It's no secret that I am not a "kid person". I don't enjoy their company, I don't find them amusing or adorable ... and I really, really don't like babies. They cry and they smell bad. These seem to be their only defining characteristics. So I'm not someone who would have been up nights trying to decide what to do had I ever gotten pregnant. And there is no way on this planet or another that I'd have gone through nine months of carrying a baby - and labor! - just to give the child to someone else. I'm selfish that way and I don't apologize for it.
So I find it incredibly generous and heroically unselfish when a woman is willing to do that. I applaud these women. (And, for the record, my mother's birth mother did that and my mother was adopted by a couple who truly loved her.). I think we should, if not necessarily encourage this, as I don't think anyone but the woman herself gets to express an opinion, we should certainly not discourage it. And yet that has to be an effect of the movement to allow adopted children unfettered access to their birth information.
I'm certainly not the only woman alive who has always known that motherhood was wrong for her. I'm lucky to live in a country and an age with reliable birth control and, had I ever needed it, legal abortion. But let's just say the former had failed and, for whatever reasons, I had reservations about the latter. I might have thought seriously about having the child and giving it up for adoption. Unless I knew that such a child could, without my consent, eventually look me up and approach me. That would have ended my internal debate right there!
It's an amusing plot point on soap operas when a woman is approached by a grown child she did not realize she'd given birth to (those soap opera writers can make anything seem possible!), and it's long been fodder for new storyline when a child one had given up at birth appears at one's doorstep, but, contrary to popular opinion, I don't want my life to resemble a soap opera! Okay, I'd love to be on one, but that's just not the same thing.
Yes, I absolutely agree that adopted children should have access to any known medical information about their birth parents. And, yes, I can understand why they might want to know more about those who biologically created them, but come on! Someone went through nine months of hormonal changes, weight gain, stretch marks, and probably a lot of rude questioning, not to mention the "joy" of giving birth, just so this child could have a life - and, presumably, one better than the birth mother could provide (whether the lack be financial, emotional, etc.). And now the child thinks it has a right to interrupt this woman's life's? That she owes the child more? Can we say selfish?!
True, I'm not adopted so I can't presume to completely understand the thoughts and feelings of someone who is, but I remember my mother's take on it ... that her mother undoubtedly did her a favor by giving her up and that her adopted parents were the parents the universe had chosen to give her ... and that she didn't feel it would be kind to enter the lives of her birth parents unbidden. I just wish more adopted children could see it in this light. They would be happier, less discontent, adoptive parents wouldn't worry that the child's loyalties were divided, and birth parents could rest secure in the knowledge that their lives wouldn't be interrupted by someone they had chosen not to know.
If this movement continues and such complete access to information becomes the law of various lands, though, the whole point could become moot. Woman who would choose closed adoptions will choose abortions instead and there will be no such children to seek them.
