We knew this was coming.

As abortion abolitionists continue to try to kill off abortion rights, the National Review calls for forced birthers to RECRUIT ADOPTEES to sell adoption over abortion.

The author of the call, Dan Hart, managing editor for publications at Family Research Council, finds himself in a market panic over where all the new adoptees, created when abortion is criminalized, as he assures us it will be, will go. Using some wanky pre-Roe arithmetic, he estimates that 90,000 newly-minted bastards will have nowhere to go (despite the 2 million people who want to adopt them) when the gong rings down abortion. Hart, suggests that “open adoption: will do the trick much of the time (along with thousands of happy-dappy YouTube videos) but if it doesn’t, who better to sell adoption to shameless and desperate pregos than adoptees, whom he assumes are grateful.

Therefore, Hart has taken it upon himself to suggest a few adoptees qualified to speak for us.

The list of suggested abolitionist adoptees includes singer-grifter Gianna Jessen, who claims to have survived a saline abortion, Her story changes as often as she changes her socks (hopefully). Her adoption story is so fucked up it’s worth a Charlotte Bronte treatment I attended her road show a couple of times. Even those of us with high toleration for BS was tempted to run for the door.

Another potential recruiter is Ryan Bomberger, keeper of the Radiance Foundation, Bomburger is a bi-racial adoptee reared in a multi-racial family of 15 kids. His personal mantra is “adopted and loved.” He is a vocal opponent of Black Lives Matter, (Marxist world view) the NAACP (The National Association for the Abortion of Colored People), and the NFL (National Propaganda League) He compares abortion to Jim Crow and Planned Parenthood to the KKK. Don’t yank his chain on trans folks, Islam, same sex marriage, Coretta Scott King, the DNC, the ACLU, and “fake feminism.

I’ve written about Radiance and its salvational view of adoption several times, My first shot:

Not only must these “babies” be saved from the abortotorium, but family preservation and mother and child relationships and affection aren’t even in the organizational vocabulary. Radiance views abortion at any state of pregnancy as murder. It also assumes that women caught in unplanned and unwanted pregnancies will opt for abortion unless they can be “saved” through adoption.. Thus, any pregnant woman in the “right” circumstances is a potential murderer.

It is not enough then for babies to be “saved.” We need to pray that adoption rates increase. That is,”saved” and “safe” babies, need to be ripped from their mother’s wombs and transported into the aching arms and gated homes.of the Worthy Class while courageous relinquishing mothers bask in the radiance of selflesness.

I once asked Bomberger on Facebook where he stood on adoptee rights. He promptly blocked me from posting though I can still read the Radiance page

The third spokesperson nominated to represent us is Melissa Ohden, someone with whom I was unfamiliar Her tale of abortion survival is so similar to Jessen’s, at least what I read online, that I thought I was reading the same narrative with the names changed to protect the innocent. Ohden claims her adoptive mother told her she survived a saline abortion in 1978. Her birthmother was surprised she was alive when they reunited. She uses a medical record to prove her story, though some who have read the document question the veracity of her story. Ohden describes herself as a ” woman that brings life and restoration to others.” She makes a living telling her story on Fox News, Mike Huckabee, The 700 Club, American Public Radio and running the Abortion Survivor’s Network.

Note: “Abortion survivor” is an ambiguous term thrown around to mean whatever somebody wants it to mean. On the one hand, everybody born post- Roe are survivors since Mom could have gotten a quick and legal vacuum job. On the other hand, people designated as survivors of “botched abortions, ” a term never exactly clarified, hold a Gold Elite AdoptionLand membership card (they always seem to be adopted) as Godly grateful examples of what the rest of us should be

Dan Hart, of course, should be careful about what he asks for.

In 2008 Patrick J. Brannigan, Executive Director of the New Jersey Catholic Conference, aided and abetted by Marlene Lao-Collins, director of CC’s social concerns office issued an alert to “birth parents,” inviting them to contact the Conference office, confidentially, of course, to help create a compendium of anonymous and speculative horror stories for legislators about the ghastly consequences of their very own flesh and blood offspring being treated legally the same as the not-adopted.

Here’s what happened. It’s not pretty.

Some of the letters are archived here. Below are a couple of short excerpts:

I neither want nor need “protection” from my own son, who is a 40-year-old adult and entitled to the same rights as other adult citizens, including access to his original birth certificate.
We never received any counseling and most of us were made to feel ashamed and disgraced. Are you a mother? If so, how would you feel if your baby were taken from you?

That was the end of that little social experiment.

The Lived Experience

Mr. Hart clearly knows nothing about adoption or doesn’t care about how adoption operates (“open adoption” indeed!) nor does he know any adoptees outside of an elect handful of evangelical Benedicts who are convinced that the world would be worse off without their shining grateful faces –or those of their future progeny. He even admits he found Mrs, Odhen online. That’s OK. We don’t want to know him either.

The lived experience of adoptees, is, as usual, ignored, ridiculed, denied. Adoptees are accustomed to others speaking for us. You know–birthparents, adoptive parents, preachers, social workers, reporters, shrinks, bureaucrats, politicians, Irish nuns, spouses, neighbors, lawyers, abortion abolitionists, cops, teachers, celebrities, ad exes, Tweeters, memes, somebody whose cousin’s roommate’s sister-in-law is adopted, your cat—speaking for us. This is the first time, though, I can remember some stranger actually, appointing somebody to speak for us, much less to speak for us against our own best interests,

An adoptee lover sends her love.

