Posted on 05/12/2013 5:38:23 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Any young woman or teen who gets pregnant out-of-wedlock faces three choices: abort her baby; keep her baby, or release her baby for adoption.
How she decides will impact her and her baby and in many cases it will affect the man who fathered the child as well. Too often, he is left out of the decision process, and just as often the young woman will make her decision without fully exploring the option of adoption.
Studies that compare birth mothers who keep their babies and become single parents with those who release their babies for adoption show that the latter are more likely to complete their education, be employed, and get married; they are less likely to have a repeat out-of-wedlock pregnancy and become divorced in later marriages. Adoption can be a very healthy and life affirming solution for young women with an unplanned pregnancy.
Ramirez notes that both adoption and abortion involve losses, but the loss for a woman in abortion is greater and it is permanent. If she consented to a closed adoption, a mother who places her baby for adoption may wonder where her baby was placed. But the mother who aborts her baby will wonder what her baby would have become if he or she had lived.
Nevertheless, according to Thea Ramirez, for every one woman who decides to release her baby for adoption, there are ten who decide to abort theirs. Every day, says Ramirez, who founded Adoption-Share, there are 3,300 abortions in America, and only 50 private adoptions of infants. Furthermore, in the U.S. although 7.3 million women seek out infertility treatments to achieve pregnancy, there are over a million abortions each year.
Too often when a woman starts to consider the option of adoption, she'll hear things like, "Oh, I could never give up my child to someone else" from those around her. Or, says Ramirez, her own physician may share his or her own negative experiences with adoption.
Yet, both the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association encourage their members to provide counseling to women facing an unplanned pregnancy and to give them information on the option of adoption.
Very often a woman in a crisis pregnancy won't visit a physician. And if she goes to an abortion center for a pregnancy test, she's more likely to hear a sales pitch for an abortion "to take care of the problem" than she is to get information about how to put together an adoption plan.
According to Planned Parenthood's latest annual report, abortions were 92 percent of their business in 2011. Adoption referrals accounted for only 0.6 percent. For every one adoption referral, Planned Parenthood performed 145 abortions.
Before Roe v. Wade, due to the stigma of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, women would often leave their community to give birth and then release their baby for adoption. But, says Ramirez, often these placements would be "closed" and the birth mother would have no say in the religious background or any other aspect of the family that her baby was being adopted into. Then, once the baby was placed with the adoptive-family, all possible communication was cut off and she wouldn't receive any further reports on the baby's health and well-being. Such conditions could cause the birth-mother to experience extreme grief and have long-term attachment issues as well as feelings of shame and guilt.
Today, however, the adoption process has been modified substantially to give birth-mothers more say in the selection of adoptive-family. Also, in most states there is a 30 day waiting period during which she can still change her mind about the adoption. If she decides to go ahead with the placement, she is able to receive updates on the wellbeing of her baby, and she receives counseling both before and after the adoption is made final.
In part, because of a lot of misperceptions and myths about the harmful psychological effects of adoption on both the birth mother and the adoptee, Ramirez founded Adoption-Share, a social networking site to bring together those considering placing their babies for adoption with potential adoptive families and licensed adoption agencies and attorneys. The site shares information, endeavors to demystify the adoption process, and can streamline the process for families who already have an approved home-study.
Ultimately, what makes adoption so powerful, says Ramirez, is that "adoption is the poignant illustration of our faith. Jesus said we are the adopted sons of God, sons... meaning we are treated as equals and having full inheritance." She says, "There is nothing more miraculous then witnessing a family being born through adoption." What should a mother do when she is pregnant and unmarried? Choose life-and, if she decides on adoption, she will also be giving that new life to those who may have been praying for just such a precious gift.
-- Dr. Karen Gushta is a writer and researcher for Truth in Action Ministries. She has written and edited a number of books for Truth in Action, including her most recent, How Can America Survive? Others include The War on Children and Freedom From Financial Fear, a book of sermons by the late Dr. D. James Kennedy. (All are available at Christianbook.com). Gushta earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy of Education from Indiana University.
One factor not mentioned in adoption is the birth father. He has constitutional rights. A “crisis” pregnancy may involve a horrible, sometimes fear based relationship with the father or no relationship at all. In the process of placing the baby for adoption, the mother may fear that he will step in and get custody.
It really HAS worked well for all time.
(various and sundry reports and statistics in 3 .. 2 .. 1 ..... )
(( both God and I shall ignore aforementioned and expected stats .. ))
How she decides will impact her and her baby and in many cases it will affect the man who fathered the child as well. Too often, he is left out of the decision process, and just as often the young woman will make her decision without fully exploring the option of adoption.
