I did not intend to write as much as I have about abortion in this month of National Adoption Awareness but the subject just keeps getting in the way.
Abortion is the wild card that pops up in even the best laid plans of reformists and activists. In some weird fit of cognitive dissonance, anti-aborts claim that the fetus shares the same rights as the already born, but reject the notion that if this sacradotaled fetus is brought to term, born and adopted that it should be treated equal under law once it is secularized. In other words, once the word becomes flesh, it’s on its own.
Adoption and abortion, of course, have little in common, though the increasingly Gospelized adoption industry and the anti-abortion corpos make a seamless fit. Together they present adoption as a happy win-win-win solution for the principals involved, when they are actually manipulating, propagandizing, redeeming and reconstructing these principals for the higher purpose of political pimping.
It’s bad enough as is, but during National Adoption Awareness Month (NAAM), we get a booster shot of happy-dappy juice from the evil twins.
STUDENTS FOR LIFE
Just as NAAM was gearing up, I received a tweet from Students for Life which led me to the group’s “Adoption, Another Option” webpage.
Students for Life has been around since the mid-1970s under different names, but became a centralized, brick and mortar organization in 2006 when it located in Arlington, Virginia, hired a professional staff, and started it’s “historic Pro-Life Field Program.” According to its website:
Since 2006, Students for Life has helped start over 350 new student pro-life organizations and trained hundreds of previously existing student pro-life groups. Since 2006, the organization has trained over 7,000 pro-lifers at its national conference, weekend training seminars, and one-on-one campus training.
Students for Life is not a student organization, no matter what it says.The president of the Students for Life board is Leonard Leo, the Executive VP of the Federalist Society. Executive Director Kristan Hawkins worked for the 2004 Bush/Cheney Re-election Campaign and served as a Bush appointee to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Assistant Director, Tina Whittingthom, came to Students for Life from Rock for Life (see below). Her husband is Rock for Life director, Erik Whittington, Go to these links for more information on the board and staff.
Students for Life posts glowing endorsements from numerous rightest and domionist organizations and individuals, including some on record as opposing obc access for adoptees: Phyllis Schafly, founder of the Eagle Forum, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, and Mary Cunningham Agee, founder of the Nurturing Network, former VP of the NCFA board, and almost (after Bill Pierce’s first retirement from NCFA) CEO and president of the National Council for Adoption.
Students for Life, not surprisingly, argues with very little wiggle room that an unplanned college-aged pregnancy (their demographic target) can lead only two ways: abortion or adoption. Keeping a kid gets little traction with these folks. They consider the adopted class, lucky indeed to have not been sucked scrapped and drained down the sink.
Pro-lifers should rejoice with a person who has been adopted…that person’s very life may have been saved because of adoption!
Students for Life also portrays us as emotional hard asses: (my bold)
Adoptees are some of the strongest people in the world. They not only have to push through the emotional struggle of not knowing their birth parents, but they sometimes look so different from their family that they must overcome the idea that complete strangers know that they came into their family through adoption.
But wait a minute! Adoptees are forced “to push through the emotional struggle of not knowing their birth parents” because some of Students for Life’s biggest supporters don’t think we have a right to know those birth parents and will stop at nothing, including calling adopted people “baby killers” and “homewreckers” to keep our records impounded and sealed. Please explain yourself, Students for Life!
Students for Life also commiserates with adopters who fall under the scrutiny of nosy strangers:
Looks of confusion when the skin of their child is a bit darker than their own, a blondie found among a family of red heads, or a nose that doesn’t quite look like Mom or Dad’s.
To celebrate NAAM, Students for Life suggests several soft tactics to use on college girls who get themselves in trouble. These fun activities include sidewalk chalking, promoting adoption songs (Mary Gauthier need not apply), and showing adoption movies such as ( hold on!) NCFA favorites Bella, Juno and the classic Penny Serenade.
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| Adoptee Nina shortly before losing her bedroom |
Longtime readers of Bastardette may remember my assessment of the latter film–one of the scariest adoption movies ever made, and nary a head chopped off by a bitter bastard. After Dear Viewers invest themselves emotionally in 8 years of adoption drama with Irene Dunn, Cary Grant (in a stellar performance) and the wonderful Edgar Buchanan as Applejack (an old adoptee), and a happy ending is finally on the horizon, Adoptee Nina is struck down by that mysterious illness of which movie children are prone. Six weeks later, after considering divorce, we find Mom and Dad painting over Nina’s room, stripped of all her belongings, to make room for a replacement an older boy–what they really wanted all along anyway. (Newborn adoption wasn’t so popular back then). This film would have really messed with my mind if I’d see it when I was Nina’s age. No doubt the same people who gripe and whine about Anne of Green Gables love this film.
