It’s almost funny to me that although I’ve been a writer all my life, a researcher of the adoption industry for nearly seven years, and an expectant mother for just about five months, writing about adoption as it relates to my own pregnancy didn’t cross my mind until a fellow writer and friend mentioned it to me just the other day.
The truth is, I am every wealthy-but-sterile woman’s nightmare. I’m 22 years old, unmarried, and got pregnant the very first time I had sex without using birth control. I’m definitely not rich, and I bet that there are a lot of infertile married couples who would argue that they could give my child more than his/her father and I could ever afford. I’m not blind to the ads that pop up in the back of young women’s magazines and in the classifieds section of the newspaper: “Happily married couple wants to adopt your baby... big house, lots of toys, all expenses paid,” followed by an ad for Adoptions-from-the-Heart or some other perversely happy-sounding agency. All of these people would be just thrilled if I thought my baby was some gift that could be passed on to the nearest wannabe parents without a single problem--but there is a problem, and it’s a big one.
This baby is a gift that nature has given to his/her father and me. And we’re not sharing! After all, it’s not our responsibility to provide the infertile couples of the world with children. Isn’t that why we have fertility specialists, Chlomid, in-vitro fertilization, and all of those other high-tech ways for people to make babies?
It’s not that I’m insensitive to the struggles some men and women experience when they begin trying to have children. I’ve been looking forward to motherhood for years, and I know it would have torn me apart to find out that I would never have a child of my own. Even so, adoption is not a cure for infertility. It won’t make parents out of people who can’t reproduce from their own genes, and that fact certainly won’t go unnoticed by the adopted child and his or her real mother and father--no matter what the baby-wanted ads say.
There are so many other problems, though, that even if I could get my mind around the wildly unnatural notion that parents can be created on paper alone, I still wouldn’t surrender my baby. First of all, children need their parents. There isn’t any substitute for the real thing, so no matter how much money or even how much love is showered over a child, he’ll still feel the absence of his true mom and dad. An infant is born into the world prepared to hear his mother’s voice and smell the familiar scent of his family. If he’s taken away from his mother and father, and all of the other people with whom he shares his looks, personality, and heritage, his little life will begin in a state of turmoil that will follow him to his grave.
I also know that the same grief that my baby would endure after adoption would become a part of her father and myself as well, not to mention her grandparents, great-grandparents, and the siblings she may someday have. The loss of a child to adoption is at least as traumatic as losing a child to death. At the very least, the parents of a deceased child have a social right to mourn and receive support for their grief. The parents of an adopted child are expected to be happy, for they have been given a wonderful gift to a deserving couple, and of course the child will be “better off.” It’s strange how people assume the child is doing well just because he’s adopted. Even when they have no idea what the adopters are like, or how loving the true parents are, they make these irrational assumptions. More likely than not, the child is ill at ease and out of place in a way that can be healed only by the comforting arms of his lost mommy and daddy. All the material possessions in the world can’t compensate for such a tremendous loss, and the love of strangers (even upper-class, married ones) will never make up for the unconditional, parental love that is missing.
Knowing all of these things--all of these realities that seem so basic but have been glossed over by the adoption industry for generations--I am not giving my baby up for adoption. Other mothers and fathers who have surrendered their children look back knowing that they would never have done so if they had any idea of the consequences. They were lied to, coerced and, in many cases, threatened, but no matter how young, unmarried, or poor they were, they were all their babies needed and wanted. Adoption wasn’t a “loving option” for them, and it isn’t an option at all for me. It is an unnatural, unimaginable fate that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, let alone my trusting infant, her adoring father, and me.
If adoption was as wonderful as its proponents would have us think, parents
would be lining up to surrender their infants.