deserve the ignorant tongue-lashing you gave her. |
Anonymous
Look, this is a controversial topic - to act insulted because you’re an adoptive parent is willfully denying reality. A lot of people adopt because of the heartbreak of infertility. And clearly there there are a lot of parents who are not ready to raise children. But the fact is there is an industry of people taking infants away from others sometimes through coercion and yes, it is a multi billion dollar industry. And yes, there are many women who would keep their babies as another poster said if they simply had a few hundred dollars in a car seat. To act insulted by this reality is astonishing to me. And no, I won’t beat around the bush or sugar coat. Adoption in human trafficking are closely linked. No matter how uncomfortable that makes you. |
Anonymous
Ignorantly attacking someone for expressing a balanced viewpoint only diminishes your credibility. |
Anonymous
You chose flippant words, by blanket calling adoptive parents “the highest bidder.” That is the main part of your post that the PP took issue with, and you need to think on that. I also find those words inappropriate and unfair, and as the child of an adoptee, I find them hurtful on behalf of my parent and grandparents. I want to give this podcast a listen agree that there is still a lot of predatory practice in the adoption world. I’m also sorry for the trauma your family has felt as a result of your mother’s experience. I feel fortunate that my parent was adopted by a loving family. My parent who is an adoptee found their bio mother a few years ago (bio mother was in her mid 80s) and it was not a satisfactory experience for any of us - bio mother did not want to meet (her right, and understandable) but her siblings caught wind of this and forced a meeting. My parent who is an adoptee attended the meeting with the goal of telling their bio mother that they have a good life and a loving family (to hopefully bring some comfort if there was lingering guilt or worry or curiosity on the part of bio mother), and bio mother acted coldly and not interested. She died shortly afterwards. My parent who is the adoptee regrets reaching out. So do you see how it can be easy to take one’s own experience and extrapolate it to the broader issue? You are doing the same in your post, clearly your perspctive is through the lens of your family’s experience. To be clear I am not denying there is an issue with many adoptions. - NP |
Anonymous
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Telling people that any adoption is coercive painful and a societal disgrace leaves suicide abortion or infanticide as the only other alternatives for someone who does not want a baby and does not want to keep a baby.
Just saying. |
Anonymous
You can't raise a child well on $60k, through college. |
Anonymous
No, but 60k can put you in a place where you can get stable. Maybe better housing, food, a job, etc. Many of the woman placing kids in adoption go on to be stable and have kids of their own. Just needed more support to get there. |
Anonymous
Most of the time it is. If you listened to the podcast, adoption exists in other countries but at much lower rates because of their social safety nets. |
Anonymous
Also because of easy access to abortion which once again - if adoption is not available a lot of pregnancies will end up in abortions. Up to you to decide if it’s a preferred outcome. I come from a Eastern European country where adoption is culturally frowned on because of importance of blood ties (and open adoption not heard of; the few peolem who do adopt routinely change the kid’s name and hide that they were adopted due to stigma.) They don’t allow foreign adoption much either. Guess what? A lot of children end up languishing in hellish orphanages in terrible conditions. There is no happy easy solution to the issue. Some women will not want to raise a child and if adoption is not available, they will choose other less pleasant avenues. In other places, some women would love to keep their child but are coerced or economically forced to give them up which is also terrible. Pick your poison. You can mitigate some of the issues with better safety nets or vetting but you will never really fix it fully. (And before you ask, I am neither an adoptee nor someone who adopted. I have no dog in this fight.) |
Anonymous
FWIW, I am the OP. The person you are responding to is not the OP, and I didn’t participate in any of this particular string of replies until now. I usually start my replies with something like, “OP here.” That said, your reply above does pertain to my original post using the language “highest bidder.” The truth is, this does reflect reality of both the current domestic infant adoption industry as well as the industry when your dad was likely adopted. I trust that in your grandparents’ case, they had no perception that they were buying a baby; they certainly did not purchase a baby directly from your biological grandmother. But make no mistake: there is no law preventing private adoption brokers or agencies from moving up in “the line” adopters who can and do pay more. When my mom was forced to relinquish, more prolific donors to the Church were prioritized in adoptions all the time, and there are those who have documented that it is happening now at the religious adoption agencies like those partnered with the Liberty Godparent Home featured in this podcast. So, it is not directly a baby auction where you lift a paddle to bid, but become a very generous donor to the “nonprofit” or be willing and able to pay higher fees for service and there is no question that you will be prioritized as a client in most places. I am so sorry that your dad’s loving gesture to express that he was safe and loved in order to potentially bring comfort to his first mother was not rewarded with emotional availability on her part. It’s a testament to the loving home that he was