I ran across this cartoon recently that I both agreed with and made me mad. The first panel had a guy asking a group of people, “Who is against abortion?” and the people are enthusiastically raising their hands. In the next panel he asks, “Who wants to adopt?” and the same people are looking shamefaced at the ground. I HAVE SOME FEELINGS ABOUT THIS.
First of all, if you are against abortion, it only makes sense that you be pro child. That can take many forms and we all have different talents and passions we can utilize in caring for kids and families in crisis. You can support struggling families through the Safe Families program, advocate for kids in court by becoming a CASA, or you can become a foster or adoptive family if a child can’t safely remain in their home short or long term. We have different gifts, different support structures, different resources, and we ALL need to be utilizing them to support kids and families if we’re going to claim to be “pro life.”
But here’s the thing—WE SHOULD NOT ALL ADOPT. This comic makes it sound like the problem in our country is there are not enough people willing to adopt the infants that could be aborted. That is just factually inaccurate. If you’d like to adopt an infant, you can wait literal YEARS to be picked by a birthmother for that privilege. Obviously those dynamics would shift if abortion was illegal and all of those infants instead were adoptable, but that is not likely to happen. Even if abortion was illegal, MANY of those women wouldn’t choose adoption but would instead choose to parent.
I’m also highly opposed to the idea that if you believe life in the womb has value, then you have to be an adoptive parent. Please, just NO. Adoptive parenting can be challenging and you need to be equipped for the task. No one should get into it just because they’re trying to make their lives some sort of public protest against abortion. No kid wants the job of being their parent’s pro life bumper sticker. No one should become a foster or adoptive parent because they feel guilted into it. As much as that comic irritated me, I was glad to see adoptive parents on BOTH sides of the abortion debate were equally frustrated by it. We need to be having conversations in this country about how we help families in crisis, but shaming people into adoption is just not productive and has real life consequences to the children involved.
I know I shouldn’t have read the comments that followed that comic, but I did. It was vitriolic thing after vitriolic thing about the horrible people who want women to give birth, but then don’t care anything about those children. These are just not the pro life people I know.
I’m exhausted by the “pro birth” insult being lobbed at the pro life community. So many of us ARE foster parents. We ARE adoptive parents. We don’t just staff the crisis pregnancy centers, but we are financially supporting agencies that provide help to struggling families. We teach parenting classes to teen moms, we pass out food to those in need, we are the caseworkers arranging services for hurting families and we’re the public school teachers investing in kids from crisis situations and providing them some normalcy. I know someone who has publicly protested against abortion, and while it might be easy for you to accuse him of being “pro birth” I know the reality is that he leaves those protests to go home and care for his foster son.