What prompted me to write this diary today was the news coverage being given to the various women’s rallies across the country being planned for today. (See: Abortion rights hang in the balance, as advocates rally across the country.)
The new Texas anti-abortion law applies to those women who get pregnant as a result of rape or incest. It makes no exception for females most people wouldn’t define as women, that is, those in their middle teens.
“The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator.” (Reference)
My title question is really is all that needs to be asked. Of course we can only surmise the answer. My hunch is that those seeking to adopt a baby want them to have had ideal parents. I suspect that many of them, if they could custom order a child to adopt, they’d opt for the baby of a 23 year old woman who was working on completing her PhD who got pregnant after a one-night stand with a 27 year old father who was finishing his residency at a top hospital.
I don’t know the state laws about whether adoption agencies can even require the sharing of any parentage information with those seeking to adopt a child. This isn’t my point. It is meant as a hypothetical and one question I’d like pro-lifers to honestly answer. Their supposed concern about fate of the unborn embryo and its right to live is what this group is based on but I don’t recall any major push towards promoting adoption now that Roe is much closer to being overturned than it ever was. There’s plenty of pro-life talk but I don’t read anything about what will happen to unplanned children when they are born. In 2019 there were over 400,000 American children in foster care. Only 28% ended up being adopted.
In 2019 when Roe didn’t seem in jeopardy like it is today, the conservative National Review published In a Post-Abortion America, the Pro-Life Movement Must Prepare to Change Attitudes toward Adoption.
Excerpt:
This is a thrilling and encouraging moment for the pro-life movement in the U.S., as American society shifts further away from abortion in both its attitudes and policies. Last month, Alabama governor Kay Ivey signed into law the strongest pro-life measure in America, and Louisiana and Missouri recently enacted their strongest-ever pro-life laws, bringing to seven the total number of states that have this year banned abortion after six weeks’ gestation.
But with this shift come new challenges for the pro-life movement. If Roe is overturned soon and states continue to criminalize the killing of unborn children, more unplanned babies will be born in America than ever before. This raises the obvious question: Is America ready to fully embrace adoption as the “loving option” the pro-life movement knows it to be?
Already, pro-choice writers are anticipating an adoption-focused future. The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan has written a mildly slanted, yet factually honest, piece exploring available statistics and anecdotal evidence on how unexpectedly pregnant women feel about adoption and their ultimate decisions about their pregnancies:
- But even among American women for whom carrying a child to term would be safe, adoption is a remarkably unpopular course of action. Though exact estimates for all women are hard to come by, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports [sic] that among never-married women, about 9 percent chose adoption before 1973, when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. (The figure was higher for white women: 19 percent.) By the mid-1980s, the figure had dropped to 2 percent, and it was just 1 percent by 2002, the last year the CDC data captured. In 2014, only 18,000 children under the age of 2 were placed with adoption agencies. By comparison, there are about 1 million abortions each year.
The notion that nurture can overcome nature and that no matter the genetic makeup of adopted children if they are raised in loving homes they will grow up to be caring and responsible adults. This is true of developmental disabled children or children with various disabilities. What is unknown is whether good parenting can overcome the negative personality traits in children whose fathers were sociopaths.
When it comes to the causes of sociopathy (used here interchangeably with psychopathic or now officially anti-social personality disorder) being genetic the jury is still out. From WebMD “The reasons behind the disorder are not fully understood. The current belief is that psychopathy generally comes from genetic factors, such as parts of the brain not developing fully, while sociopathy results from an interruption in personality development by abuse or trauma in childhood. People often think that those with antisocial personality disorders are always criminals and are easy to spot, but many are unaware of the disorder and may never be diagnosed.”
When it comes to incest we know that, from Wikipedia, “A common justification for prohibiting incest is avoiding inbreeding: a collection of genetic disorders suffered by the children of parents with a close genetic relationship. Such children are at greater risk for congenital disorders, death, and developmental and physical disability, and that risk is proportional to their parents' coefficient of relationship—a measure of how closely the parents are related genetically.” It seems to me theses children when adopted by loving parents who can handle any disabilities they may have, the issue is forcing the mothers to having the child of her father or brother, especially when it was the result of being forced into having sex.
Another factor to consider is that a woman can’t always be assured that the man who raped her and caused her to get pregnant can’t sue for custody or demand visitation. See
When Your Rapist Demands Custody — More states are banning abortion without exceptions for rape. But what happens to women who must carry their pregnancies to term?
Excerpt:
That many rape survivors are forced to share custody with their assailants gained fresh relevance this spring, when Alabama lawmakers passed a near-total ban on abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Critics said the law was tantamount to forced motherhood and pointed out that Alabama was one of only two states with no law barring custody rights even when the assailant was convicted of first-degree rape. At the center of the debate was Tiffany’s lawyer. Kiessling supports abortion bans even in cases of rape but she is also fighting for laws to protect rape survivors who do not want to share custody with their assailants. As such, she sits at an unusual confluence of arguments over women’s rights and has become a thorn in the side of legislators who have pushed laws that force women to carry their pregnancies to term without considering their impact on rape survivors. For Kiessling, ending all abortions shouldn’t mean rapists can claim shared custody. “There is nobody more vulnerable than a pregnant rape victim, so you’ve got to protect her,” she says.
I have an uneasy suspicion that those who are crafting the anti-abortion messages for the media don’t want to focus any of their anti-abortion messages on adoption because they know that too few of their audience are willing to walk the walk, or to put it another way, to put their money where their mouths are, and willing to even think about adopting a child that has even a slight chance of being a sociopath or having serious physical disabilities.
(above image article) They want to portray a six week old embryo with a cluster of cells which shows some electrical activity as having a beating heart when in fact there is really no actual heart yet developed let alone one with its muscles making it beat. They will always show you fetal pictures that look like tiny babies instead of those of embryos that could be unborn mice (below).
Mouse article..