This commentary is by R.P. Dragon of Pownal, a founding board member for Adoptees for Choice.
Abortion and adoption are unrelated. The former is a medical decision regarding whether to continue a pregnancy. The latter is a social and legal decision made on behalf of an autonomous human being.
And yet, as adoptees, we are frequently tokenized for anti-abortion agendas. We are made poster children, happy and grateful survivors of would-be abortions.
The pregnant and vulnerable hear, “Don’t abort; you can just give your baby up for adoption.” People struggling with infertility hear, “It’s OK; just adopt!” That word, just. As if the trauma of infant/maternal separation is just a nothing, a benign medical procedure, like the removal of a few basal cells. To say” just” before “adoption” is to minimize this enormous trauma and its lifelong ramifications.
Our society loves a good savior story. Information about this foundational trauma of separation is silenced in a sea of feel-good stories like Little Orphan Annie and images of “forever families,” as if love makes everything well and perfect. As if babies are just blank slates waiting to be written on, easily redistributed, clay in the hands of the potter.
Adoptees are seen as extra-lucky, the unfortunate gifts given to better people so those better people can give us better lives. Overall, we are valued most for how we make our adoptive families feel.
Our value is quantified by being subjects of their desires, by accomplishing their goals of family-making, by being the missing pieces to their puzzles, by being the salve on their struggles — not by our existence as individual and autonomous human beings with our own identities and agency.
Subsequently, a common response to an adoptee supporting reproductive rights is one of shock and confusion. Most adoptees, at one point in their lives, have heard, “At least you weren’t aborted. Or thrown in a Dumpster. Aren’t you glad your birth mother chose life?”
My personal favorite response to that question came from a fellow adoptee born in the 1960s, Patti, who as a struggling teenager looked her priest square in the eyes and answered, “I’m glad she chose premarital sex!”
The idea that adoption is a remedy for abortion is the ghost of a bygone era, one in which premarital sex was seen as the ultimate sin, and those who dared to act on natural sexual impulse were immediately disqualified from loving and raising their own infants.
As society has progressed from this archaic belief, the greatest sin is now poverty. Vulnerable pregnant people who live in poverty or lack resources are preyed upon for the ultimate resource: a brand-new baby that the more privileged can call their own. Just give your baby to someone who can give them more things, just give them more opportunities with people who can provide them, and all will be well. Win-win.
Property and prosperity are more important than people and place.
Domestic Infant Adoption — the kind of adoption that is orchestrated before the birth of the child through a dance of fundraising, marketing, and convincing expectant mothers that their unborn infants would feel extra loved if just given to more privileged people — is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry.
The waiting list of hopeful adoptive parents is miles long compared to the number of available infants. The supply is low; it doesn’t meet the demand.
For those who would personally benefit from an increased supply of available infants, restriction to abortion access is the easiest and most productive path forward. Force the pregnant to carry to term, even when they wish to terminate, instant baby boom. And since many of these babies will be born to poor and marginalized people, of course the best thing is that these babies just be given to the more fiscally deserving, foundational trauma be damned.
Although we are rarely heard on the matter, many adoptees are challenging our societal narratives, on both adoption and on reproductive rights. Our voices are missing from the place where society insists that abortion and adoption intersect. Countless adoptees want to wrest ourselves from a forced affiliation with a political perspective we do not share, a position that would rob many of us of the ability to choose safe and legal abortion under the guidance and assistance of a medical professional and would replace that choice with restrictions created by legislators.
Adoption is not a reproductive choice, and adoptees are not living and breathing propaganda in the fight to restrict bodily autonomy.
To help elevate this message, Adoptees for Choice was created. We are a small grassroots group that is quickly gaining some support. As our first official action, it is our honor to publicly support Vermont’s Proposal 5, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment.
In today’s national landscape, it is essential that reproductive rights are permanently codified in our state constitutions. This amendment would preserve the right of all Vermonters to make their own reproductive decisions, no matter what happens at the federal level regarding Roe v. Wade. We encourage all Vermonters to vote yes on Proposal 5 and hope to see other states follow suit.