Editor’s note. We end this week’s installments of our year-long “Roe at 40” series with a column that appear in the June 6, 1989, edition of National Right to Life News. The topic is adoption, which has the effect on most n pro-abortionists of wolfsbane on werewolves. The objective of this series is to provide you some of the best and most enduring columns from NRL News going all the way back to the beginning in 1973. Please pass this on, using your social networks.
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To advance successfully the case for obliterating unborn children, pro-abortionists must negotiate three challenges. To begin with, trying to forestall all criticism, they insist that any opposition is, in the final analysis, futile. Abortion is inevitable and pro-lifers will have no more success in holding back the demand than Canute did in holding the tides.
Second, abortion partisans must persuade the public that abortion offers a big payoff, whether the bonanza allegedly be “women’s equality” or the “better families” we’re told we get when parents have the freedom to pulverize “inconvenient” children.
But, third, even if the citizenry bought into this nonsense, pro-abortionists fear it would still go largely for naught if people were convinced there were other options—gentle alternatives to the brutality of abortion, such as adoption.
Former NOW President Eleanor Smeal.
Now just a word about challenges One and Two, Abortion, like all human activities, is heavily influenced by the surrounding environment. If we legalize abortion, propagandize its ready availability as inescapably linked to equal treatment for women and give minimal support to women facing crisis pregnancies, then the numbers will go through the roof (see post-Roe America). By contrast, if protection is afforded to the littlest Americans, if the message is sent that unborn children are not obstacles to the first-class citizenship for women and that our society is eager to stand by women in times of severe emotional trial, the killings will be negligible. Moreover, only [then-NOW President] Molly Yard and her zany ilk can possibly believe that life is “improved” by brutalizing those family members too helpless to defend themselves.
But my point in this column is adoption; specifically, the vicious, all-out, no-holds-barred assault on the noble idea that it is a mark of genuine humanity to choose to give life to a child and allow others to raise him or her over tearing them limb from limb. A few examples will give us the flavor of the attack.
Critics of the “adoption option” insist that if women are not allowed easy access to abortion, they will keep their babies rather than allow them to be raised by another family. “The price the country will pay to raise these unwanted children may financially and morally bankrupt us,” says psychologist Jacqueline H. Plumez, writing in (where else?) the November 18, 1988 issue of the New York Times.
In this context, it is interesting to note that “liberals” are increasingly resorting to thinly disguised racist attacks on the poor to justify abortion and to downgrade adoption. At the popular entertainment level, NBC’s “Roe vs. Wade” movie had the “Jane Roe” character viewing the decision to give her child up for adoption as far harder than killing her child via abortion; indeed, the Jane Roe character tries to commit suicide after her second child (the one she wanted to abort) is taken away from her at birth. [Editor’s note. “Jane Roe”—Norma McCorvey—never did abort her child and later became a stalwart pro-lifer.]
Furthermore, for the past two years, there have been a spate of op-ed pieces, editorials, and the like recycling the hoary, inaccurate assertions that adopted kids grow up loony, and that the women who give them up fare even worse.
Part of the reason adoption so unsettles pro-abortionists, I suspect, is that they see its availability as a standing indictment of their decision to take their kids’ lives. It too strongly suggests a win-win situation-for the birth mother, the child, and the adoptive parents. Perhaps more than fundamentally, adoption is unacceptable because it (a) challenges, or at least redirects, the notion that the unborn child is nothing more than property, and (b) is too remindful of an older tradition which pro-abortionists will do anything to stifle: that parents ought to sacrifice for their children.
We must never for a moment forget that pro-abortionists will go to any lengths to avoid contemplating the possibility that the unborn are humans, and, therefore, possessors of such inalienable rights as the right not to be killed.
But worse yet, from the abortion partisan’s point of view, is that adoption suggests that if necessary a woman could, and should, sacrifice on behalf of her child. Far better to thoroughly dehumanize her unborn child, to whine about how tough it would be on the mother to give up the child than to broach the possibility that perhaps what is best for the child trumps our wishes. Suggest mother love to the likes of [former NOW President] Eleanor Smeal and you have to peel them off the ceiling.
What can you say to people whose world seemingly consists of all take and no give? To the hardened zealot, probably nothing. To those whose hearts are not completely encrusted, however, perhaps we can show them that we are never more authentically human than when we place others first; that real maturity is not synonymous with solipsism but rather with a disposition to serve and to help others first; and that preoccupation with self is a prison, which offers no room to exercise our moral imaginations or to nurture our capacities for empathy and caring.
To anyone with an even passing familiarity with what used to be known as the Judeo-Christian heritage, such sentiments are hardly new. They were the mainstay of our public culture for thousands of years, the True North by which we set our ethical compasses in our journey to self-mastery and maturity. In this older view, happiness was oriented outward, not inward.
Alas, this no longer is the case. A weariness with commitment has cut a wide swath through much of our culture. There is antipathy in many sectors for the very idea of prolonged responsibility; it is no accident that the “Me Generation” marches under the banner of “nonbinding commitments.”
But pro-lifers are conspicuous exceptions to this rule. They are women and men whose deep sense of moral obligation and relatedness extends beyond their own children to the millions of little ones we have tried so hard to move out of harm’s way. Understandably, to the pro-abortion set, this is intolerable. If they are to have their way, pro-lifers-and our motives-must be as thoroughly demonized as the unborn are dehumanized.
Because most mothers who do not abort will choose to keep their babies, our preference for adoption over abortion (as noted previously) is excoriated by our opponents for producing more of “those” babies, the kind, we’re lectured, who will fill up the welfare rolls. (Our opponents are as pessimistic as they are unkind.)
Alternatively, we’re clobbered for not individually adopting all the babies which would be available. But surely the logic of the first criticism tells us that we eliminate poverty by eliminating—literally-the poor. So, why stop with the unborn?
Second, anyone who knows the movement knows that, disproportionately, pro-lifers do adopt children, work to place children for adoption, or both. And in what other context do we wait to remedy a terrible situation until every possible contingency is accounted for in advance?
The rhetorical onslaught against adoption is only beginning; count on it. Beyond the “right to choose,” beyond even the insistence that women will abort no matter what the law is, the pro-abortion movement primarily places its ultimate faith in the continuance of abortion on demand on the notion that public uneasiness with abortion is best neutralized if people buy into the idea that abortion is “the lesser of two evils.”
Adoption seriously undermines this rationale. It is for that reason that the entire Abortion Establishment and its auxiliary wing in the media will train all their considerable powers of distortion, mockery, and hatred on adoption.
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