The war on adoption - opposing adoption as a way to fight the pro-life movement - Cover Story

National Review, June 7, 1993 by Marvin Olasky

Why the Rage?

Why does adoption make cultural leftists rage? Three strategic needs of the proabortion mindset underlie the War on Adoption.

Need 1: For abortion to be legal and accepted, the unborn child has to be considered the property of the mother; if the clump of cells must die to make her free, it is a small sacrifice. Key adoption questions, therefore, must concern the mother's psychological liberty and pursuit of happiness, not the life of the child.

Need 2: For female autonomy to be affirmed, the fact that it is better for a child to live in a two-parent family than with a single parent must not be acknowledged. Therefore, the issue of adoption must be portrayed as one of class struggle (poorer birthmother v. middle-class adoptive parents), racial struggle (black v. white), and sexual struggle (liberated v. confined to marriage).

Need 3: Every happy adoptee is a reminder to aborting mothers of the road not taken. Since abortion must become a guilt-free operation if women are to be psychologically as well as physically liberated, this town isn't big enough for both adoption and abortion.

Am I stating these needs and temptations too bluntly?. Look at a book such as Death by Adoption, in which abortion counselor Joss Sawyer writes that she had compared "the traumatic results of adoptions with the comparatively simple remedy of early, safe abortion. In my view, there is no contest. ... Adoption is a violent act, a political act of aggression toward a woman who has supposedly offended the sexual mores by committing the unforgivable act of not suppressing her sexuality." The villains are "women who safely made it into marriage by either successfully suppressing their sexuality, or by not being caught out carrying an unplanned pregnancy to term." Such women "wait greedily with outstretched arms for their prize" - babies to be adopted.

Miss Sawyer also writes about the plight of foreign-born children who come to the United States and "are whisked away in cars to arrive at strange houses full of objects they've never even imagined . . . they are popped into Western - style beds and left alone in dark rooms to sleep. Probably even teddy bears are stuffed into bed with them." The brutes!

The few positive portrayals of adoption that make it past media gatekeepers leave pro-abortion partisans furious. Debbie McKenny, who chairs the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Abortion Rights Action League, said that when she first saw pro-adoption ads paid for by the DeMoss Foundation [see sidebar], "I probably hopped out of the chair and started screaming and pacing. I was very, very angry." Pro-abortionists threatened to take away business from the advertising agency, BBDO, that produced the DeMoss ads, arguing in Advertising Age that the agency had linked itself with "a fringe perspective." Threats led the Lifetime and CNBC cable networks to refuse to accept the paid DeMoss ads.

For every screamer who understands that adoption is a threat to the abortion way of life, there are probably ten fellow-travelers concerned with vague questions of equity, and a hundred "useful idiots."