Freedom of Choice

Here's a great article I've come across that deflates the whole anti-choice argument for pressuring girls and women to go through with an unwanted pregnancy and place their child up for adoption, rather that opt for an abortion:

Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio)
October 21, 2004
Adoption Can't End Abortion
BY: By Steve Conn

The writer is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University.

It was a throw-away line in the second presidential debate. Somewhere during his response to a soft-ball question about federal funding of abortion for poor women, President Bush suggested that he supported adoption as an alternative to abortion.

And as Ronald Reagan might have said: There he goes again.

It has become a standard response on the part of those who oppose women's reproductive choices that adoption is a solution to the problem of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. In fact, the president's father, once he abandoned his pro-choice position for a spot on Ronald Reagan's ticket, was fond of saying as much.

But equating adoption and abortion in this way is a rhetorical sleight of hand, hiding a fundamental misunderstanding of both adoption and abortion.

The implication here is that rather than terminating a pregnancy, women instead ought to carry those pregnancies to term, go through the ecstatic agony of labor and child birth and then hand their newborns over to some other parents. Never mind that during those nine months, a woman might well experience physical discomfort, gestational diabetes or, worse, be bed-ridden for some number of weeks or months.

We have heard a great deal from anti-choice advocates that abortion is physical and psychologically dangerous for women. No doubt it has proved to be for some number. But in fact, pregnancy remains a greater physical hazard for women than abortion.

Likewise, the implication of the slogan ''adoption not abortion'' is that, while abortion leaves women psychologically scarred for life, giving a child up for adoption is easy as pie. No muss, no fuss.

Few want to discuss just how difficult it is for a woman to give up her baby, and how that decision haunts her for the rest of her life.

In essence, those, like the president, who would tell pregnant women that their single moral obligation is to deliver a baby, see women largely as elaborate life-support systems for their uteruses.

As if this weren't offensive enough to women, the fallacies continue. To propose adoption rather than abortion is to imply that there is a long line of families waiting for children, and that every child born in this country has a home waiting for it. This is simply and utterly wrong.

There are thousands of children in this country who will grow up in under-funded foster care systems, kicking around through the courts in custody battles, or bouncing around from one relative or another. And once an unwanted child reaches the age of 6 or thereabouts, the chances that he or she will ever find an adoptive home are crushingly small.

The children President Bush insists women ought to have will, in all likelihood, become yet more children left behind, like so many are already in this country.

Internationally, the situation is even worse. Put bluntly, the number of ''surplus'' children around the globe today is in the millions.

Children who suffer, who are victimized and whose life options and chances will prove narrow and harrowing. When the president extends his ''adoption not abortion'' fatuousness to the developing world through the imposition of the global gag rule, he condemns these children to poverty and deprivation. In many cases, their mothers had no access to safe, reliable birth control and in almost no case will they be adopted into more privileged families.

What the president and other abortion opponents seem not to grasp is that adoption and abortion are different questions entirely, despite the president's conflation of them during the debate and on the stump. It is easy, indeed, facile for the president to lump them together, the one a solution for the other.

But in so doing, he reveals an ignorance about the situation the world's children find themselves in. He reveals as well his contempt for women who are faced with the most difficult, complicated choice of their lives.

I know a bit of what I speak. I come from a two-generation adoptive family. My baby sister -- hardly a baby any more -- and my oldest child are both adopted.

I can attest that adopted kids are just as wonderful and miraculous and moving (and frustrating and maddening and sleep-depriving) as children who arrive the old fashioned way.

I often have been asked by people who meet my daughter why my wife and I chose to adopt. I sometimes respond: Why have you chosen not to? Most don't know what to say, because most haven't thought about it that much.

Neither, apparently, has the president, and I am a bit weary of the way he uses my family to promote an entirely different agenda.

A few nights ago on CNN's Paula Zahn Now, a Roman Catholic Bishop from the Midwest was going on about how abortion was "intrinsically evil" and, according to his moral outlook, worse than executing an adult. (He was warning Catholics that they must not vote for a presidential candidate who supports abortion rights, but, when asked by Ms. Zahn, stopped short of actually endorsing a candidate.) It's wild that he and so many other people favor a potential life over a fully mature human being. I'm all for protecting and ministering to those who are suffering, vulnerable, etc., but we're doing a really shabby job now of taking care of the millions of poor and sick children and adults that are already among us. Wouldn't it be more productive for the anti-choice movement to channel all of its energy into tackling poverty, hunger, or homelessness?

How do the anti-choice folks know that God is on their side? Where exactly is abortion condemned in the Bible? (I don't think it's mentioned at all!) What about all of the fertilized eggs that are naturally and spontaneously aborted? If you subscribe to the theory that God is the impetus behind everything that happens on Earth, doesn't this make God the biggest abortionist of all? (I guess He/She really works in mysterious ways!)

Another contradiction that I can't wrap my head around is that the majority of anti-choice folks appear to be dead-set against all contraceptives that would prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. They claim that any device or medicine that prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall causes an abortion. This is at complete odds with medical science, which considers a pregnancy established when the fertilized egg is attached to the uterus, for without the mother's body's nourishment, etc., the fertilized egg cannot develop into a fetus. Hello, you can't have an abortion if you're not pregnant! But I guess all that science and logic doesn't really matter to them...facts are inconvenient for those obsessed with ideology and dogma...and that might raise all sorts of uncomfortable and complicated questions now, wouldn't it?