As most nations
outside of the United States are aware, adoption North
American style is pretty much a free market, driven by
demand, where ‘anything goes’ for a price. The latest
baby breeding plan to be hatched – excuse the pun – by
pre-adopters is the purchase of eggs from healthy,
supposedly intelligent white women – that is, in the
adoption shopping world, the proof of the mother’s
intelligence is university attendance. Apparently many
women university students are willingly selling off
their unfertilized eggs in exchange for money to assist
them through their studies. If trading one’s own
potential children for money is considered evidence of
intelligence, one wonders why they bother to enroll in
‘higher’ education in the first place. What type of
university actually accepts their enrolments? This is a
worry.
In
response to this publicized egg selling racket, a group
of first mothers, many of whom have devastating, first
hand experience of the damage done to their children
once lost to adoption and now found, have suggested that
this process of baby farming will soon be streamlined to
make it more efficient and also more affordable for
women to buy and sell each others fertility. They
consider infertility has become sort of like the
commodity market, where people can buy and sell things
that do not actually exist, like next years coffee or
tea crop.
Suggestions
to further facilitate the free market approach included
the idea of fertility sections in supermarkets, where
pre-adopters can pick and choose their embryos. If you
think adoption is sane, this makes sense. It would make
the purchase of others people’s gene pool more
accessible, more fair. Everyone would be able to
purchase potential babies off the shelf. It would be
affordable, very democratic. There would be no controls
which would give all ‘waiting families’ a pretty good
crack at someone else’s family tree, a phenomena to
which infertile people believe they have an absolute
right.
Just
to clarify, a ‘waiting family’ is a couple of either
gender – mixed or otherwise – or even a single person
who for reasons of their own infertility or inability to
match egg with sperm, look outside their own bodies for
a source of children. The ‘family’ is apparently the
family they will become once they procure a child or
children with the expert assistance of fertile women. Or
men, as the case may be. The ‘waiting’ sounds passive
but actually alludes to the frenetic chase for sperm,
eggs or ready hatched children born, or about to be
born, to some poor woman without the emotional or
financial support to raise her own child. While they
‘wait’ for someone’s else’s egg, sperm or personal
tragedy to provide them with a ‘family’ these infertile
pre-adopters actively seek the source of their fantasy
‘family’. This involves grim chases on internet sites
looking for a brokers who will provide them with the
opportunity to create a child from scratch or assist
them to steal one ready made. They then make the real
mother go away so they can pretend they had her child
themselves. It’s pathetic. It's mad. It should be
outlawed.
There
is so much nuttiness surrounding adoption throughout the
United States and Canada, I think it should be formally
considered a form of mental illness. That the adoption
insanity has been normalized in the way it has, does not
make it sane. Grief literature explains explicitly, the
importance of human beings coming to terms with personal
loss, in this case, their own lack of fertility. Sound
mental health depends upon the ability of individuals to
come to terms with their life experiences and regrets.
No
matter how personally difficult coming to terms with
infertility may be, it is far, far less painful than
losing a child to adoption. Women whose children are
stolen by this legislated social policy never actually
get over it even though all the advertising that
supports the adoption industry, says they must. They are
stripped of their child and then abandoned to an exile
of an emotional wilderness so extremely devastating, it
is hard to find words to describe it. I cannot imagine
that the ‘loss’ of potential children – who are only an
idea – can come anywhere close to the loss of a real
child. One already born, to a real live mother who weeps
and bleeds and is left to deal with the aftermath of a
dead child gone but not actually dead – well – that is
crazy making stuff. That the people who adopt her child
do not give a toss about her once the adoption is
legalized, illustrates just how little emotional depth
they really have. People that shallow don’t actually
feel hurt deeply. In fact, they should try eating less
cheese or stop eating supper altogether before bedtime,
as they may be confusing symptoms of indigestion with
emotional ‘pain’. These things are not the same.
Infertile
people need to face their infertility and get over it.
They need to weep and cry and scream ‘unfair’ and then
dry their eyes and get on with life. They need to face
the fact they are not ‘waiting families’ but just sad
insecure people who need to find outlets for what they
imagine are unfulfilled maternal or paternal feelings
but may actually be something entirely different.
Infertile women need to look outside of other women’s
families to find fulfillment in their own empty lives. I
suspect that most of the trouble over adoption is the
inability of infertile women to find meaningful
direction in their lives apart from the culturally
induced expectation of the supposed happiness that will
come from raising a child – any child. There is no
inherent ‘right’ to other people’s children. It only
exists in the hype of the adoption industry which is a
money making business that feeds off its own
misinformation, or should I say, bullshit.
As
one first mother from the United States commented, “What
is normal? Pretty soon I think having your own child
will be abnormal, so many other ways to make families,
buying, selling, facilitation, buying embryos,
sperm…………..what is normal?…”
What
indeed. The other day I read somewhere that there are an
estimated 50,000 fertilised embyos stored on ice around
the United States, waiting for their parents to decide
the right time for them to be born. If ever. How
terrible. How sad. The nation that has everything, with
a population that believes it has a right to more of
just about anything, may have nothing at all that is
actually worth envying apart from central air
conditioning and those nifty little plastic bags that
come with their own zippers.