Thursday, November 01, 2007

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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think anyone thinks adoption is going to solve the abortion issue. One thing is sure, given the fact that the mother didn't "give up" her son--he won't be coming back to her years later demanding to know why he gave him away.

This was sort of a post-natal abortion. Now the kid won't be around to bother her conscience or (gasp!) ask her why she gave him away.

Jim in Cleveland

Anonymous said...

You think he won't be bothering her conscience now?

-spub

Anonymous said...

Why should he? He is gone. Out of sight, out of mind. He was only 17 months old, after all, and he could not do much more than say "goo" and wet himself. He couldn't talk, couldn't hold a job, couldn't exist without a parent taking care of him, so I am not sure he was even a viable human being yet, just potentially so. And he sure was an inconvenience for the mother too, and not for the father, I might add. Everybody should be happy.

Jim in Cleveland

Anonymous said...

Wow. Lame. I get that what you are trying to say, but that kinda seems like a mean-spirited extrapolation of the viability argument. I took the argument in the other direction on my other post (which I forgot to sign) to "A Dialogue About Abortion: Part IV," and it came out sounding just as ridiculous as your argument here.

In all of this debate about abortion, I never thought it necessary to point out that it is an extremely difficult decision to make, and the majority of women feel at least a twinge of guilt and regret when they ultimately choose to abort. The world isn't black and white, it is shades of gray, and many decisions we are forced to make are about choosing what is less bad. That's what I have to do every time I vote. So, while I don't believe it's morally wrong to abort a fetus, it's understandable to regret what might have been.

-spub

Anonymous said...

But why is it lame? Or mean-spirited? I honestly don't get it.

Of course there are degrees of wrong. If I plan the murder of a spouse so I can inherit her money, and do it, it is first-degree murder. If I kill her because she laughed at me when I caught her making it with my best friend, in the heat of the moment, it is second-degree. The justice system recognizes that there is a difference. But both are murder.

To me, viability is a silly arbitrary line. And frankly, it is BS, because many pro-choicers, especially NARAL, don't accept that abortion is wrong after viabiilty. But even if they did, they never establish why it isn't the taking of a life before the viability point.

Jim in Cleveland