Tuesday night Adoption Twitter blew up with forced birthers telling adoptees (1) you have no idea what you are talking about (2) you have the same rights as everybody else, (3) your bad experience is an anomaly (4) move on (5) adoptees with “good experiences” have no reason to criticize (6) adoptees need to find peace, (7) prayers, (8) adoptees represent life, (9) “would you rather have been aborted?” and (10) STFU, baby killers.

Deplorable Sandy Build a Wall & Crime WILL FALL@sandyHuggyYou are blocked from following @sandyHuggy and viewing @sandyHuggy’s Tweets. Learn more. Yes, this avatar and block belong to an adoptee lover.

Canada Open Records co-leader Jill Daviau was told that by discussing her adoption she was “tarnishing adoption” and to “seek help.” For supporting abortion rights I got a #rottinginhell hashtag from a woman who said she “loves adoptees because they have life.”

Since the adoptee lovers found adoptee response to their comments “negative” they quickly blocked us for attempting to “steal their joy.” Before one flounced, though, she posted that I would burn in hell for something she thinks I do to fetuses. Unfortunately, their posts exited with them; otherwise, I would screenshot more of them here.

Propagandizing Adoptees

Someone has written, “family preservation, not abortion, is the opposite of adoption,” but that doesn’t fit into the abortion-or-adoption propaganda generator so it’s kicked out. A few days ago this tweet, erasing adoptees from the scene, appeared in a Lila Rose Live Action discussion:

The Real Choice for unplanned pregnancies. The choice women can live with for the rest of their lives.

Abortion abolitionists, in fact, have done a good job of convincing their constituents and even mass media that untimely pregnancy has only a dyadic solution: abortion or adoption.

But without real live gratefullized adoptees to pander to the public, their propaganda falls flat. After all, how many not-adopted people are expected to be grateful “My mother didn’t abort me?” Forced birthers need a steady stream of the “saved and adopted” to keep their groove going.

The visible and the invisible

Adoptees, then, from the evangelical (Protestant or Catholic) POV, need to be visible as a “saved” class, grateful for the life they claim we would otherwise not experience, yet be invisible regarding our genuine selves, including our genuine and often unpleasant opinions about adoption, What’s more, abolitionists and co-religionist adopters need to be seen as saviors to fulfill their own social and spiritual ambitions. Former Kansas Senator, Governor, and US Attorney General Sam Brownback says that the more children you adopt the easier it is to get into heaven.

Gliding up the stairway to heaven on the backs of adoptees, however, is not the way adoptees see it.

The Internet is jammed with adopted people telling their own stories, demanding recognition of their rights and humanity Thousands of adoptee- and adoptee rights-centric websites, pages, blogs, social media accounts testify that adoptee truth. It’s a big voice, yet, we hear constantly from adoptees that adoptees have no public voice. That’s because, like the tree that falls in the forest, the people who need to hear that voice, aren’t there. They are too busy playing keyboard savior and dreaming about imaginary Baby Bumbles falling from heaven into the wrong tummies, They can’t and don’t want to hear the voice that breaks the myth and derails their trip to the starry upward plain with “child” in hand.

That’s why adoptees who disrupt the discourse are shut down, dismissed, ridiculed, accused, and ignored by abolitionists who want to create more of us, Meanwhile, adoptees like Jessen, Bomberger, and Ohden, who have never once publicly questioned their adoptive status, believe everything adoption authorities and adopters tell them about their “cases,” and have never lifted a finger to support adoptee rights, get the spotlight. They are willing exploiters of themselves and their status so they think they can exploit us, too.

Forced birthers and their cohorts (with some notable exceptions) render us invisible. They are the people who run to the statehouse to kill OBC and records access bills. They are the people who ramrodded Safe Haven laws though and are now some of the people pushing Baby Boxes. They are the people who deny adoption trafficking is real. They are the people who sit silent while international adoptees are deported.

The Baby Scoop Era is still real to them, (in a positive way), and family preservation is as comprehensible to them as Aramaic. They claim unless adoption remains “secret” women will rush to their local “abortatorium” to get rid of their dirty little secrets. At the same time, however, they attempt to re-create a culture and legal apparatus to force shame and stigma on women that could cause some to do run to the back alley, and if some new laws are upheld, to go to prison.

The bastard body is their prize

Across social media abortion abolitionists pimp that bastard body, but simultaneously anonymize it by re-imagining us in a born-again body cut from our roots and records. God’s gifts to worthies saved from certain death by them. Now as “heartbeat” and similar bill pass state legislatures they think they can foo-foo us around like fancydress poster poodles. Unfortunately for them, very few of us, even those who do not support abortion, feel the need to out hop in bed with the chisto supremist adoption industry.

They don’t get it

And that’s the point. This is not about abortion per se, but about an entire class of people– ignored, exploited, used, profiled, infantilized, abused– being dragged into a political battle that isn’t ours, and exploited used, profiled, infantilized, some more. Repeatedly, but informally, adoptees on the internet have told forced birthers to lay off. Leave us alone. Stop using us. We aren’t your prop.

They haven’t.

They don’t get it Not content with dehumanizing us, locking up our records, origins, and histories, and turning us into some weird fetish object, they now expect us to do their dirty work for them. And be happy to do it.

Whether these new abortion restrictions are upheld or not, they are a very real danger to the adoptee rights movement. In nearly every state where adoptee rights bills are introduced abolitionists show up spewing fantasies and horrors of what OBC access–and adoptees attached to them– will bring. The rhetoric has been around for deades and has killed many of our bills. In the current political climate, it will bleed through, even more, Adoptees aren’t going to play this game. We aren’t their prop.

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