Attacks on adoption need to stop before they gain traction

While this was inspired by the abortion debate engulfing our country again, it’s actually about love; more so than I realized when I started writing.

The Supreme Court’s been hearing arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health and the pro-choice crowd is predictably losing it’s collective mind. The same faulty arguments about abortions becoming illegal if Roe falls, misrepresentations of the public’s support for “abortion rights” and falsehoods about pro-life positions only being held by the religious and/or those on the right are being trotted out again. That’s nothing new, but now there’s a new approach that’s incredibly dangerous and needs to be called out before it can gain traction.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is actively pro-life and has two adopted children. This renders the standard (but false) line about how pro-life people only care about babies until birth but not after as moot in her case, so they’ve taken a worse approach to press the attack on her. They’re claiming that people like Barrett (but not people like Buttigieg for some reason) are monsters for advocating for adoption.

The argument: Adoption is hard, painful and leaves people feeling broken with a sense of loss; that it creates a level of human suffering. That is true, but, even though she’s being painted that way, Justice Barrett has never argued that relinquishing custody of a child was simple or painless. She just doesn’t advocate terminating a life as a rational solution to avoiding future pain. Yes, adoption can be traumatic for both mother and child, but that doesn’t justify the narrative that adoption is a problem while abortion is a solution.

It’s actually the natural progression of the “compassionate” pro-abortion argument that an unwanted child is better off being aborted because, if a child isn’t wanted, their life will be hard and not worth living. They use prettier words, but the sentiment is just as harsh, no matter how you say it. Human life is precious, no matter the circumstances of its creation, but this argument creates the false concept that “wantedness” equals worth.

However, even if a standard of being wanted was to be applied, adoption throws that train of thought off the rails. While an unwanted pregnancy can be a source of stress, fear and hardship, adoption allows for adoptive families to become instruments for the better parts of the human condition. These families extend vital elements of love, hope and healing to kids who’ve gone through something that often leaves them with a level of brokenness.

Adoptive parents embrace these kids because they love them. They’re worthy of love, regardless of the circumstances of their conception. They’re worthy of love just because they are. To be clear, relinquishing a child to adoptive parents is also a huge act of love. Carrying a child to term isn’t easy and giving up that child afterward is painful, but those are burdens that love makes worth bearing.

Every adoptee has something in common: They’re alive; they have the opportunity to experience love from those who chose them, hope that grows from being wanted and being shown they have value and healing from the damage of the past. Those are things that can only happen with life.

Adoption isn’t about avoiding pain. We don’t often get a choice between easy and hard. Abortion/adoption is clear evidence of that. This is a choice between two kinds of hard. One choice removes the potential for life to ever get better. The other doesn’t. To characterize the latter as monstrous is both disingenuous and … well, monstrous.