Ken Connor ubiquitous abortion hater cum adoption worshiper, made an appearance today in the Christian Post. In his column Abortion and Adoption; Two Choices, Worlds Apart Connor groused over the lack of newborns available for adoption. Unmarried women who don’t place their children in “loving adoptive homes” are short changing themselves and their children. (Fathers aren’t mentioned.)
Connor lectures that adoption is win-win-win without asking bastards or their birthers how they feel about it. Picking up the pillow talk where Richard Land left off, the other day, Connor rhapsodizes on motherhood and mothers, especially the mother who becomes, as some first mother activists say, the “not mother”. The woman who is a mother but not a mother due to act of adoption.,
Ken Conner
Ken and I go back a long way. Not in a personal way, mind, you, but back more than a dozen years when he was president of The Family Research Council. While at FRC,, he and Rev. Curtis Young , who are joined at the hip and who I frequently confuse with one another, published the notorious mind fucking The Missing Piece: Adoption Counseling in Pregnancy Resource Centers [pdf] It seems worse now than it did when it was published in 2000 by FRC and the National Council for Adoption. When Bill Pierce retired from NCFA, NCFA’s attribution was removed. from web and hard copies.
The booklet was intended to serve as an adoption marketing manual to guide recalcitrant “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) to go for the gold. That is, to convince CPCs to walk psychologically push their clients to the adoption mill, through the use of sophisticated yet warm and fuzzy affirmation counseling with sexual, economic, and social guilt– old techniques with new names. I say recalcitrant because much to Young’s (and presumably Connor’s) horror, many CPC staffers or their friends had had unpleasant personal adoption experiences. and they weren’t enthusiastic about spreading the misery.
For a substantial number of grassroots CPC women who wanted to “save babies” but were familiar with the adoption experience, it was OK for unmarried women to keep their newborns. But for organization men heading up a religio-politicized anti-abortion movement, with a larger social agena ,just “saving the baby” wasn’t good enough. Once “saved” the baby had to be re-distributed into the right kind of environment–a 2-parent, preferably “Christian” het home. Connor and Young were (and still are) dumbfounded why women don’t see it that way..
Neitiher Connor nor Curis Like Women Much.
Rev. Curtis Young
In today’s column Connor argues that women whose seek abortions are abandoning their “sacred duty” of motherhood . They are ridding themselves of the fruit of their sin–and embarrassment. Of course, one can say the same about closed and sealed record adoption;
Connor writes:
Abortion is a way in which a woman absolves herself of her new identity as a mother. The abortion “choice” represents a philosophy of self-centeredness in which life is viewed as a zero-sum proposition. “If I have my baby, my sense of self will be diminished. I will not realize my full potential. My child will inhibit me from becoming all I can be. It’s the baby or me, and I choose me.” Deliberate killing, therefore, becomes the final solution for a social problem.
The woman who gives her child up for adoption, though. is shedding her narcissism, and exhibiting generosity and unselfishness–the nonsensical line that adoptees were fed for generations, and didn’t believe for a minute. She loved you so much she gave you away. .
Connor again:
Columbus, OH, Photo by Bastardette
The decision to opt for adoption becomes a win-win-win course of action. The baby wins because her life is preserved and she likely is provided with better options than her biological parents could offer her. The adoptive parents win because they are able to become parents. The biological mom wins because she embraceT
This lines are identical in sentiment to those in Missing Piece: where Young says that women who place children for adoption, exhibit strength of character and spiritual growth–qualities that are emphasized repeatedly in the booklet. They embrace their personal motherhood by extending it to unfortunate women who cannot conceive their own children. In theological terms, the act of relinquishment earns unmarried mothers redemption.
Ironically Young uses the same arguments in Missing Piece to promote adoption that he and Conner use to condemn abortion: Without saying it in so many worlds, Young advocates that arguments for abortion can be used as arguments against parenting and for adoption.
At the end of Missing Peace Young lists several methods of influencing clients toward adoption including a section headed “Emphasize the Difficulty of Parenting.” These emphases include inability or lack of preparation to raise a child, lack of economic resources, the inability to finish education or advance in the workforce:
Counselors must be trained to give women sound reasons that will counter the desire to keep their babies. One example is to reinforce the notion that it takes a strong, mature woman to place a child for adoption. Arguments about financial survival can be
compelling as well.
While Connor and Young argue that women who seek abortions demonstrate “self-centeredness “( bad) they use that same “self-centeredness” (good) to convince them, not only that they will be better off without their children, but that they will feel good about divesting themselves of them for the happiness of strangers.
Connor writes that “the choice to abort and the choice to adopt are not equal, they are worlds apart.”
They are. Women who do not want to be pregnant get abortions.. Women who relinquish either can’t or don’t want to parent. Yet in the confused minds of Connor, Young, and their ilk, abortion and parenting are both inferior and dangerous alternatives to adoption, and unmarried mothers must be talked out of both.
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