I’ve been pregnant twice. It’s not a matter of mere “convenience.” Ever given birth? No? Then don’t tell me about convenience.

All that said, the whole arena of fertility medicine and reproductive alternatives makes me sick. It results in kids not knowing where they come from, not being in touch with their family history and it also results in women being used as brood mares with their purported “consent,” and never mind what their participation in this farce says on a meta level about the place of women in society. Screw it all. My opinion is, if you can’t have a baby then you can’t have a baby, be an honorary auntie or uncle to someone else’s baby and get on with your life. I think we do need something similar to the Hawai’ian o’hana so that more adults can participate in a child’s life so that we don’t feel we HAVE to bear children to be “complete” or anything.

The current way of doing things, though, has got to go. At this point I am completely opposed to our present system of adoption in which a child’s identity is erased just so some infertile couple can feel good about themselves or whatever. If the child’s in imminent danger from its real parent(s) or is an orphan and in neither case has extended family then fine, but the vast majority of children in unstable circumstances do not fit that description. And they still deserve to know where they come from and to grow up knowing their blood relatives in most cases.

My daughter was brought in to my room after her birth, crying like her heart would break. Right as she was brought through the door I spoke to her. She hadn’t seen me yet, but she knew my voice and quieted immediately. You can’t tell me abortion is crueler than adoption. What if I hadn’t been there? What would that have done to her? I don’t like to think about the answer.

I did lose her brother to adoption. I couldn’t fight it, I didn’t have the money for a lawyer and he was in another state with his grandparents at the time. I had no options. I’m sure he thinks I abandoned him. Their one answer for me was “keep in touch, call and write letters.” I couldn’t initiate calls because his dad might be around and raise hell, and I didn’t feel writing letters was actual parenting. And that’s the best they were willing to do. Me going to live near them with none of my friends or family nearby when they had already been hostile and nasty to me was not an option.

They just view you as the generative material for the child. You’re not even human to them. What they do to you emotionally and spiritually, or what they do to the child who misses hir mother, doesn’t matter at all.

So as a woman who’s actually relinquished a baby for adoption, let me make it clear: paying women to give their babies to “acceptable” families will hurt the WOMEN who surrender the children and the CHILDREN who are surrendered.

Sheelzebub–thank you for your comment. Yours was one of the few that actually seemed to understand that we “birth mothers” (mothers) are real women with real emotions, and that the adoption industry certainly doesn’t need any more means of legal coercion at its disposal to break up more families.

I found this: “The jury awarded the estate of Evelyn Forman $120,000 for pain and suffering she endured between the time the missile struck the airplane and the time the airplane crashed.”

Not for her death, but for her emotional pain and suffering for the perhaps though at least 104 seconds for time actually suffering before she died.

For arguments sake, we will round that up to 2 minutes. We’ll take the 120K and reduce it to 100K for easy math making us a nice round number of 50K per minute of suffering at a legally acceptable rate. I’ll even be so kind as to say: Ok we won’t measure my Kool aid years, but only count the last 8 when I was mentally transforming to the pain filled bitter birthmother that I am infamously known for today. So that’s 8 years with 365 days each times 24 hours in a day times 60 minutes in an hour times the 50K per minute rate for emotional pain and suffering.

Great! I’ll take my 210,240,000,000 dollars please.

Adoption is not an alternative to abortion. It is a false solution. I live in Florida, and the “Choose Life” plates have tried to pay women to choose to put up their children for adoption instead of choosing to terminate. They don’t have many takers. Women do not want to be forced to carry to term. It’s not just the new child that will be born, which is a big deal, but the pregnancy is about a year of the woman’s life.

Adoption is not painless or victimless. Adoption is not uncontroversial. Surrendering a baby is not an easy, everybody is happy solution to an unwanted pregnancy. And two white men with money, stability and no chance of every getting pregnant have no place discussing these issues int he New York Times.

I agree that it’s utterly frustrating to have a two-way dialogue on this topic with two men and this supposed solution drastically oversimplifies the decision to continue an unwanted pregnancy.

Annual wage-gap payments, indexed to equality.

If it doesn’t directly effect them and they have no experience with it, how much room should they even have in a debate about a person’s private decisions concerning their body?

The main post suggests that “Pro-choicers are concerned with women first and foremost; providing economic support for women probably sounds great to most of us.” My point is that this formulation of “choice” narrowly defines the scope of a woman’s agency to the decision to breed or abort. If economic support is to be given – and I’m assuming Jill means governmental support — it should be allocated in a way that does not define women by their reproductive function.

The question of when the support starts is of course problematic, but the difficulty is common to every decision to direct public fund to a particular class of people. As Jill notes, the decision is difficult even when the class is limited to pregnant women. But again, my focus is merely upon whether it should be so limited.