Now that the Supreme Court has tossed the abortion issue back to the legislatures, it’s time to promote the adoption option. This will enable us to demonstrate that what is often called an “unwanted child” can be really twice loved.
Texas Monthly, a magazine without any particular editorial bias, recently assigned an investigative reporter to write a factual article on what goes on inside and outside of a Dallas abortion clinic. Nestled among other articles on Texas desserts, Indians in Chihuahua, and modern music, I discovered a factual article on the daily routine in this clinic.
“As patients rest in recovery,” the reporter wrote, “counselors push the wheeled aspirators into a small pathology lab. There the contents of each abortion are dumped into a colander and the excess blood rinsed away in a sink. The remains are placed in a dish on a light table; it’s a technician’s job to be sure the doctor emptied the uterus entirely.”
How does the technician do it? “Poking at the bloody mass on the disk with gloved hands, the technician searches for a cord and sac; in a pregnancy over nine weeks, she checks for the presence of two feet and two hands. When she finds them, she holds the tiny fetal parts against a ruler to be sure that their size jibes with sonogram measurements estimating the age of the pregnancy. That work done, the remains are disposed of as medical waste.”
What kind of a person could do this job, over and over again, day after day, week after week? There must be a better way to deal with the problem of unwanted pregnancies than by assigning technicians to dispose of dozens of tiny feet and hands as “medical waste.”
When George Bush talked about adoption during his presidential campaign last year in response to a question about abortion, I first thought he was straying to the periphery of the issue. It was only when I saw the NBC docu-drama this spring on the Roe v. Wade case that I realized that the pro-abortion lobby is passionately anti-adoption.
“Jane Roe,” the woman who started the case by challenging the Texas law against abortion, did in fact give up her baby for adoption (since the case could not be decided within nine months). The NBC script, however, had Jane Roe and her lawyer make a vicious attack on adoption as something worse than abortion.
In fact, the adoption option is the kindest, most loving, most humane, and most generous option. It gives the baby the chance to be twice loved in a home where a child is wanted more than anything in the world.
Yet, adoption is the least chosen option when a woman has an unwanted pregnancy (which is definitely not the same thing as an unwanted child). Only about three percent of women who give birth out of wedlock give up their babies for adoption.
The 97 percent choose to keep their babies, even though this clearly means the baby will be disadvantaged by being raise without a father, and even though the mother often doesn’t have a job or other means of support and will fall back on welfare for daily necessities.
Meanwhile, two million childless couples are on agency waiting lists or at fertility clinics who want to adopt the 50,000 babies who become available for adoption – 40 couples competing for every adoption. This is a conservative estimate because thousands of couples have given up or use private foreign sources, and the number of infertile couples is rising because of social or medical reasons.
Many steps need to be taken to assure that adoption is a viable alternative, both psychologically and financially. We should make sure that so-called “non-directive” counseling of pregnant women is no longer just abortion referral, but includes complete and fair information that adoption is an honorable alternative which will enable them to give their babies the gift of life in a home with two parents who love that child very much.
We should rectify the present ridiculous situation that an unwed pregnant woman can abort her baby without the father’s consent but not give the baby for adoption without his consent. We should terminate the rules that allow biological fathers to tie up adoption proceedings for years.
Adoptive parents should have the same tax status for adoption that parents now have for natural births. Adoptive parents should be allowed tax deductibility for all adoption expenses, including the birth-mother’s medical bills.
The mother who wants to get her problem pregnancy behind her and is generous enough to give her baby to a couple who will give her baby a loving home should have the absolute right to know that adoption records will be permanently sealed and the adoption is a final act that cannot be reopened. She should not be left with the threat that someday that baby can walk back into her life.
