| |
 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 belives it has a right
to more of just about anything, may have nothing at all that
is actually worth envying apart from cental air conditioning
and those nifty little plastic bags that come with their own
zippers.
Voices
From Exile July 2003 "When Infertility Goes Shopping"Copyright
© 2003 Joss Shawyer
|
|
