This is a NAAM news story featuring Baby Ellis Burns. He’s 20 months old but was conceived 20 years ago, then stored on ice waiting patiently for a forever family. to find him “when the time was right.” He is what the Adoption Industry likes to calls “a snowflake baby.” A Baby-in-Waiting.
Embryo frozen 20 years ago becomes Louisville couple’s “snowflake baby”
I’ve been familiar with “snowflakes” for 20 years, as long as Baby Ellis, the putative subject* of the news story, existed in the cryobank, so they aren’t anything new to me. I’ve written on the topic occasionally. I’ve never seen, though, so much snowflake weirdness. So much entitlement. So much baby lust. So much sugar compacted into 3 minutes and 24 seconds of video space. Oh, these parents! Oh, that reporter! Oh, poor Baby Ellis!
You should watch the video,. The language is much more explicit and disturbing than the printed text of the story, which I’ve used in this blog rather than taking the time to transcribe.
The gist:
Ellis Burn’s carrier/adoptive mother Emily Burns clearly was intended for motherhood, but God (though, she thankfully doesn’t evoke His name, at least on air) felt otherwise. Let’s face it. Plenty of undeserving folks pop babies out without a thought. Why not deserving me? In Emily’s words:
I’m supposed to be able to do this, this is supposed to be easy…People have children all the time and when it happens to you, you feel like, ‘Why is this my story?
Then, came the miracle of embryo adoption. And motherhood. But….but…
Baby Ellis, then Embryo Ellis, was not adopted, no matter how snowflakes are advertised online, in the media, and pimped all over AdoptionLand as a cure for interfertility and marital unbliss.
“Adoption” is the nice word embryo dealers use to hook in the desperate and childless to convince them, that they are performing a sacred act of saviorisn not unlike anti-abort clinic harassers. The only difference is that embryo adoptions are blatant commercial transactions where a slick amount of money changes hands for product. Clinic screamers only shell out for carfare, sign-making materials, megaphones and loudspeakers, amps, and an occasional bail bill. Bombs optional.
And boy, does saviorhood run deep in Emily’s psyche, saving Embroyo Ellis from an unknown but bleak future in the backwater deep freeze the equivalent of a Dickensian orphanage or Waiting for Godot.
There’s so many times where I’m like, he was frozen suspended in time for twenty years and now he’s just, like, running around our living room,”…He was just sitting there in a freezer waiting for someone to call him their own and now he’s our perfect little child.
Oh, Samuel Beckett! Oh, poor Baby Ellis!
Emily, neatly conflates snowflake implantation with “paper pregnancy” wet-dreaming the fantasy of some adopters:
It’s the only form of adoption where you can carry your adopted baby,”
Oh, Mary Shelly! Oh, poor Baby Ellis!
Fortunately, my adoptive parents, and I bet my birthmother who later became an adoptive mother, didn’t talk like this. In fact, except for the handful of adopter savior and PAP bullies who confront us on Twitter, I don’t know anyone who thinks like this. I’m beginning to see this is as generational and tied to forced birth rhetoric since our own personal harassers seem to consider mandatory birth the highest form of parenthood, something previous generations did not.
I feel really bad for Baby Ellis. The Burnses say they will be transparent with him about his origins. Does this mean he will have a relationship with his much older siblings and his biological parents? I ask this since this has been a huge problem in surrogacy where snowflake adopters cut a deal with bios that will allow something akin to open adoption with regular contact, and then shut it down once the sale is final. Lawsuits have been filed. My bigger concern right now is that by running to the press with their NAAM story, the Burnses have breached Baby Ellis’ privacy and put him out on Front Street. Don’t think that people won’t know and remember this story years from now. Adoptees know how that goes.
Reportedly the Burnses are have taken a second drive into Ellis’s ice cube tray and have thawed out another snowy sibling to join him “sometime after Spring.” How long do you think it will be until we get a public update?
*I say putative since the story is really about the Burns’ infertility issues and how Baby Ellis saved them from “the dark time.” Adoptees, as always, are saviors of their saviors. It’s part of our aesthetic. It’s part of our role.