As an adoptee, I would like to humbly and respectfully point out that all circumstances necessitating the relinquishment of a child to the foster care system are inherently traumatic. Adoption itself is a form of trauma. In some cases — the best cases — adoption is akin to the amputation and cauterization of a limb to preserve life, and even then, you are being forcibly severed from someone to whom you were biologically attached.
I and many other adoptees grew up being reminded that we could have been aborted — not just by peers and family members, but by licensed medical professionals and therapists. Sometimes this was to remind us to be grateful. Sometimes it was to bully or threaten us. In the most harmful cases, it was so professionals who were not adoptees themselves could prove to us that the abuse we were experiencing from our adoptive families and actively seeking help for was not actually abuse and that we somehow had earned whatever poor treatment we were receiving.
Our lives have never been sacred. We have always been used as props for people peddling the sanctity of life and lauding our adopters as saviors.
It’s incredibly infuriating and hurtful to hear adoption being touted as a panacea when it is an incredibly expensive, incredibly complex, and incredibly daunting thing, not just for the adoptees themselves but for the adoptive parents who do care about their children as individuals and understand what they’re taking on. In no way, shape, or form should adoption be presented as a suitable alternative for abortion, a medically necessary lifesaving procedure. It’s not an either-or situation.
I was abused, sexually assaulted, and raped multiple times by my first boyfriend when I was fifteen or sixteen. He knew that I was not on birth control. He had been pushing me for months to talk to my mother about it, but whenever I tried, she would fly into a rage. Unsurprisingly, he kept forcing himself on me until he got me pregnant. When I told him, he threatened to kill me if I didn’t take care of it. I stopped eating lunch at school so I could save up for my half of the abortion cost. Even though he had a car and a driver’s license, he didn’t come with me to the clinic. I ended up having to catch a ride downtown with my friend’s mother. I was not asleep or even lightly sedated for the procedure. It was one of the most painful and traumatic things I have ever experienced. I saw clumps of tissue and blood being suctioned out of my body. I walked to the bus stop alone afterward, harassed by people holding signs with gruesome imagery, herded off the sidewalk and into the street by people screaming that I would go to hell for what I had done, that I was a whore and a slut and deserved to die like the “baby” I had just “murdered”.
I went through some medical complications following the procedure that necessitated an abnormal number of appointments with a gynecologist and eventually I came clean and admitted everything to my mother. I begged her not to tell my father. She promised she wouldn’t, then told him that same night. He told me, “Pack your fucking bags; I don’t keep sluts under my roof.” I didn’t protest, plead, or explain. I packed a bag and set it by the front door. I waited. He was watching ESPN. At the commercial break, he realized I was still standing in the hallway. “You can stay here until you’re eighteen,” he told me, “but don’t expect me to ever trust or respect you again.”
There are some pro-birth people who like to tell me, “I mean, that was a special circumstance, you were young, you had no other choice at the time,” but that’s because you know me, and you think I somehow don’t know what you really think about other people in the exact same situation I was in. Believe me. I know what you say behind closed doors. Here’s what you need to understand, though. I got pregnant because I was being forced to have sex when I wasn’t emotionally or physically ready, but the abortion was something I chose.
I did have a choice. I was lucky and privileged to. I would choose it again.
As an adoptee who has had an abortion, please understand that you are not allowed to speak for me. You’re not allowed to tell people that adoption is the more humane alternative to abortion when adoptees are forced into sexual slavery or made to peddle drugs on the streets or deported from the only home they have ever known. You’re not allowed to tell people that abortion isn’t medically necessary when people die without access to safe, hygienic ones. Most of all, whether you have a uterus or not, you’re not allowed to tell other people who have them what to do with theirs.
The Unapologetic INKDOG 