Facing a “Crisis Pregnancy”?
Forget about finding helpful resources in the Yellow Pages. The US
currently has 4000 Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPS’s). They are
supported by $60 million in federal abstinence-only and marriage
funds. (These funds are taken from the welfare budget.)
Why not contact these
centers? They have two agendas: 1) They aggressively push women to
“choose life.” How? by telling tall tales about the horrors of
abortion and pressing them to avoid having “death on their hands.”
2) They even more aggressively coerce women to relinquish their
child for adoption.
In fact many of the CPS’s
are actually adoption agencies. Bethany Christian Services, a CPS,
is the national’s largest adoption agency. It has more than 85
offices in 15 countries.
How do CPS’s manage to
persuade moms to “choose life,” but not for themselves? They provide
intensive counseling about the poverty of children born to single
moms. They promise to pay the moms bills for birth, delivery and
housing until delivery. They place them in “shepherding family”
homes isolating them from family and friends.
Then they evangelize moms
to be “selfless” and portray single parenting as a selfish, immature
choice. They exploit women’s insecurities about age, finances,
sexual shame. They show them scrapbooks with letters and photos of
well-off parents who can give the child “so much more.” These
couples pay $14,5000 to $25,500 for a US infant adoption.
When sobbing moms beg to
keep their child, counselers up the pressure. They warn the mom she
will be homeless and lose the baby anyhow. Post adoption counselers
celebrate the successful adoption while a birth mom is now alone to
face leaking breasts, grief and guilt. One mom stated, “I felt like
a walking uterus for the agency.”
Finding enough babies for
wealthy families has only recently become a problem. Between 1945
and 1973 over 1.5 million mostly white moms were routinely forced to
give up their babies for adoption. They faced deadly stigma,
coercion, secret maternity homes, brutal isolation, shaming,
trickery and more. Author Ann Fessler calls that time the “Baby
Scoop Era.”
Both abortion and single
motherhood gained legitimacy by the early seventies. As a result
adoption rates went from 19.2 percent to 1.7 percent in 1995. Thus
arose the need for deceptive CPS adoption rings to funnel babies to
upper classes.
Most maternity homes
identify as “christian”. Agencies like Bethany, Heartbeat
International (1100 CPS’s), CareNet (1160 CPS’s) and Christian Homes
and Family Services reserve their beds only for women who agree to
give up their baby.
Few beds in the nation
exist for women planning to keep their child. Fessler calls it,
“Give away your first-born and we will take care of you for six
months.”
Not only do the feds fund
these deceptive adoption clinics, but DHSS also funds the
National Council for Adoption. They are the largest lobby group
for adoption in the US. They run the Infant Adoption Awareness
Training Program, a DHHS initiative created in 2000. They also
publish the pamphlet, “Birthmother, Goodmother. Her story of Heroic
Reedemption.” It promotes abstinence as one more tactic to produce
more babies for adoption.
With all these organized
efforts to artificially produce more “orphans”, state laws have
become less favorable for birth moms. Watch out for Utah where any
two witnesses can claim a mom agreed to give up her baby—in a park
or hotel room. And forget about a birth dad trying to get custody.
They will need big bucks for lawyers and lots of perseverance.
adapted from The Nation
Fall
2009