I’m back home. One of the Bad Cats dumped a cup of Earl Grey into my laptop as I was writing this morning. Hopefully it will dry up. In the meantime, I”m working on slower computer which is hampering my efforts to get my letters out to Nebraska leggies today.
Sabina offers an update on yesterday’s hearing here Apparently our baby dump friends now think that women suffering post-partum depression should be encouraged too dump their kids to avoid killing them. It goes on and on, while, as you will see from Sabina’s report, the social welfare system of the state staggers along into oblivion.
Sabina should be awarded Bastard Maschocist of 2008 for listening to this without throwing a haame through her computer.
http://depression.about.com/cs/babyblue/a/postpartumdep.htm
Wow, women who suffer ppd should surrender, huh? Wow, what a windfall that would be for the industry since, according to About.com 40-60% of new mothers suffer from it. And, the adopters have coined a new wrinkle on it, and are calling it Post Adoption Syndrome, and claiming that it is “just the same” emotionally and equally as debilitating. So, maybe they need to surrender the babies they just adopted, to avoid abusing them, too. Wow! We can recycle babies all over the place. In some states like Illinois, if they wait until the babies are a year old, the adopters then can get adoption welfare, and then there isn’t so much to be depressed about. Man, a whole new source of adoptable infants opening up. Foreign adoptions are down 12% this year as the foreign sources dry up from the excesses of the salivating PAPs. So, in order to stay alive, the industry has to find new sources somehow. How very creative of them to designate one state to be it. Very energy efficient, too.
God, this all makes me so disgusted! Thanks, Marley, for posting this, and thanks, too, to Sabrina for having the intestinal fortitude to listen to these pompous fucks!!! Is there no reality in the world any longer??? Is everyone crazy?!
“Apparently our baby dump friends now think that women suffering post-partum depression should be encouraged to dump their kids to avoid killing them.”
WHAT?!? That’s ridiculous. So according to the geniuses in Nebraska, women who show signs of PPD should quickly dump their newborns, lest the mother suddenly goes psycho on the baby? What if is only appears to be PPD, but is simply depression from the stress and anxiety of childbirth, and will diminish shortly? Dump first, ask questions later?! PPD happens often and can last a few days or months. Some women need treatment, or it can become a severe mental problem that is harder to treat. (I’ve witnessed it myself; the mother didn’t abuse the children, but she couldn’t cope with daily life, and she turned to vodka and narcotics to “help” her get through the day. She’d have breakdowns now and then, and the police would need to get involved. YES, she refused proper treatment and denied having PPD from the getgo. This case was not “the norm,” though; the mother was bipolar manic and doctors had not known her past because it was during her teens. She did not reveal her BPD during or after pregnancy)
“Many Nebraskans pride themselves on saving dollars, said Sen. Vickie McDonald, one of 16 senators who will not be returning in January.
“The biggest concern is that this is going to cost money,” she said. “So I challenge you to make sure you fund this program so we have services across the state for all our children who are mentally disturbed.”
Nebraskans want things cheap, said Omaha Sen. Don Preister.
“Our children are under siege and largely it’s because we are cheap,” he said.
“We closed mental health facilities to save dollars. Being cheap. Now we are looking at only a three-day (changed to 30 days) safe haven law. Being cheap,” he said.”
This makes my blood boil and feel so sad for those children who have no control over what is going to happen to them. Aaah, Nebraska. Sounds like paradise. (NO) Saving money and being cheap has done a lot of good in this situation. :::sigh:::
I Googled this latest development, and was anyone aware that only THREE hits come up if you pick a quote, like one I copied and used above, to do your search? You get The Fremont Tribune, http://www.babylovechild.org and cornkids.blogspot.com.
It’s no wonder the country is clueless about this. KUDOS to Marley and Sabina for letting more people know about this.
—Suzanne
p.s. Here’s a doozy I found on the front page of the Fremont Tribune.
Neb. court sides with would-be adoptive parents
http://www.fremonttribune.com/articles/2008/11/21/ap-state-ne/d94jdamo1.txt
I am disgusted but not suprised.
How many women are there helping to pass these Safe Haven laws? Do you know? I am sincerely asking. I cannot imagine a legislature composed of, oh, 75% women encouraging women who suffer from PPD to dump their babies.
One more question:
Is it women with post partum DEPRESSION they are encouraging to baby-dump, or women with post partum PSYCHOSIS? (Or both?)
Either is completely assinine, for some of the same reasons but for a couple differing reasons, also.
