Society is backward. That impression is more intuitive than concrete, except when examining the modern posture toward parenthood. Then, statistics speak for themselves.
For example, “By a ratio of nearly 50:1, women choose to terminate a pregnancy rather than place that child for adoption.” Researchers Ryan Hanlon and Elizabeth Kirk explain as much in an Institute for Family Studies article titled “Why Most Americans Admire Adoption But Don’t Choose It.” The article supplements Hanlon and Kirk’s recent paper on how adoption figures into pregnancy decision-making and concludes with the prescription that adoption needs to be reframed.
Current messaging places adoption as a “choice of the choiceless,” as one abortion advocate, whom Hanlon and Kirk quote, has put it. That sums up the seeming triumph of abortion over adoption, death over life. However, women reach this preference; a given unexpected mother would rather kill her child than suffer the pain of handing over the child. It’s a split in the common notion that parents should give their lives for their children, rather than the other way around. Chronology is flipped, but so is the value system.
Hanlon and Kirk contest that this need not be so. By their findings, “22% of the women said they considered all their options at once. One-fifth first determined not to get an abortion, and then chose between adoption and parenting; a separate 27% said they never considered abortion. Others only ever considered adoption.”
That’s a good amount of testimony on the part of adoption, if only it were heard. Instead, a primary optical problem with adoption is its closeness to foster care. The two are lumped into one concept, despite differing in both structure and process. Anti-adoption voices often worry about placing a burden of life, so to speak, on the growing child. Hardship is certain after parent-child separation, and the quality of a new home is uncertain.
Somehow, many are persuaded that the opposite burden of death, resultant from abortion, is much less grave. The confusion surely comes down to worldview, but it is not impenetrable to fact. And the facts, Hanlon and Kirk argue, are largely a product of informed consent on the matter.
That is, simple and objective explanations of adoption. Indispensable details, such as open versus closed adoptions and the support resources available, clear up misconceptions that have either backed women into the corner of abortion or made it dishonestly palatable.
IS THE PROLIFERATION OF ABORTION PILLS POISONING THE WATER?
Institutions are in dire need of informed consent independent of the adoption consideration. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement is largely an informed consent endeavor. Transgender activism has emerged as a primary area for revamping the informed consent field, as it has especially corrupted the framework through the sex-reassignment of minors. Likewise, Kennedy and his allies are working closely with the Food and Drug Administration on an equally focal abortion pill-based informed consent system.
Facts alone are the answer to much of the life debate. Of course, even these facts’ starting principles have been obscured for the sake of a different, imagined good, but adoption may not be too far gone.