Abortion is such a hot-button issue that I don't think it will ever be resolved politically in my lifetime. But I fail to see how anyone can attach a negative connotation to any adoption. About 2% of us are adopted so many women have chosen that option through the years. Mona Charen writes:
"It is one of the enduring misconceptions of modern life that birthparents who make adoption plans for their children "don't want them" and that this "rejection" scars the adoptee for life. Social science data refutes this. But even before considering the statistics about adoption, consider the absurdity of characterizing adoption this way in an age of widespread abortion. There are countless women who say, "I could never give up my baby for adoption" but who, strangely, see no impossibility in aborting their unborn babies.
"It is one of the enduring misconceptions of modern life that birthparents who make adoption plans for their children "don't want them" and that this "rejection" scars the adoptee for life. Social science data refutes this. But even before considering the statistics about adoption, consider the absurdity of characterizing adoption this way in an age of widespread abortion. There are countless women who say, "I could never give up my baby for adoption" but who, strangely, see no impossibility in aborting their unborn babies.
Consider 23-year-old Joanne Schieble, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin who became pregnant in 1954. She and the baby's father, a Syrian immigrant named Abdulfattah "John" Jandali
were not married. (They married and divorced later.) Abortion was illegal in most states at the time, though plenty of exceptions were made, and many women got abortions. But Schieble chose to proceed with the pregnancy and
give her son life. Our world would be so much diminished if she had not."
Read her entire column here:
