I think this has the potential to be a great discussion. If these babies are going to be born, we have to deal with the reality of them entering the world.
Those are real and challenging questions and we could use good and thoughtful discussion. Not trying for the gotcha if you don't get what you want in a few hours.
I think the "how are we going to handle these real live babies and their moms?" is a super important issue.
I dunno Joe I found "go to the nudie bar and just wear a condom a little offputting but I guiess thats not worth mentioning. In the principles office again. Sigh.
BUT ANYWAZE....
On the adoption issue. There is an industry just waiting to comodify these babies many/MOST times with little regard for biological mothers. Regardless is not an easy or painless process. Gestation and giving birth is orders or magnitude more dangerous than abortion.
Also too medical bills will be devastating for many. Like lifetime of indebtedness devastating.
https://www.salon.com/2022/05/03/adoption-makes-abortion-unnecessary-claims-the-right-thats-even-worse-than-it-sounds/
In response, in the mid-2000s, some anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers began trying to deploy market research to determine what "subconscious emotional motivators" might make adoption more appealing. Two reports that emerged from that research — one bluntly titled "Birthmother, Good Mother: Her Story of Heroic Redemption" — counseled CPCs to use a common message: that single women who opted to parent their children were being selfish and immature, while choosing adoption was more mature and loving and even, in some cases, a chance for a woman to "prove her character by relinquishing her child."
That sort of rhetoric had real effects. One mother I met was sent to a modern maternity home in Washington state when she got pregnant at 19. There she was told that choosing adoption would both please God and prove that she loved her child more than if she kept him. Isolated from her friends, family and boyfriend, she was instead encouraged to spend time with the couple who wanted to adopt her child. She came to feel like a surrogate rather than a "real" mother, and when she expressed doubts about going through with the plan, she was chastised severely. When she fell into a deep depression after relinquishing her child, the family closed what was originally intended to be an open adoption, and she wasn't allowed to see her son again.
Another woman in North Carolina responded to an ad in the Yellow Pages offering help for unplanned pregnancies, and was quickly placed with a "shepherding family" in another state. When she went into labor, in a town hundreds of miles from her family, no one was there for her except the prospective adoptive parents, the shepherding family and an adoption agency staffer. When she said she didn't think she could go through with the adoption, the shepherding family told her she would be on her own.
"I was never an 'expectant mother,' a 'mom-to-be,' or even 'Carol,'" the woman told me. "I was simply one of the agency's 'birthmothers,' although I hadn't signed a thing. I felt like a breeding dog . . . a walking uterus for the agency."
There are a lot of stories like this, but they're often rendered invisible in a culture where adoption is seen as a unilateral good or a "win-win-win"; where Democrats have long sought to triangulate the abortion morass by offering, somehow, to "make adoption more available"; and where media depictions of birthmothers are often limited to seedy reality-show storylines. In a dynamic where adoptive parents are almost universally wealthier and more powerful than birthparents, even the language we use privileges one side of the story, leaving almost no neutral way to discuss the issue.
These narratives have also played out against the backdrop of a much larger phenomenon, as international adoption rates have plummeted from their peak of around 23,000 in 2004 to just over 1,600 in 2020 (the most recent year for which there is data). This has caused such a constriction in the adoption field — a market contraction, to return to the business metaphor — that numerous agencies and even a large-scale lobbying organization have been forced to close shop.
"The underlying consideration of adoption in the leaked opinion reflects the view that the decline of American infants available for adoption is inherently an adverse trend," says sociologist Gretchen Sisson, author of the forthcoming book "Relinquished: The American Mothers Behind Infant Adoption." Rather, she continues, "this trend reflects that more women are parenting the children to whom they give birth — which would have been the preferences of many 'baby scoop' era birth mothers as well."
In researching more than 600 mothers who relinquished children from adoption, Sisson found that most had done so in the context of extreme poverty or instability. Most reported income of less than $5,000 per year, most were unemployed, and a fifth were homeless at the time they relinquished. Statistics like those cast relinquishment not as a selfless choice, or one parents can easily forget, but rather, as Sisson says, "a reflection of an American failure to not just allow people the dignity of making their own choices about their bodies and lives, but to invest in families at the most basic level."
The reality is, Sisson says, that in general "women are not particularly interested in adoption," but may feel forced to consider it when they cannot access abortion services or when they feel "wholly unsupported" in parenting. "This was true for 'baby scoop' mothers, and it is true of relinquishing mothers today."
This is all necessary context when we hear right-wing Supreme Court justices arguing that adoption — and falling adoption rates — are part of the justification for re-criminalizing abortion. It's also key to understanding, and rebutting, the various responses to Alito's opinion that weaponize adoption to make a point: whether from pro-choicers trying to shame their opponents or anti-abortion advocates hopeful that adoption waitlists may get a little shorter. Neither is reckoning with what it is they're actually calling for.
