She wants those babies to be killed.
Read this quote carefully - all that’s being banned is abortion. Adoption is still allowed - however ZPG doesn’t even consider it among the list of options worth considering, at least not while murdering the baby remains an option.
And thanks, pedescribe!
She’s doing the child a favor by rescuing it from a genetic tieless life. Who would want to live that way?
“All that means is that the government officials there like to be bribed by rich foreigners, it doesn’t mean the babies were stolen. They were adopted out of orphanages, like babies all over the world (such as myself).”
There are stolen babies though and various abuses that have occurred in international adoptions for instance, which is why the Hague convention came into being. The drive to be a parent is extremely powerful and people are times have been willing to do some fairly horrendous things in order to be parents or be complicit in them.
We also have different terms in Australia for voluntary vs involuntary adoption, permanent care is where the child is taken away by the court. While there are clearcut ‘the child would be dead or seriously harmed’ cases, there are others where things can get a bit greyer and unfortunately we’re just having to make the best guess possible based on clinical knowledge, generally after a long period of trying to make things work first admittedly.
That doesnt mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater though (sorry!).
In the next 48 hours or so I’ll be finding out if we’re the one of the 3 options the biological/relinquishing mother has to choose between, so this thread is surprisingly timely.
Otara
I think this cuts right to the heart of the problem in this thread - Excellent post. I see no alternative for the OP but to ignore it.
It’s no wonder agreement cannot be reached here -everybody in this thread is defending parenthood by adoption. Whatever the hell it is that the OP is attacking, it’s something else.
That is true. Our State Department in the U.S. also watches international adoptions and shuts down programs where they suspect there is “baby selling” or “baby stealing” going on.
But there are a lot of cultural factors in an international adoption, and you do it according to the laws and customs of the country you deal with. Some of those countries have a tradition of bribes - which to us may seem horrible, and to them is the way the foreign official gets most of his income.
I also get the feeling ZPG really doesn’t understand how much effort many adoptive parents nowadays put into making sure their children have cultural ties to their birth country. We dragged the kids to Korea school for a year, took them to Korea cultural events, ate in Korean restaurants, cultivated Korean friends, offered Korean camp - until my son put his foot down with “I’m an American kid, stop treating me like I’m different.”
I can’t give my kid his birthmother, no one can do that. And sometimes I suspect I have the most sadness in the triad over that - although I don’t know his birthmother and its possible she grieves more than I do. I can offer him his birth culture. But I can’t make him live it.
(Where is that kid, the corns need to be filed off my feet!)
I am trying to understand the mentality of someone that can raise a child for 18 years and then be prepared to disown them over a title anyone with a working uterus can possess if they forget their birth control.
Can you cite a single person in this thread that has said that? You may know one person who is doing that–that is not typical behavior of adopted parents.
Sure I do. It’s just that because my father had the misfortune to lose his mother at the age of 2, and his only full bio-sibling at the age of 17, and his father at the age of 36, most of those people aren’t tied to me by genetics. My aunts are my dad’s two step-sisters and his half-sister. My cousins are the children of the two step-sisters. My grandma is his second step-mother. The grandpa I lost a couple weeks ago was the man Grandma married when I was 15. Those people would walk through fire for me without ever stopping to think about it, not because they’re obligated to, but because they want to. When it comes to family, genetics means very little, and love means everything.
Chances are if the birth mother doesn’t want the baby, she wanted an abortion and was denied it which should have been corrected long before nine months were up. As for me and my mother, yes even before the age of 5, I didn’t care for her company. She liked loud music and people. I liked it quiet and perferred to read (I was reading at the age of three). As soon as I could walk I would toddle down to my first aunt’s room were it was nice and quiet. Soon enough my little bed got moved in there and that’s where I slept. It was a good arrangement for all. My first aunt had the primary charge of looking after me, but once again it never occurred to me even at the age of three I was suppose to call her mother. She was my aunt.
