Stuff People Who Know Who Their Blood Relatives Are Say

Parenthood Requires Love, Not DNA!

PRLND is the name of a Facebook Group. You can click the link if you want, or you can take my word for how awful it is. It’s page after page of disembodied baby feet being held in disembodied adult hands, and posts about how love knows no color, and god’s plan, and how giving up a baby is not giving up a baby, and how Moses was adopted and every other nauseating trigger I or other adult adoptees have ever discussed. But this image took the motherfucking biscuit. Look at it. LOOK AT IT:

Sacrificing family is for adoptees and their original families. So is sacrificing your heart: The adopted will love who they are told to love and like it. Dignity? Are you SHITTING me? Adoptions are all about the loss of dignity–but not for youuu, you special, special parents who know DNA has nothing to do with love but also know who you are and where you come from.

Fuck you all with rusty rakes. Doesn’t cognitive dissonance ever reach a conscious level with you people?!

“It’s generally believed that the transaction is purely commercial”

…by the purchasers, of course. Because I’m sure I don’t know who else could believe this nonsense. Carrying, nay constructing, a future human being in one’s own body for nine months doesn’t involve anything other than money…just ask people who’ve never done it! (Shit, I’VE never done it, and I know better than this!)

Now, assuming any of you fine, fine parents-by-surrogacy out there really want to know, which you nigh universally do not, this purely commercial transaction bullshit is bullshit. I mean, was it “purely commercial” for you to finally get the baby you dreamed of all these years? No emotions involved at all? Oh, that’s right, you’re not “birth mothers” or “rental wombs”–you’re real live humans! How DO I keep forgetting such an obvious and vital distinction?

Anyway, this article tells the stories of three rental wombs who had the brazen (and fertile!) ovaries to Feel Things about their vending machine status and the products it produced. Who would have thought? And isn’t the progressive and compassionate BBC just swell to give these vessels a voice? I mean, otherwise, how would anyone who matters know that poor and/or Indian womanshapedthings have emotions?

These women’s stories sound eerily familiar to me, and there’s a reason for that. S. Sumati says

I was still under sedation when they removed the baby. I never set eyes on it. […]

When I gained consciousness, my first words to my husband were, ‘Did you see the baby? Is it a boy or a girl?’

He said he hadn’t seen it. I asked my doctor, but she didn’t answer my question.

‘You are a surrogate mother, you shouldn’t ask these questions,’ she said.

But I want to know about the baby. I want to know where he or she is and what it is studying.

The second interviewee, Anandi Chelappaun, describes being sent away:

While I was in the hostel, my family was allowed to visit only once a month and that was very hard for me.

I was warned that whatever happened, I couldn’t go home, but then thankfully nothing untoward happened which required me to visit [my family].

Jothi Lakshmi says

My mother and mother-in-law [..] didn’t speak to me during my pregnancy.

I never laid eyes on the baby and I think maybe it was for the best because if I had seen it, I would have felt very guilty giving it up.

But it was hard, I had felt the baby move in my belly, I had become attached to it, and I couldn’t see it. It just disappeared.

For about two-three years, I felt very bad and I lost a lot of weight.

But now I don’t want to see it. At home, we don’t talk about it. I even discourage my husband from talking about it because I know it belongs to someone else.

I have made peace with myself.

Tell me you can distinguish these three stories from the accounts of many BSE-era relinquishing mothers, because I can’t. Isn’t it wonderful how adoption has changed? Now you can purchase your child outright, without the least wisp of worry that you’re doing anything wrong (just like before, when you could tell yourself you were doing that slut a favor in helping her get on with her life). And you get to leave that incubator on the other side of the planet where she belongs and never worry think about  her again (just like the good ol’ days when you could be sure that shame would keep your baby’s adoption delivery system-thingummy from ever looking for your child).