Good points, Sandy. I hate that “post adoption depression” stuff, that is so bogus as PPD is hormonally related and that just is not happening after an adoption.I remember one article where the woman claimed her PAD was “cured” by hiring a nanny! Guess she did not really want to be that involved in childcare after all. Maybe the fact that she was old enough to be a grandma had something to do with it?
Part of why I could not get it together to get my baby out of foster care was PPD, exacerbated by being deserted by my boyfriend and not being with my child. But they never called it that, just acted like I was hopelessly insane, gave me lots of drugs that did not help, and the shrink I was seeing never even mentioned my child or my real losses.
So my kid ended up with a mother who was long-term mentally disturbed, not for a few months but her whole life. Nice solution, eh?
This so sucks and should not be happening to young mothers today.
20/20 Safe Haven Law Outcry, parts 1 and 2:
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerindex?id=6311664
http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerindex?id=6311687
Not only should it not be happening to young mothers of today, it should never have happened to us Senior Mothers, either. Injustice and eugenics and capitalistic gain from the bartering of children is a national shame…we call it adoption.
Agreed, it should not have happened to us and should not still be happening now.
But my understanding of Eugenics would make adoption it’s opposite, not something a eugenicist would encourage. The viewpoint of eugenics was that heredity is everything and that environment can’t influence or improve someone born with “bad blood”, hence they discouraged adoption in the 19th and early 20th century. The whole “science” of Eugenics was racist and anti-immigrant, as well as declaring unwed mothers and their offspring “feebleminded” and worse…..not the kind of child nice upstanding WASP Americans would want to take into their spotless home!
What gave adoption a big push was another kind of bad science, the “Tabula Rasa” or “Blank Slate” theory of Watson and others in the 1920s, where the pendulum swug all the way to say heredity does not matter at all, environment is everything, so go ahead and adopt that little bastard because your superior environment will make him grow up just like you!
In his eugenics program, Adolph Hitler would take the small children from the Jewish parents he was sending to the camps, if they had any Aryan features and give them to “good Germans” to raise to fit in to the master race. Eugenicists seem to contradict themselves. Yes, they thought infants were like baby ducks that would imprint on whoever fed them and they were wrong. That still doesn’t stop some factions, such as the LDS, for instance, from trying to build a “superior” society using adoption.
Actually Maryanne has part of it, but the American eugenic entanglement is far more complex.
The best book I’ve found to date (that forms an important backgrounder for adoption and repro-autonomy work) is “War Against the Weak” by Edwin Black.
You have to start with things like look at the roles “vital statistics” and birth certificates played in American history, how they came about and whose ends they served.
Many cultures had previously documented births. In the 19th century, church records and family bibles were the primary forms of keeping track of births.
Births, Marriages and Deaths were registered in the UK starting in 1837, but there were no penalties for not registering.
The initial reasons for registration related to taxation, and determination of availability for military service.
Compulsory birth registration began in the UK 1853.
Initially in America, church records and family bibles had been how births were recorded.
“Vital Statistics” in America, on the other hand really got started around 1900. By in large, such was about creating a racial profile of each person, and then utilizing such in the determination of who could and could not marry.
For example in VA, there were essentially two classes, “whites”, who could only marry other “whites”, and everyone else, who could intermarry freely.
There were penalties for not registering, and those registering incorrect information could face jail time, be that the registrar, the parent, or the midwife.
Between 1900 and 1946 the U.S. Census Bureau worked on creating standardized birth certificates.
It is no coincidence that such overlaps with the height of the American eugenic period, (though the US Census Bureau and the eugenicists were by and large completely at odds, one relying on confidentiality of records, the latter relying on gaining access to all such records.)
But what the eugenicists were often unable to get the Census Bureau (in many ways due to a personality conflict) to do, (such as add the names of mothers and fathers to the records of individuals) they were able to add through Vital Statistics and birth records.
I would strongly urge folks to read chapter 9 of War against the Weak, “Mongrelization”, that goes into great detail about how the eugenic origins of so much of the record keeping.
Particularly how after failing to gain what they wanted withing the Census Bureau, the early eugenics movement turned to the states, and found in Virginia with it’s registrar of vital statistics Walter Ashby Plecker, a racist more than willing to build model policy.
I could go on and on, but such is beyond the scope of a mere blog comment.
The other key thing to remember is that in America after WWII, eugenicist notions of in group and out group, worthy and unworthy did not just go away.
But rather than basing such upon purely physical attributes, (as the world now had an example they could point at in Germany of what happens when such is followed to it’s “logical” conclusions) in groups and out groups began to be determined more based upon behavioural attributes.
Thus womyn became divided between those “deserving” of being mothers and those “not deserving” of their own children.
