shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2009/03/breaking-silence-on-living-pro-lifers.html
Breaking the Silence: On Living Pro-Lifers' Choice for Women | posted by Guest Blogger | Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by Shaker Anonymous Hey, Shakers, Liss has graciously allowed me to yell in her forum. I want to tell you first: at least one of you knows me in person. What I'm about to say is something you do not know about me. If it's not you, then one of your friends might be like me. I'm the birth mother of an adopted child, vehemently pro-choice, non-Christian, very unsuited to motherhood, and after over a decade, have got some things to tell the world about adoption. It's been stewing since I heard about the recent rash of pre-abortion ultrasound legislation. While I am touched that so many men in such various states are so deeply worried about women possibly being all sad from having an abortion, I wish to point out to these compassionately bleeding hearts that the alternatives are not exactly without their own emotional consequences. Keep in mind, this is from over a decade ago, and maybe things have changed - but I did four quick searches and found one site that says it's for birthmothers, and it turns out, it's to show them how easy it is to find a good family for your baby. I didn't find a single one for birthmothers who have already given up their kids. No need to go google for a half hour just to find me one site, okay. I have given a baby up for adoption, and I have had an abortion, and while anecdotes are not evidence, I can assert that abortions may or may not cause depression - it certainly did not in me, apart from briefly mourning the path not taken - but adoption? I don't doubt that there are women who were fine after adoption, and there is emphatically nothing wrong with that or with them; but I want to point out that if we're going to have a seemingly neverending discussion about the sorrow and remorse caused by abortion, then it is about goddamn time that we hear from birth mothers too. Believe me when I say that of the two choices, it was adoption that nearly destroyed me - and it never ends. The pain retreats, maybe fades, but it comes right back if I poke at it. Normally, I can write this amount in about thirty minutes, with bathroom breaks. I started to type, and stopped only to reread, then go wail into my pillow. Birth mothers are a demographic seldom heard from, and then generally only in the context of how soon they want to "replace" their lost child. I went into a self-destructive tailspin for over a decade, and never once thought that maybe a new doll would do the trick. Yet every support group, every online forum, every possible resource I found, all zeroed in on this one-size-fits-all panacea. I also didn't want an abortion, and I don't see how any of my reasons for any of this are anyone's business, either. What I didn't realize at the time - because not one person in my whole life had ever seen fit to mention the possibility, including the pre-adoption counselors - was that I'd spend so long hovering on the edge of suicide, desperately trying to find some way to deal with an all-consuming pain I had no idea even existed. I had never needed help so badly, and I doubt I ever will again. I've known a lot of birth mothers, and I consider myself lucky; I don't know what the post-adoption counseling is like now, but in my day, it was through the adoption agencies or religion. In my case, the adoption agency was Catholic, lots and lots of Catholicism, so no help there; I was also extremely upset that they provided psychiatric, drug-assisted help, but not mention that it was possible you'd have need for it until after it was too late. This is the kind of thing you really need to know before you make the decision, if only to brace yourself. No, until the baby was gone, it was all paperwork and offering to put me into a nice Catholic household where I could go to church with the family, watch wholesome programs on TV. The idea of church revolted me, as much as it would revolt others to have to follow a religious or non-religious lifestyle that they don't share. Also it was mentioned that I'd have to go along with all the Catholicism, because if I didn't, my host family could have me removed. So I handled it myself, which wasn't easy, but at least, I could pee in the middle of the night without someone I barely knew hovering outside the door. I'm not sure what mattered more, privacy or freedom, but they were both necessary. Then the baby came, and soon I realized that it had fucked me up considerably to give it away. The adoption agency I went through was so Catholic that my fillings hurt. I never found counseling or therapy or any kind of help whatsoever that wasn't about self-hatred. Post-adoption counseling turned out to be focused on getting yourself together enough to make yourself a new Christian baby so you could be a good Christian wife and mother. What if you don't want to have a New Baby (tm), or can't? And why the fuck are actual babies so disposable that you're expected to get over it after a suitable period of mourning (ie, till you get a good Christian husband) in the case of adoption? It's odd how this does not apply in the case of aborting a blastocyst, when you're expected to wall yourself into a tomb away from decent society and gnaw on the bitter bones of your own despicable evil. Where did this all-too-common idea that the only normal reaction is "longing for replacement motherhood" come from? I think that it at least partially comes from the roles women are assigned in society. Sometimes it seems like the only acceptable choice we have is when to become a mother, not if. I had my tubes tied without having any more babies, and all of a sudden everyone viewed me as an alien life form. " pressure in this world, we'd have fewer stories such as Susan Smith and Andrea Yates. There's a hell of a lot wrong with making people feel like monsters if they don't. I'd also like to point out that every time I mention the adoption in public (including the Net), one of these things invariably happens: 1: metaphorical pat on the head: "you did the right thing", which helped at first, but rapidly came to sound amazingly condescending. Nobody asked me if I was doing okay or anything like that, ever, even though I quite spectacularly wasn't. " - this is always said by exactly the kind of people I don't want to be having a conversation with in the first place. I can pretty much guarantee that talking about the downside of being a birth mother on the Net will bring out at least one, regardless of where on the Net it's posted. I can also safely assume that any such commenter will not have read this far, but just in case, I want that commenter to know one thing: your deep concern for pregnancy (in a thread about adoption) sounds more like the self-righteous squawking of someone so deeply disturbed over their own lack of bone-deep ethics that they're compelled to spend their days lecturing the rest of us. I suggest volunteer work, but I don't recommend any kind of personal contact; Many cities, even small ones, have beautification programs involving cleanup and planting trees, which might do for a start. You will be enriching the lives of others, improving your own health, you can proudly point out "your" trees, and you'll feel self-righteous with damn good reason for a change. Back to my topic, which was: Adoption fucked up my head far worse than abortion. I've googled over the years about the psychological aftereffects of giving up a baby, and what little I found is astonishing. Depression and suicide rates ridiculously high, comparable to PTSD - and beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no way you can cook any post-abortion trauma study to come anywhere near post-adoption trauma levels. Strange how peer-reviewed studies on this are damn near non-existent; strange how nobody mentions any of this when it's not just your mind on the line, but also that of your kid or kids (more on that later). Strange how this is never on the radar when these stupid obstructionist anti-abortion rules are proposed by retrofuckwits. They're always blatting on about how concerned they are for us, apparently because women aren't capable o...
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