This is what parents-by-surrogacy want and what they pay for. The Baby Scoop Era, with its thousands of suffering women and confused children, remains the gold standard in *adoption. All these decades later, it is what almost anyone who hears the word “adoption” believes the word means. The average PAP will pay any amount of money to attain this experience, or one as close to it as they can get. (Some, of course, will do worse.)

Surrogacy is actually superior to gold standard adoption in that you may very well receive a baby who’s genetically your own. So here’s another BSE question for you parents: Are you going to tell him/her? Don’t you think it might confuse him/her to know s/he was purchased out of a brown womb on the other side of the planet?

Adoption will never change unless and until those who pump money into it and benefit from it want it to change, and they don’t seem to want that at all. Why aren’t more people ashamed of themselves?

* (or “reproductive choices,” or whatever we’re supposed to call the buffet of child-procuring methods rich white westerners get to choose from)

 

Fuck You, Pennsylvania.

Because we all know what “streamlining” means, don’t we? It means PAPs get what PAPs want ASAP.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (CBS) — Three more bills from a package of legislation to streamline and speed up adoption procedures in Pennsylvania were approved by a state House committee on Wednesday.

Greg Grassa is Executive Director of the House Children and Youth Committee, which advanced three bills that are part of an eight bill package to tighten up adoption procedures. Grassa says one of the most important bills in the package has already passed the House and awaits action in the Senate. That measure would reduce the period of time a birth mother can revoke her consent from 30 days to 14 days.

Because nobody needs more than two weeks to make a decision that will affect her and her baby for the rest of their lives (and beyond). I mean, fuck that noise. The “most important” part of adoption is that the PAPs get what they want when they want it…even though adoption is supposed to be founded on the best interests of the child.

“From the adoptive family’s point of view, they can actually bring a child home and welcome them into their hearts and homes,” Grassa said, “and on the 29th day of the revocation period, the birth mother can still say ‘ahh, I’ve changed my mind.’”

Oh the unimaginable horror! Oh those poor adoptive families!

Thing is, those suffering “adoptive families” are NOT adoptive families: not until the mother relinquishes. If there’s one good thing I can say about my BSE adoption, it’s that I was NOT placed in my APs home before my mother relinquished me. I was given up, then put in foster care while the state found a match for me–a family with that matched my first family as closely as possible–and then adopted. That’s right: They wanted a match FOR ME, not for some mob of “adoptive families” who saw fit to approach my mother with a wad of cash, zero morals, and the presumption that she wanted to sell her daughter.

But we don’t do that anymore, do we? Because if we couldn’t put a non-adopted baby into an “adoptive” home, the mother would feel freer to change her mind. Far better to put the kid there right away so that if she does change her mind, she’ll be “taking the baby from the only home s/he’s ever known.” She will be the villain and everyone will tell her how horrible she is. After all, they paid her medical bills: she owes them. Now that societal shame is not enough, coercion must be employed, because who is adoption about, anyway?

Individual shaming is the way to go these days. Bitch, you led them on, and that means they’re entitled to use you. Don’t you know prostitutes can’t be raped? (If you think you see a difference between these two methods of shame-based economic coercion of women, do please tell me what it is.)

Also, if we want to be fair, shouldn’t we pass similar laws against non-adopted babies who have the temerity to die before they’re two weeks old? Someone–god, the Universe, the government, their bank accounts–SOMEBODY owes their parents a baby, because they paid their money and they got screwed over. If that sounds insane to you but the other does not, you are part of the problem. No matter how much you love your adoptee or how long you waited or how much you paid or what you think you were promised, you’re the problem.

On Wednesday, one bill approved by the committee requires courts to set a hearing date of no more than 20 days after birth parents’ file a petition to relinquish their parental rights.

NOW! NOW! NOW! Easier, cheaper, faster, NOW! If “your birth mother” kills herself when she learns how horrible you are, that’s…well, it’s rather convenient, isn’t it? Especially if you promised her an open adoption you had no intention of leaving open.

I was in the middle of composing this post when TAO put up an excellent one about the (shh!) E-word in adoption. Please read it and comment if you like (but read the guidelines first).