This article leaves out the impact on the family of the mother and the father.
My step daughter who lives with me was a teen mother. She was sixteen when she had her son. She decided to have and the keep baby. In my estimation this was a purely selfish decision. I tried to pursued her to give up the child but was fought by my wife in the matter.
She of course has no job at the time and no money. Consequently the financial burden of the child fell on my wife and me.
In the time to follow the birth my step daughter has gradually spent less and less time with her son. He spends about 4 days a week with his father who farms out most of the care of the boy to his aunt who is a substance abuser. The other three days she has the boy she dumps him on her mother and I.
The boy is three and ½ years old and is not potty trained. He gets very little encouragement in that department when he is at his father’s. He typically show’s up at our house with a sore bottom.
My step daughter is the most self centered person I have ever met and should never have been a mother. I knew from the time I was told she was pregnant that things would turn out as they have.
As I see the future it will be my wife and I (the grand parents) raising this boy. This is a common trend today that the article ignores.
I don't know how "constitutional" his rights are, but one of numerous reasons why women choose abortion is because they don't want to be permanently associated with their babies' fathers.
A woman is told that she alone has the right to destroy her baby, but if she keeps it, there's no guarantee she won't lose custody to the father, or have to permit him to visit, or even pay him child support. Once she (and perhaps her advising friends and family) realize that the only way to avoid making "him" a permanent presence in their lives is to abort, they find killing convenient.
As to adoption, I’d think twice about adopting if I knew the law was going to leave the birth mother (and quite likely the biological father) some residual “rights” to the child.
Not to mention social services and the adoption agency. These days it’s hard to adopt a puppy, never mind a baby, and it’s often so conditional you can never be confident of your status or your rights.
The law is making a frankenstein monster of the traditional family, and it isn’t just the law legalizing abortion.
Gosh, Pontiac.. I feel so sorry for your grandson. No true consistency in his life, is there? He is with this parent, then an Aunt (with substance abuse), then back and forth. I probably shouldn’t write this but IMHO... the best decision would have been to have the child adopted by a loving couple. In open adoptions, your step-daughter could have made it part of the agreement to get letters/pictures/etc.. As it stands now... the best for this little boy would be if you two were granted full custody/guardianship (I just fear the Aunt and her drugs and the impact it will have on the little one). Prayers for him...
Or she is afraid that he will deny the adoption without taking the baby, leaving her with the child she doesn’t want.
“As to adoption, I’d think twice about adopting if I knew the law was going to leave the birth mother some residual “rights”....”
That is why it was and is common for couples to foreign adopt. In our group, everyone did their research. They looked into open adoptions and felt that they wanted a child to be 100% theirs. For example, some of the contracts stipulate that the birth mother get visitation or two weeks during the summer. Also, everyone was fully aware that if the paperwork didn’t have every t crossed and i dotted... that social services could show up at the doorstep. Your two year old, four year old... any age.. could be taken “back”. Foreign countries made it darn clear that once you signed for this child, he or she was yours for life.
Thank your for your prayers.
Unfortunately my wife and I both work full time jobs to pay the bills. My wife works nights and I rotate shifts; both of us on 12 hour days, so raising a very active boy at this point is beyond our abilities.
Also raising teenage when I will be in my 70’s is not terribly appealing.
Whatever happened to, "Marry the father?" Crazy as it sounds, I've known a lot of good marriages and good families that began with a missed period.
Don't young men have it in them to "man-up" and become husbands and fathers anymore?
My daughter returned from her second deployment to Afghanistan, six months pregnant, 38 years old and unmarried. She could have aborted the child in Afg, but chose to carry her to term. I flew up to be with her (her mother had died almost ten years earlier). She did some serious scouting for appropriate adoptive parents. She and I took the day-old infant girl to them. It was the right decision for my daughter. She has an “open adoption” where in she can occasionally visit her (she is breath-takingly beautiful little girl); they live several hundred miles apart. A child was adopted by a successful family, and my daughter could carry on with her career, knowing that her daughter couldn’t be in better hands. I think the father, a contractor, contributed to some of the pre-natal medical costs.
In my world he cannot deny the adoption without taking on the full responsibility. He has the right to be involved with the child if he wants to be. He has the right to due process.
Oh, it’s very constitutional. The birth father’s rights are often ignored but in my state the court will appoint a lawyer to represent him even if the mother claims not to know who he is. That lawyer is supposed to seek out the father. If he cannot be found, then constructive notice must be given. It is probably one of the reasons for abortion but its a tangled knot that I’m sure we all agree, cannot simply be cut without horrible consequences.
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