Abortion and Parenting are Equally Bad: Ken Connor and the Topsy-Turvy World of Adoption and Abortion

Topsy TurvyKen 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-connor

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.

Curtis Young

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:

Life Chain 2008 Columbus 009  2

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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One Reply to “Abortion and Parenting are Equally Bad: Ken Connor and the Topsy-Turvy World of Adoption and Abortion”

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