I’m just not sure when all the feminists are going to realize that. This is a start (from Shakesville).
Breaking the Silence: On Living Pro-Lifers’ Choice for Women
Related posts:
dawn friedman’s blog
Books I’m in
I’m just not sure when all the feminists are going to realize that. This is a start (from Shakesville).
Breaking the Silence: On Living Pro-Lifers’ Choice for Women
Related posts:
I saw that this morning. It was just heartbreaking – I didn’t feel like I should comment at all as an adoptive parent. I hope that she can get in touch with some birth/first parent bloggers; I really do think that would help her.
What was eye-opening to me was seeing all these people who are (presumably) active in pro-choice and feminist issues and who had never thought about adoption and what it does to a first mother. Maybe this will get the word out somewhat, but wow.
That post moved me to tears. I could have written it myself. I wanted to comment but couldnt. I want to kiss that anonymous blogger. I tweeted it.
Perfect. Absolutely perfect. It could have been written by me. (Envious it wasnt but so frakkin happy it was!)
The post your reference was incredibly powerful. The connection between the pro-life movement and adoption terrifies me. But although I want to, I can’t share everyone’s optimism about the impact of the post. I haven’t met a right-to-lifer yet who has shown even a shred of willingness to even entertain the notion that adoption could be flawed, never mind actually support movements to support single motherhood or open adoption records.
Feel free to ignore me, lately I’m very pessimistic about adoption reform, powerless in the face of stupidity, misinformation and the NCFA.
(I wanted to comment on the post itself but it was so complicated and I couldn’t figure it out.)
I agree with Thorn — anyone who has read any of the firstmother/birthmother blogs would know that there is a lot of pain (and a whole, whole lot more) for them, even where the firstmother/birthmother says she has no regrets.
Is there still so little awareness of this side of the triad?
Even by feminists?
Wow, that’s scary.
Artemis (and Margie — I wish wordpress would let me reply to two people at once!) I was telling Thorn that I’ve been told by many feminists that adoption isn’t a feminist issue because they think it’s something that women (usually not feminist women) choose and they don’t know all the machinations around it. I had a friend who I was asking to help me formulate a pitch to Ms (because she’d written for them) and she said, “Dawn, Ms. won’t want this. What does adoption have to do with women?” And this was a smart, connected, well-read and well-traveled feminist woman. So even if it doesn’t wake up pro-lifers, maybe it will mobilize pro-choice women who have felt like adoption wasn’t an important part of the discussion.
The most exciting thing about the post was the wake up to her ‘feminist’ audience.
“What does adoption have to do with women?” Womens rights, basic rights have been overlooked way too long, by women.
Someone just posted this on Feministing, too: http://www.feministing.com/archives/014312.html
“I haven’t met a right-to-lifer yet who has shown even a shred of willingness to even entertain the notion that adoption could be flawed, never mind actually support movements to support single motherhood or open adoption records.”
My parents, Margie.
So all we have to do is coerce a whole lot more women into relinquishing, and perhaps the ripple effect through families will cause a change in thinking.
/snark
I found this so heartbreaking, I could hardly look at the meta issues. The comment that described the woman sleeping in her car outside the hotel where the aparents had her baby…I had to go look at knitting sites to keep myself from crawling under my desk (at work) and crying.
When I first got radicalized about adoption, from a birth parent perspective, about the second cogent thought I had was this is such a feminist issue. What happened and sadly I think continues to happen is very much about the fact that we are women.
Many years ago, another birth mother and I approached a pro choice organization along the lines of the blog, i.e. saying that the suggestion adoption was no muss no fuss by anti-choice factions was wrong and we were prepared to say that publically. We talked about the trauma of losing a child to adoption. The woman we spoke to listened to us and then said her daughter was having trouble conceiving and well she wouldn’t want to publicize anything that discouraged girls from giving their children up.
I feel sometimes that the pro-adoption forces are everywhere and have been told that that, not anything about women being free to make decisions, is the reason feminists do not get behind our cause.
I’d like to think it’s not true but one really does wonder.
It’s not true that ‘feminists’ aren’t (and haven’t been) raising questions about the challenges in adoption triads, because some have. It was as a young feminist that I first became involved in supporting women with crisis pregnancies, as well as with birth choices, and saw the impact adoption (the ‘easy’ choice, at the time @@) had on all the women and children. 30 years on, I’m still struck to the quick by how seldom anyone in my middleclass neighborhood (all of whom have liberal politics) gives any thought to the dynamic that produces a ‘surplus’ of children for adoption.
Empathy is hard to find, around reproduction.
“All” the feminists, however, will never agree on anything…there’s no system for stamping our union card, although I’ve often regretted that.
[...] choosing NOT to be a mom, but to choose to BE a mom, it didn’t register as well as I wanted. Ditto for adoption. And this is why I told Nona that I think the pressure to BE a mom is so great on some young women [...]