You can also flyer your campus with incorrect information about “celebrity adoptees.” downloaded from the Students for Life site. For instance, What do Willie Nelson and Eleanor Roosevelt have in common?” (Love the High Times graphic!) Maybe Willie and Eleanor smoked it up at Val-Kill? No, that’s not what they have in common! The “correct” answer is supposed to be “they’re adopted” But they’re not. adopted. Both were reared by grandparents. BTW, Eleanor had a kept bastard half brother.
You can see the flyer catalogue here. . If you’re going to pimp, do it right. I’ll probably write more about purposeful celebrity adoptee mis- disinformation later this month..
FEMINISTS FOR LIFE
Feminist for Life, dusts off an old issue of its American Feminist: (Fall-Winter, 2003-2004)– its Rewarding Motherhood “family album” issue– on the joys of motherhood.
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Relinquished moms discuss satisfaction with open adoption; married moms, some with large families, write of the rewards of rearing 9 children; adopters speak of their struggle and good fortune in acquiring some courageous woman’s child; and adoptees thank their heroic mothers for giving them life. The curious thing about this is that with the exception or one woman, seeking an abortion or actually having one, never seriously crossed the minds of the writers. The exception: an abortion due to pregnancy complications.
Celebrity Feminists for Life front woman, actress Patty Heaton tells us “women who experience an unplanned pregnancy also deserve unplanned joy.” She challenges her readers to “take up the challenge of sacrificing for these women, too.”
I didn’t find any mention of sacrificing something to keep women and newborns out of the adoption system, though at least one teenage writer actually manged to do it.
ROCK FOR LIFE
Rock for Life is a “project” of the American Life League, an amicus in Doe v Sundquist. I have written about ALL and its founder Judie Brown here , here., here, and here with a couple more marginal mentions elsewhere. Judie is one of those Grundys haunting the American landscape, that can’t stand the thought that somebody somewhere is having sex for non-procreative purposes. D W Griffith would have had fun with her. Brown was particularly aggrieved when Planned Parenthood International sent a shipment of condoms to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
Rock for Life’s mission, according to its webpage, is “promoting human rights for all people, born and preborn, by engaging the culture through music, education and action.” Their page includes an endless list of “pro-life bands” that, with the exception of Skillet, no one has ever heard of unless they listen to Radio U. Maybe.
The folks at Rock for Life are so convinced that adoption saves lives, though no one says how they know this, that it offers this attractive lime green Adoption Saves Lives hoodie for only $35.00.
Rock for Life, in fact, has a busy t-shirt ministry.
Gloming on Steve Jobs death, Rock for Life director Erik Whittington profers his opinion:
What if Steve Jobs was conceived today? Since his parents weren’t married and both attending college there is a much higher chance he would have been aborted. Could his mother of withstood the pressure from her friends, her classmates and her family members to abort? Would she of withstood the pressure of a Planned Parenthood abortion salesperson telling her pregnancy is just a blob of tissue & abortion is harmless? Many college mothers these days choose abortion over life for their child. The abortion rate for college aged mothers is astronomical. I would easily bet my iPhone4 that if Steve Jobs would have been conceived today he most likely would have been aborted…
…Adoption is powerful! Without the willingness of his mother to place her son in an adoptive home AND for Steve’s adoptive parents to take him as one of their own who knows how the world would be today. Would we have Apple, Inc.? What would we do without our Macbooks, iPhones, iPads, iTunes, etc., etc.?
A Rock for Life video features Chris, 15, who breaks my heart with the bill of BS he’s been sold by his adoptive parents who claim his adoption was finalized two weeks before he was scheduled to be aborted! This may be the saddest adoption video I’ve ever seen.We’re here for you Chris!
For some reason, many adoption reformists show little interest in getting to know the enemy. .I was surprised no long ago when someone tried to tell me that the abortion v adoption issue was dead. I can’t remember who said it, but she must have been a liberal. Abortion v adoption is very much alive, and any adoptee rights activist–no matter what his/her beliefs are about abortion (some oppose it) had better know the territory in to which they are walking. God may not make mistakes, but it’s up to people like Students for life, Patty Heaton, and Rock for Life to make sure the babies from the wrong tummies end up in the right families. If you think any different, then you’re just a whiner…or worse.
It is absurd, of course, that in the second decade of the 21st century Class Bastard has to spend valuable time debunking adoption myths and defending our right to our own birth records. Tonight, for instance, I’m engaged in a “discussion” on the Conservative News Network cite regarding records access I’ve been told off. but good! hrumpf! The restoration of adoptee rights is a “justification for killing babies.”
