Adoption is a reproductive choice

When economically-strapped families abandoned their babies as foundlings, at least they had a choice. 

When women stopped giving birth at home, they moved into a system that made their choices for them.  A recent yahoo! news story describes how women around the world, still bleary from industrial-strength anesthetics, unwittingly signed over their illegitimate babies for adoption as late as 1987. 

In Spain, an 80-year-old nun, Sister Maria Gómez, became the first person accused of baby snatching in a scandal over the trafficking of 1,500 newborns in Spanish hospitals over four decades until the 1980s.

Did adoptive parents choose babies with health problems?  

Until midcentury, eugenics proponents did their best to forestall this issue.

After then, the answer depended on the adoptive family.

(A)t midcentury, when social workers were still reluctant to place less-than-perfect children, many ordinary families expressed both willingness and desire to raise many different kinds of children as their own….Well-educated adopters were particularly interested in identifying children who could take advantage of a college education.

How many of these babies were from out-groups such as Native Americans?  And where did those children go? 

Eighty-five percent of the Native children removed from their families from 1941 to 1967 were placed innon-Indian homes or institutions, said the Association on American IndianAffairs report. The aim, said White Hawk, was assimilation and extinction of the tribes as entities, as their younger generations were removed, year after year... 

Did biological parents choose to extinguish their own culture?

Kudos to the families who adopted special-needs children.  Even the families who adopted Native children may have thought they were doing good.  Still, the decision about whether to put the children into the system at all belonged to the parents, especially mothers, and the news story makes it clear that those women were deprived of their choice.

I hope we can all agree that adoption is loving response to an unintended pregnancy, and yet the choice to put the baby up for adoption belongs strictly to the biological mother.