[Note: you may need to read this post with a little more care than usual. I always get a little ranty about the three-legged stool of the anti-abortion, pro-adoption, “crisis” pregnancy mindset. —fl]

Kathryn Joyce of RHReality Check has a lovely article about an extra ugly practice: infant traffickers posing as “pro-life” supporters. The immediate subject is a woman, Carol Jordan’s, experience with a South Carolina branch of a “crisis pregnancy” network that’s actually a front for a the largest adoption agency in the country. At the end of her pregnancy — which she’d been coaxed and convinced to carry to term by the “clinic” — the woman started having second thoughts about abandoning the baby she’d carried in her own body for nine months.

The story is heart-wrenching.

“My options were to leave the hospital walking, with no money,” says Jordan. “Or here’s a couple with Pottery Barn furniture. You sacrifice yourself, not knowing it will leave an impact on you and your child for life.”
The next morning, Jordan was rushed through signing relinquishment papers by a busy, on-duty nurse serving as notary public. As soon as she’d signed, the couple left with the baby, and Jordan was taken home without being discharged. The shepherding family was celebrating and asked why Jordan wouldn’t stop crying. Five days later, she used her last $50 to buy a Greyhound ticket to Greenville, where she struggled for weeks to reach a Bethany post-adoption counselor as her milk came in and she rapidly lost more than fifty pounds in her grief.

When Jordan called Bethany’s statewide headquarters one night, her shepherding mother answered, responding coldly to Jordan’s lament. “You’re the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock,” she told Jordan. “You have no right to grieve for this baby.”

Read the quotes in context here.

I know it sounds quirky that I’d support abortion “on demand” but not adoption on demand. The problem, though, that “on demand” means really, really different things depending on how it’s used. In one instance it’s an expectation that an individual can have a medical procedure she decides best suits her needs. In the other instance it’s an economic term for the other side of a transaction wherein the “supply” is coaxed out of human beings by intermediary vendors.

—-

Aside: Yes, there really, genuinely, totally, and completely are people who shouldn’t be parents. And sometimes they (half of them anyway) can get pregnant anyway. And sometimes parents die and leave their children orphaned. And when those things happen it’s really, really good that other people are willing to take those infants and children into their homes and their lives. So that part I’m not so dour about. At all.

—-

What I am dour about… in fact what I’m downright rock-ribbed morally conservative about, though, is the idea that since there’s actually not anything wrong with having sex, there’s nothing wrong with becoming pregnant when you have sex. Problematic maybe, and sometimes problematic in the extreme, but not wrong. And since there’s nothing wrong with becoming pregnant, there’s nothing wrong with choosing not to carry it to term. Nor is there anything wrong with choosing instead to have a baby. Again, problematic maybe, but not wrong.

I mention this in large part because virtually 100% of lore, tradition, convention, and law hold that except for very narrow circumstances it is, indeed, wrong to be pregnant and especially wrong to have children outside those circumstances. (Almost as wrong, incidentally, as it is to decide not to be pregnant.)

Which is where “crisis pregnancy” centers… and the very idea of “crisis pregnancies” comes in. Or, more accurately, come cashing in.

If it’s wrong to be pregnant and, oh, say, single, or young, or of a locally unfashionable race, class, ethnicity, or orientation and “oh by the way,” it’s also wrong to terminate one’s pregnancy then the answer would be…? Adoption? Right in one!

And look who’s there to help! “Crisis pregnancy” centers. Fronting for adoption agencies. Who, gee, for some reason never get around to, oh, say, helping pregnant women who want to keep their babies keep their babies! Helping them, maybe, navigate social services, mediate with the prospective mother’s partner(s) and family, locate child-friendly communities and employers and schools and places to live and even other more supportive potential partners or co-parents. And who never, absolutely ever, lobby or agitate or donate or organize for social acceptance of “unwed” mothers, or for policies to support them, or for programs to assist them.

Instead they’re invested, up to their scrawny, ugly, viscous, baby-trafficking necks in perpetuating the notion that “You’re the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock. You have no right to grieve for this baby.” They’re invested… or otherwise directly financially interested in… the whole thousands of years old, straight out of the patriarchy, “abortion stops a beating heart” billboarding, “contraception is abortion” propagandizing, slut-shaming, whore-naming, “ruined flower,” “no one will want you now,” poverty-relishing, healthcare-withholding, social-assistance denying, “wages of sin” trumpeting culture of “crisis” which makes a pregnancy a crisis.

Nice little racket they’re running there, eh? Do everything you can to perpetuate a culture of slut-shaming. Then use that culture to a) shame women out of terminating their pregnancies and then b) shame them out of keeping them. Then top it all off by selling the resulting infants to “deserving” couples who’ll give the little sinner’s spawn a “good” home. Pocket the agency fees and image that’s going to get you into heaven when you die too!

#%

—-

This post, by the way, is via Sarah Posner at TAPPED who adds that on top of profiting from “crisis pregnancy” centers the Bethany service organization also somehow gets buckets of Federal Abstinence-Only education funding. Which at the very least seems like an ethical conflict of interest.

At the very least, they should have Abstinence-Only money taken away from them. They should be made to disclose (hey, maybe they way they keep lobbying for abortion service providers to disclose things) that they’re front groups for adoption agencies and that their sole loyalty is to their paying customers, prospective adoptive parents, and that therefore they will say and do whatever it takes to get you to effectively surrogate your pregnancy on someone else’s behalf.

—-

One last thing: do I need to say that at no point in the preceding post have I said I think women should continue unplanned, unwanted pregnancies instead of terminating them? No. At any point have I said I think an unplanned, unwanted, and especially unsupported pregnancy is any more of a walk in the park than a planned, wanted, supported one? No. And have I ever said, anywhere, that it’s not 100% preferable to have policies that support comprehensive sex education and policies favoring safer, more effective, easier to use, more reliable, more affordable, and more available forms of contraception and sufficient agency for both women and their partners to use them? Definitely not. Have I said I believe all children should stay with their families, particularly their mothers. No. And have I said you’re a bad person if you adopted someone? Or were adopted? Or gave up a child for adoption? No, no, and not at all.

On the other hand have I said any of the very real difficulties of pregnancy are compounded by a culture of shame and blame? Yes. Have I said “crisis pregnancy” centers by both name and nature have a vested interest in maintaining and exacerbating the culture of shame and blame? Yes. And that therefore they’re not the solution but a very real part of the problem? I’ve definitely said those things.