I remember when Pat Robertson pulled that one 15 years ago when Sundquist was running in Tennessee. It didn’t get him very far.
This is from a paper I presented at the American Adoption Congress annual meeting in 1997 and again at the Bastard Nation conference in 2002. I thought about paraphrasing it, but I think it needs to be quoted in full:
In the July 2, 1996 edition of The 700 Club, Jay Sekulow, playing to Robertson’s bumpkin straight man, contended that the abortion rate would rise in relation to the rate of adoption records made available to adoptees. He even espoused a modified version of the American Life League’s abortion conspiracy theory–that, is pro-abortion organizations were going stealth or setting up front groups to push their agendas. Thus, adoptee rights activists and organizations were simply ungrateful bastards with no legitimate beefs and were either knowing agents of abortion or dupes.
The following conversation is taken from the official transcript of that show published at the time on the 700 Club’s home page, since erased. Sekulow certainly knew the difference between open records and open adoption, but I have no idea if he made a slip of the tongue, intended to smear openness in adoption in general–or if, in fact if he was implying weirdly that open adoption causes abortion. There is no doubt, though that he was referring to records access.
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| Jay Sekulow |
SEKULOW: …The significance is that we expect that those who are in favor of abortion, those in the legislature that are pro-abortion, those that are trying to get this whole abortion agenda through, were looking at the Tennessee case and say “Gee, we should do this everywhere because they picked a great name, open adoption, but…
ROBERTSON: Do you really think that they had in view more abortions and less adoption Do you really feel that?
SEKULOW: Pat, they have had to. Can I give you tangible evidence? No, but I can give you the legal evidence. We looked at cases in the Untied States where judges from a Court of Appeals all over the country said, “this type of legislation opening up these records like this is pro-abortion.” Those were the words a court said. There’s a North Carolina Court of Appeals, Louisiana Court of Appeals, Texas Court of Appeals. These same types of bills were being put forward and the courts said, “The legislation is not pro-life. They said the opposite. They said, “This is pro-abortion This will encourage abortions and discourage adoptions.” So they had to know that
Yet nine months later on April 2, 1997 edition of MSNBC’s The Site (no longer online), ACLJ’s Chief lawyer Larry Crane conceded that the ACLJ did not intend to use evidence they had gathered from a New South Wales study which showed that although abortion rates went up the first year open records were in effect, they declined steady after.
We’re not relying on statistical evidence for our case, and we are not required to do to.
That’s because there is none. Not that it makes any difference to the “for Life”(trademark) crowd who simply consider adopteess, ponceout of the womb, as another step to tramp on as they ascend their stairway to heaven.
If this comes to Columbus will you go see it with me? We’ll pick up Kate and make it a party!
http://octoberbabymovie.net
I got to comment. Because I walked into my church last Sunday, I endured five minutes of Orphan Sunday. I walked out and sat in our truck smoking a cigarette because I was so pissed. My boyfriend who adamantly prolife and I who is against both for personal reasons got into it. He always says that God probably gave us someone who could have brought America from the brink. My retort is that we probably put someone away who would have destroyed our world.
What gets me through all this stupid debate is that we forget the women and the children lost in both processes. I remember seeing the cross at Groom, Texas. It is an awesome image but on the side is a memorial dedicated to the children lost to abortion. Where are the women in that? In fact, where are the parents in that image? Why isn’t their pain remembered?
…”who claim his adoption was finalized two weeks before he was scheduled to be aborted!”
Umm, is he dumb enough to believe that he was adopted while still in the womb?
I don’t believe Chris is stupid. He’s at a Rock for Life event which indicates that his adopters are fundamentalist or evangelical and active in the anti-abortion movement. This is all Chris knows. He’s part of a generation of kids who are taught from the cradle that anyone born after Roe is an “abortion survivor.” It’s nuts, but true.
I’ve attended events where this is heavily emphasized: you could have been aborted; therefore you ae an abotion survivor. There are teen and young adult speakers who spefialize in this.
I once saw a video of “re-abortioning” nearly identical to infamous “re-birthing therapy.
In this case, kids are indoctrinated to believe that they are survivors, but their “brothers and sisters” didn’t make it out alive.
Mothers are encouraged/ordered to tell their children if they underwent an abortion; fathers to tell their children if they helped someone get an abortion or were involved in anyway.
The kid is then talkead through being aborted. He rolls around on the floor in pain and agony, screaming, “feeling” the abortion. He not only is i”aborted” himself, but is bonded to “the aborted.”
It’s sick perverse, and dangerous.
Nice one, Marley.