As most nations outside of the United States are
aware, adoption North American style is pretty much a free market,
driven by demand, where ‘anything goes’ for a price.
The latest baby breeding plan to be hatched – excuse the
pun – by pre-adopters is the purchase of eggs from healthy,
supposedly intelligent white women – that is, in the adoption
shopping world, the proof of the mother’s intelligence is
university attendance. Apparently many women university students
are willingly selling off their unfertilized eggs in exchange
for money to assist them through their studies. If trading one’s
own potential children for money is considered evidence of intelligence,
one wonders why they bother to enroll in ‘higher’ education
in the first place. What type of university actually accepts their
enrollments? This is a worry.
In response to this publicized egg selling racket,
a group of first mothers, many of whom have devastating, first
hand experience of the damage done to their children once lost
to adoption and now found, have suggested that this process of
baby farming will soon be streamlined to make it more efficient
and also more affordable for women to buy and sell each others'
fertility. They consider infertility has become sort of like the
commodity market, where people can buy and sell things that do
not actually exist, like next years coffee or tea crop.
Suggestions to further facilitate the free market
approach included the idea of fertility sections in supermarkets,
where pre-adopters can pick and choose their embryos. If you think
adoption is sane, this makes sense. It would make the purchase
of others people’s gene pool more accessible, more fair.
Everyone would be able to purchase potential babies off the shelf.
It would be affordable, very democratic. There would be no controls
which would give all ‘waiting families’ a pretty good
crack at someone else’s family tree, a phenomena to which
infertile people believe they have an absolute right.
Just to clarify, a ‘waiting family’ is
a couple of either gender – mixed or otherwise – or
even a single person who for reasons of their own infertility
or inability to match egg with sperm, look outside their own bodies
for a source of children. The ‘family’ is apparently
the family they will become once they procure a child or children
with the expert assistance of fertile women. Or men, as the case
may be. The ‘waiting’ sounds passive but actually alludes
to the frenetic chase for sperm, eggs or ready hatched children
born, or about to be born, to some poor woman without the emotional
or financial support to raise her own child. While they ‘wait’
for someone else’s egg, sperm or personal tragedy to provide
them with a ‘family’ these infertile pre-adopters actively
seek the source of their fantasy ‘family’. This involves
grim chases on internet sites looking for a broker who will provide
them with the opportunity to create a child from scratch or assist
them to steal one ready made. They then make the real mother go
away so they can pretend they had her child themselves. It’s
pathetic. It's mad. It should be outlawed.
There is so much nuttiness surrounding adoption
throughout the United States and Canada, I think it should be
formally considered a form of mental illness. That the adoption
insanity has been normalized in the way it has, does not make
it sane. Grief literature explains explicitly, the importance
of human beings coming to terms with personal loss, in this case,
their own lack of fertility. Sound mental health depends upon
the ability of individuals to come to terms with their life experiences
and regrets. No matter how personally difficult coming to terms
with infertility may be, it is far, far less painful than losing
a child to adoption. Women whose children are stolen by this legislated
social policy never actually get over it even though all the advertising
that supports the adoption industry, says they must. They are
stripped of their child and then abandoned to an exile of an emotional
wilderness so extremely devastating, it is hard to find words
to describe it. I cannot imagine that the ‘loss’ of
potential children – who are only an idea – can come
anywhere close to the loss of a real child. One already born,
to a real live mother who weeps and bleeds and is left to deal
with the aftermath of a dead child gone but not actually dead
– well – that is crazy making stuff. That the people
who adopt her child do not give a toss about her once the adoption
is legalized, illustrates just how little emotional depth they
really have. People that shallow don’t actually feel hurt
deeply. In fact, they should try eating less cheese or stop eating
supper altogether before bedtime, as they may be confusing symptoms
of indigestion with emotional ‘pain’. These things are
not the same.
Infertile people need to face their infertility
and get over it. They need to weep and cry and scream ‘unfair’
and then dry their eyes and get on with life. They need to face
the fact they are not ‘waiting families’ but just sad
insecure people who need to find outlets for what they imagine
are unfulfilled maternal or paternal feelings but may actually
be something entirely different. Infertile women need to look
outside of other women’s families to find fulfillment in
their own empty lives. I suspect that most of the trouble over
adoption is the inability of infertile women to find meaningful
direction in their lives apart from the culturally induced expectation
of the supposed happiness that will come from raising a child
– any child. There is no inherent ‘right’ to other
people’s children. It only exists in the hype of the adoption
industry which is a money making business that feeds off its own
misinformation, or should I say, bullshit.
As one first mother from the United States commented,
“What is normal? Pretty soon I think having your own child
will be abnormal, so many other ways to make families, buying,
selling, facilitation, buying embryos, sperm… What is normal?
What indeed. The other day I read somewhere that
there are an estimated 50,000 fertilised embryos stored on ice
around the United States, waiting for their parents to decide
the right time for them to be born. If ever. How terrible. How
sad. The nation that has everything, with a population that believes
it has a right to more of just about anything, may have nothing
at all that is actually worth envying, apart from central air
conditioning and those nifty little plastic bags that come with
their own zippers.
Copyright © 2003 Joss Shawyer