While this still plays out along ‘racial’ lines (see Rickie Solinger’s “wake up little susie” for a vital backgrounder) in other ways it played out according to other criteria (behavioral, for example, such as married status or lack there of) for what was and was not considered “Desirable” for classes of womyn (by which I don’t mean economic classes, so much as groups of womyn.)
American Eugenics are still absolutely central to the way pregnancy and lack there of, support for such and lack thereof does and doesn’t play out in this and other countries (particularly based upon American reproductive foreign policy.)
But yes, often completely blended with that tabla rasa-ism.
In short, Americans have taken ‘whatever works’ from both; the eugenic notions of “fixed” attributes, and the evangelical “rescue” notion tangled with both American self reinvention-ism and “nuture not nature” and created a distinctly American hybrid.
I think my last response got lost in Marley’s Computer Labrynth of Hell…LOL. But BLC said part of what I was going to say.
The American way of adoption and eugenics still has a lot to do with children being raised by “the right kind of people” in order to improve the general population. One concept kind of spills over into the other.
The LDS church is practicing this kind of eugenic/tabula rasa thinking, for instance. Unfortunately, adoption advocates still see infants as malleable with no inborn traits.
And Hitler, ever on the lookout for ways to manipulate, would take light-haired Jewish children and give them to “good German” families to raise as part of his eugenics program.
Thanks BLC and Robin, for further information.
However, Robin, Hitler’s Lebensborn program to breed pure Aryan children and distribute them to “good” Nazi families did not involve Jewish children, no matter how fair, as their Jewish blood made them inferior and deserving of death by Nazi standards. The Holocaust was not about looks or religious belief but about blood…if you had a Jewish grandparent, were fair,blue-eyed and a practicing Christian, you were still fodder for the death camps if the Nazis found out you had “Jewish Blood.”
Rather these were the children of Nazi soldiers and women in occupied countries of Northern Europe. It was Nazi Eugenics but it did not include Jews.
From Wikiepedia:Lebensborn (Fount of Life, in Old German) was a Nazi organization set up by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, which provided maternity homes and financial assistance to the wives of SS members and to unmarried mothers, and which also ran orphanages and relocation programmes for children. Initially set up in Germany in 1935, Lebensborn expanded into occupied countries in western and northern Europe during the Second World War. In line with the racial and eugenic policies of Nazi Germany, the Lebensborn programme was restricted to individuals who were deemed to be “biologically fit” and “racially pure” “Aryans”, and to SS members. In occupied countries, thousands of women facing social ostracism because they were in relationships with German soldiers and had become pregnant, had few alternatives other than applying for help with Lebensborn.”
There are groups for these Lebensborn adoptees and those raised by their mothers who now searching, more than 60 years later.
We must have read different accounts, Maryann. I know that Hitler’s program was that of breeding the “perfect” Aryan race, but Weisenthal talks about the seizure of “fair-haired, Jewish children” by Hitler’s minions to be raised by German families. This, according to what I read, was based on what you spoke of..the “Tabula Rasa” concept that they could take these children and mold them. It was an experiment.
I’ll have to re-read Weisenthal’s account.
And I also still contend that, especially in the church-based adoption programs, eugenics of a sort (molding children into the “right kind of people re; the tenets of said religion) is involved.
In any event, the point is that baby-dumping at so-called “safe havens” is bogus. It boggles the mind to think of the effort that this nation will go to in order to play God with families.
Robin,
Where did you get the information from Simon Weisenthal that you mention? I could find no information saying that children known to be Jewish were part of the Lebensborn program. Perhaps some were snuck in to save their lives, but their real heritage would have to be hidden, and this would have been very very rare if it happened at all.
I did find information saying that Polish Slavic non-Jewish children who looked Aryan were kidnapped and made part of this program, but that is a different thing.
Some Jewish children who were blond and fair were saved by being taken in by good people who pretended they were Polish or German or some other nationality and Christian, but that is a very different thing. Also, many Jewish children were smuggled out of Nazi occupied areas and sent to England with phony ID as Christians of “Aryan” descent. This was done to save their lives.
As the mother of blonde blue-eyed, half-Jewish children who certainly would have been fair game for Hitler had we lived there and then, I don’t like to see history misrepresented. Maybe it is a small distinction to you, but not to me.
If the mother is Jewish the kids are Jewish.
Doesn’t matter the hair or eye color only if the mother is Jewish.
Yes, by Orthodox Jewish law if the mother is Jewish the kids are too. If she is not (I’m not) they are not Jewish even if their father is.
Hitler did not care which parent or grandparent was Jewish, as his murderous prejudice had to do with blood lines from either side, so if your father was Jewish and your mother Christian you were still a target of the Nazis.