The thread was started because I wanted to know why one of my soon-to-be ex-clients was doing just that. Go back to page one.
“But there are a lot of cultural factors in an international adoption, and you do it according to the laws and customs of the country you deal with. Some of those countries have a tradition of bribes - which to us may seem horrible, and to them is the way the foreign official gets most of his income.”
Id have to recheck but Im pretty sure that would be technically be a disqualifying factor under the Hague convention. The US has only adopted it fairly recently, but I think there were following it beforehand. There has been talk about the US being a bit uh, looser, with some of its procedures than ideal, he says cringing at how this could go as a thread by saying it.
One reason there is a clear separation between the adopting parents and the overseas countries by having an accredited agency in between is to try and cut down on this sort of thing, as it is a pretty obvious motive for baby farming or preferential treatment to start up. In Australia a single payment is made to ‘DHS’, and they take care of payments from there rather than a ‘this is the latest charge’ setup, theres none of the receipt stuff talked about above as far as I know.
Now I might be being naive here as I havent had direct involvement in this track, and maybe everyone was carefully not talking about it. But Im pretty sure thats the case, you’re not even allowed to go to the country before the adoption has occurred.
Edit: “I am trying to understand the mentality of someone that can raise a child for 18 years and then be prepared to disown them over a title anyone with a working uterus can possess if they forget their birth control.”
Theres almost certainly other factors involved and this is just the symbolic thing they’re drawing a line over rather than the only issue. Its hard to take this claim seriously without a lot more information which would turn it into a clinical discussion rather than a debate.
And SmellMyWort, I do think orphanages are better than fake families. I don’t consider that giving a child a good home.
I know I wouldn’t want to live with people that wanted me to lie about who my parents were.
This isn’t correct either - a large number of people are opposed to abortion on principle, and a large number of people are in favor of it being legal but would not (and do not) get one themselves. So:
A - people who would get abortions (and want it legal)
B - people who wouldn’t but want it legal
C - people who wouldn’t and want it illegal
If A > B + C as you are claiming, then A + B > C would be true (for trivial math reasons), and it would be legal everywhere. But it ain’t. Because C > A + B, which means that C + B (people who wouldn’t get abortions) is clearly > A (people who want abortions and can’t get them).
Strawman, the minute you apply it to adopters in general rather than the desperate messed up lunatic you started the thread about.
There’s a good chance she’s not in her right mind. She apparently believes that people can tell the future.
Well, that’s an interesting observation, but not really on point, since the reference was to murdering a child to save it from a life without genetic ties. It had nothing to do with living with people who demanded that a person lie, it had to do with living versus dying.
I think the members of CUB (Concerned United Birthparents) would disagree with you. You might also check out Joss Shawyer’s Death by Adoption for a real look at what the adoption industry is about.
You are trying to understand the mentality of someone who is ill. That can be a usefl exercise sometimes but it’s a big mistake to attribute it to a larger group of people.
[quote=“Contrapuntal, post:236, topic:525506”]
There’s a good chance she’s not in her right mind. She apparently believes that people can tell the future.=QUOTE]
Perhaps, but her contention that she should be called the child’s mother seems to be supported by many people. My own first inclination was to counsel her that she should be more accepting of reality and not project her own fantasies unto another person. I have a question I have often used with adopters in the past, “Would you rather have this child say, Mrs. or Mam to you with love and respect, or would you have them call you Mother with hate in their eyes?”
And why shouldn’t she be encouraged to take pride in raising an orphan? It’s a very noble and honorable thing far more so than merely stepping up the responsibility of raising a child because your birth control failed. Given the physical conditions of some infants put up for adoption (premies and drug addicted babies), if I was raising them, I would be damn insulted if anyone implied I was the mother who did meth while pregnant and caused the child to have all sorts of heatlh problems.
But no one has endorsed her behavior. So why are you saying they have?