raised in that he had such nurturing and kind intentions. Given her age, it’s sounds like she relinquished during the height of the baby scoop era (as did my mom; she’d be 84 now) and there was SO much shame and secrecy around it and absolutely no access to therapy or threatment for these girls who were sent away; so many, to survive, put up HUGE impenetrable emotional walls in order to cope. Yours is one of so many examples I have heard where reunions did not go well because the biological mother did not have the emotional capacity to get beyond the layers and layers of pain and shame she had to bear. (I mean, sure, maybe she was just a mean person or a psychopath, but I think given her circumstances what may have appeared to be coldness and indifference was a mask of protection capping a volcano of molten pain. Uncorking all of that after decades of trying to hold it all in may just have been beyond her strength or courage.) I am so sorry both for her and for him that their reunion could not have been more fulfilling or healing or meaningful. For what it’s worth, my own mom would not have had the emotional capacity to welcome her first daughter until just before she found us; literally just 6 months earlier she finally agreed to participate in a therapy group for survivors of rape. It included women from their late teens to their 70s including another relinquishing mother and it helped my mom finally life some of the shame she had been carrying about the pregnancy, not just the adoption. A year earlier, she too might have been cold and distant because she didn’t have the capacity to handle ALL the emotions. And even the best of reunions are complicated. When I finally found my second sister, I was overjoyed but also 1000x more angry about what my mother had endured and how she had been lied to by Church authorities. And I had to have new grief that I had now TWO amazing and wonderful sisters who had been lost to me but my mother and brother would never know my second sister, never know her husband and kids, never get to be a family all together even after 50 years. It was new loss on top of new joy. For you and your dad, I hope that contact with his family of origin might result in some meaningful connections even if his mother didn’t have that emotional capacity. My second sister never got to meet our mom, but our children are now loving cousins, she is now really close friends with another of my cousins, and we have vacationed and shared many family milestones since finding each other. I even have a great relationship with her adoptive mom, who always prayed for my mom and thigh her to do so even when she was little, a gesture that would have meant the world to my mom had she found that out before she died. To know she was not erased or hidden but rather was remembered with love (even though they didn’t know her name) would have been very meaningful to her. Maybe your grandmother’s siblings who pushed for the meeting might be more fertile ground for connection. (I can see why it wouldn’t seem appealing to you given your dad’s first outreach experience, but you might be surprised.) |
Anonymous
And see what a hot mess this was for all involved? |
Anonymous
OP here. Extensive research shows that very few women in the United States make a choice between adoption or abortion. Given that abortion was relatively accessible until Roe was overturned, most women who wanted to end pregnancies ended them. Among those unable to access abortion, only a tiny percentage choose to relinquish to adoption. A woman’s first choice may have been to prevent pregnancy or end a pregnancy, but most women who carry a pregnancy to term have zero interest in relinquishing to adoption. It is far, far too painful to have a child in the world and not parent that child. Research shows that the vast majority of women who relinquish do so for economic reasons. That’s why there is almost zero domestic infant adoptions in countries with a strong social safety net like those in Northern Europe. With access to health care, maternity leave, housing, and child care, nearly zero mothers who choose to carry a pregnancy to term ever choose adoption. |
Anonymous
OP here. Precisely. And look at the fact that our government (under great donor support form adoption industry lobbyists) actually provides HUGE tax credits to adopters …far, far more generous tax credits to adopters than those provided to parents. Policy wise, that makes sense when it comes to providing government incentives to adopt children in foster care. But those tax credits go to rich adopters who are paying for domestic infant adoptions, too!!! There is literally no societal benefit to incentivizing domestic infant adoption - there are 50-100 waiting would-be adopters for every available infant…so a blanket tax credit really only creates an incentive for those who profit from adoption. To create more supply of available infants. And how do they do that? By making it even harder for poor mothers to parent: cutting SNAP benefits. Cutting welfare, blocking funding for childcare, opposing maternity leave, blocking universal Pre-k, shortening the time period when a mother can revoke adoption consent, allowing mothers to sign adoption consent before the baby is even born, etc etc etc. |
Anonymous
Yes, I agree. Adoption is always a loss. Even if the mother died in childbirth, the child lost its birth mother, and it is ALWAYS a trauma. Always. And I'm saying this as an adoptive parent. It is a tragedy that it has to ever happen, and I know that there ar situations where it is necessary, but it needs to be understood as the loss and trauma that it always is. My daughter will always wonder why her mother abandoned her on the streets (A country in Africa ), did she love her, is she even still alive? That alone is sad and breaks my heart for her every single day. |
Anonymous
Be real. It still happens. It happened to us trying to adopt. |