Friday Cat Blogging: The Return!

Friday Cat Blogging is back baby! And once again we have a guest cat appearance. This is from my Portland friend, Melissa: Oscar Wilde. He does seem to love reading his Portland Mercury.

According to her Oscar Wilde is also known as "AKA Bosco, AKA Piss Factory." He is one of ELEVEN cats that she owns. ( and I might add she's married!) That's enough cats to keep Friday cat blogging in guest cat pics for months. She also wrote that she likes his David Niven 'stash. It took me a while to see it, and then I couldn't see anything but.

Anyway aside from my regular day job of trying to keep the teens from becoming pregnant, I've been attending panels about abstinence-only education (which were gate-crashed by abstinence-only teachers) and reading the book about adoption "The Girls Who Went Away." I feel like there's some kind of blog coming up about all that.

In the meantime, Virginia's Senate voted to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood this week (the House had been really eager to do it months ago. And this is DESPITE the fact that Democrats are in power in both bodies).

The Main culprit: Democrat Sen. Charles J. Colgan from Prince William County. He switched his votes which allowed the vote to go to a tie so that the Lieutenant Governor would break it to side with the Republicans.

We're talking about $250,000 to $500,000 that has normally been budgeted for Planned Parenthood. Funds that NEVER apply for abortion services. I'm talking about providing pap smears, ob-gyn examinations and low-cost birth control. Clearly services you don't want your communities to have. (I've love it if Sen. Colgan can now explain to his Prince William County residents where they will get their low-cost birth control?) I mean, there are plenty of low-income health clinic around that we can afford to shut some down right?

Adoption: Not Enough (White) Orphans To Go Around

Bitch Ph. D has a post talking about the book, The Girls Who Went Away, which is about the (mostly white) women from the 40s-60s who got pregnant and then gave up their children for adoption.

There is an interesting point to be made about the drop in newborns available for adoption that corresponds to the increasing acceptability of single-parenthood and female sex outside of marriage. (Which I suspect some people will read as "Oh well that means we need to make single parenthood LESS acceptable. Shame the sluts!"

The reason I call this "Not Enough Orphans" is because not only the post, but the comments, really make it clear that adoption is can be absolutely fucking painful because in a lot of cases these children are absolutely wanted by their birth mothers. These are not little adorable cast-off orphans.

I'm particularly struck by comment by madmama.

I placed a child for adoption 13 years ago. Open adoption. I would never have considered closed adoption. In the paralyzing years following, I have lived in poverty (partly because I was so overcome with grief I could hardly get up each day, face the only work I could find after the birth, when, still bleeding from giving birth, I was hired at 7/11), dealt daily with a grief and loss and wondered why these people I chose to care for my child were so eager to take my baby but offered me no help. (Legally they couldn't, I know the reasons why, but it was a thought process. Also there was a governmental process to provide easy access to adoption, no such easy process to help me keep my child. In fact a woman at the pregnancy crisis centre said to me at the time, "Wouldn't it feel good to give a couple the gift of a baby?" Even then I thought she was full of shit, I thought, my baby is nobody's present. I never returned. But I had no other help.)

It's an interesting dimension to the "family values" discussion is that many groups are eager to push the line that adoption is an option, but why aren't these same groups willing to offer significant governmental assistant (the way France or Finland does) to supporting motherhood in this country?

The number of women in American who a) accidentally get pregnant and b)genuinely do not wish to become a parent and c) would not choose to have an abortion, may bit just a tiny fraction of all adoptions.

It's an interesting question that if an accidentally pregnant American woman were suddenly whisked away to, say, Sweden, would her decision about whether to keep the child or whether to consider either adoption or abortion change? Does anyone know the rate of Swedish children available for non-relative adoption in Sweden? And what percentage of those children are newborns?

More On Adoption Issue

I’m taking this out of comments because I think it’s interesting to explore on its own. The problem with relying on adoption to “solve” the abortion issue is that too few women are willing to give up their newborns and you can't force them to.

I think many women who are against having an abortion (or can't get one for a variety of reasons) think they can “just make it work” when they find themselves pregnant at a time when they can’t handle a baby either due to a lack of resources or maturity or both. So you get stories like this one where the 22-year-old woman, clearly becoming increasingly distraught over parenting, left her baby in a hot, stuffy car for seven hours while she worked as a waitress. (The fact that she worked at Hooters is immaterial. It could have just as easily been an Applebee’s).

What I found particularly revealing was this passage:

Court records show Clayton Gallagher [the baby’s father] had spoken on the phone with [the mother] for 1 1/2 hours the day before Ryan's death. She told him that she "couldn't do it anymore" and she didn't want Ryan around because he cried so much. She also couldn't stand not seeing him every day and rebuffed Gallagher's offer to take him.

I don’t know what was going on in that woman’s mind when she left her kid in the car but I think the thought of “giving up” her son forever was something that in a way drove her to kill him.

Giving up your son (to adoption, to the father) might make you feel as if you failed as a mother. You gave your child away. And what happens if the kid comes back to you years later and demands to know why you gave them away? I know I would think like that if contemplating giving up my child, even if it was the best thing for them.

Of course it’s a truly loving thing to sacrifice your desires to make sure your children have a better life, even if that means a life without you. But how many people in the world are that selfless? Probably not as many as become pregnant when they don’t wish to be.

Instead you get situations where women try to make it work as a parent. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes though, it doesn’t. And sometimes you end up with parents that aren’t fatal but simply poor quality.

Until the state can mandate that children be taken away from people before they have a chance to show they are bad parents (maybe if baby Ryan Gallagher had lived through that day it would have been his last in his mother’s care, but maybe not) I don’t think we’ll see the adoption rate of newborns increase significantly. There may simply be a ceiling of the people a year who are willing to put their children’s needs ahead of their own desires.

The Adoption Option

Entirely aside from my abortion dialogues, there is an interesting oped in the L.A. Times, "The Adoption Vs. Abortion Myth: Why politicians are wrong to trumpet the former as a solution to the latter."

But I found this nugget very interesting.

Meanwhile, we know that very few women actually place their infants for adoption. In the United States, fewer than 14,000 newborns were voluntarily relinquished in 2003 (the latest year for which an estimate is available), according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That proportion -- just under 1% of all the children born to never-married women -- has remained constant for almost two decades. It's down considerably from the early 1970s, but even in those days, more than nine in 10 unmarried women who gave birth kept their babies.

I never really thought about what is the actual number of newborn adoptions (not just older children adopted out of foster care). The fact that only 14,000 women a year voluntarily give up their newborn children to be adopted makes me understand why there is such a competition amongst couples who want to adopt.

But it's such a hard thing to give up your baby, especially if you do want children and the problem is money and ability to take care of it, not a lack of desire to be a parent. Even on Loveline there were SO many callers where it was a young woman in a shakey relationship with the biological father -- someone who didn't sound all that put together with no money and no finances -- who clearly had a highly idealistic sense of what life was going to be like once the baby was born.

Adam Corolla used to say in those circumstances the kid would be better off if the mother would launch the baby from a giant slingshot than be raised by its bio-mom. Most of the time I had to agree.