I'm NOT Your Poster Child

I've been following the Mississippi initiative to have personhood assigned to a zygote at the moment of conception.  This means that not only will abortion be outlawed but certain kinds of contraception as well.  When looking at the website of the proponents of this initiative, I am struck by just how much adoption is billed as the solution to all of the issues outlawing abortion will cause.  Of course, I have yet to see someone explain how adoption solves the issues of need where a woman has an unwanted pregnancy but gives birth to a wanted child and doesn't want to choose adoption but has no other support.  I also have yet to see someone explain how, for example, adoption is a solution to a woman experiencing a health complication in early pregnancy where her life would be severely altered or even lost by attempting to carry a fetus to term.  Looking at the websites both in support of "Amendment 26" and against it, I am struck by something.  Have you ever noticed when political issues are discussed, "other people" and what "other people" need or want are usually spoken about by people who are, well, not those people? Well, I have something to say about it.

Among other things contained on the pro-"personhood" advocacy website are links to answer questions anyone might have about adoption and abortion even in special circumstances, such as rape.  Apparently, adoption proponents are all over this initiative (surpise, surprise!).  Two different links take you to pages by two different adoptees; adult adoptees who were conceived from rape.  One adoptee, who is a marketing director for an enormous agency which itself has a 26 million dollar budget, takes issue with Planned Parenthood for the amount of abortions provided vs. adoption referrals given, alleging that Planned Parenthood just wants to make money off of abortion.  Of course this line of thinking makes sense, because when you're pregnant and seeking out Planned Parenthood, which may be the only clinic near you that provides health services to low-income women, your only two considerations are abortion and adoption.  That's a nice stereotype.  The other adoptee has written a book and takes issue with people arguing for abortion using instances of rape because she feels like she is saying it makes individuals conceived from rape as less human than other people.  Both adoptees take a staunch anti-choice stance claiming they "would have" or "should have" been aborted.

As an adoptee with a controversial conception circumstance that I will not at this time get in to, I do not appreciate it when people use me as some sort of poster-child for their political stance or to make a point in an argument.  It stigmatizes me and it stigmatizes my mother.  You do not know us.  You do not know that just because of how I was conceived or that because I was adopted that I was "almost" aborted or that anti-choice laws (which there weren't any at the time of my birth) "saved" me from being aborted.  You cannot possibly know any of that without asking either of us.  Quite honestly, whether or not my mother considered abortion is no one's business but her own.  The lack of services and support in place for her, either to have me parented within my natural family or for her to have for support after my surrender, however, were significant.  Adoption was too busying being the solution to everything to solve these issues, I guess?

However, I also take issue with some pro-choice (sorta) arguments I am seeing on other anti-"personhood" pages and elsewhere wherever the abortion debate is discussed..  I take issue with the phrase I've heard several times now: "I believe that the fetus is a person and that abortion should be outlawed...oh, except in the case of rape!"  If the fetus is a person, how is it not a person in the case of rape?  Is a person less worthy of being defended because of their conception circumstances?  I reject the personhood argument but I bring these questions forward because I want people to realize what they're saying and how stigmatizing it is to people who are born, who do have personhood, and who were conceived from rape.  People talk like rape victims and their sons and daughters aren't around us to hear and have feelings about what we have to say about their circumstances.  Stop comparing zygotes and fetuses to people; when you do so, and label those "people" of worthiness based on economic status, ability, or conception circumstance, you're doing the same to living, breathing, already-born, people are actually are people.  Pro-choice isn't about dictating under what circumstances a woman is competent to make decisions that will impact her body and her life.  This is about a woman needing privacy in health care to make informed decisions with her health care practitioners for herself.  None of "us" need anyone else speaking about how horrible it must have been for my mother to give birth to me, just to make your political point.  Mind your own business, let pregnant women make their own choices, no matter what those decisions are.  Period.

The personhood argument is perhaps one of the most hypocritical arguments made by a lot of anti-choice groups.  A lot of anti-choice groups who advocate for the personhood, and therefore the sustaining of a pregnancy being valued over a woman's right to autonomy, will be the first to turn around and claim that adoptees do not have the same rights as all other people.  If you really think being adopted gives me equal personhood to others, why then, do they advocate for me to have unequal rights?  The same anti-adoptee rights lobbying groups (including the one the agency that marketing director adoptee works for spends mega bucks contributing to) that say fetuses and zygotes are full people will say that adoptees are less than equal to all other people.  They can't make up their minds as to who they want to be real, equal people, and who they think can't be.  It's quite confusing.  It's awfully backward.

So here is Mississippi about to pass a bill saying that a zygote is a person, because a zygote is a person just like an acorn is a tree and blueprints are a house.  But a woman?  She cannot be a person, at least not when pregnant.  Being pregnant means she is no longer capable of making decisions for her own body.  This initiative will compromise women's rights and complicate women's health care touting adoption as the solution.  Because it makes so much sense for the solution to women's health needs, of course, to be adoption.  This is what happens when they don't teach women's history or adoption history in the books.  We'd know that a woman's pregnant body being out of her control and society taking over the decision making for a woman yielded a period of forced adoptions.  We told women just not to have sex, knowing that giving this direction wouldn't stop unplanned pregnancies or complications where pregnancies can't be carried, but it does make it look like the problem is the woman's fault.  We didn't want her to prevent the pregnancy, no, so we stigmatized contraception.  We didn't want her to terminate the pregnancy, no, so we made it largely unavailable and humiliated every last woman who needed one in front of hospital board rooms full of male doctors.  We didn't want her to keep the baby she bore, no, so we put little structure in place, we'll be darned if those "welfare queens" will soak up our tax dollars "getting themselves pregnant," so adoption was often the only alternative.

Yes, Mississippi, because denying women choice and autonomy and managing everything with adoption worked so well for women and children in the post war to pre-Roe v. Wade period.  It worked so well, and that's why we have Roe v. Wade, right?  Because it was all working so well?

I support the right of all people to have the opinion that they want but I take issue as an adoptee when adoptees are used as an example for some political cause.  I am Amanda; I am an adoptee, a Christian Universalist, a wife, a mother, a student, a nature photographer....I am a lot of things.  Someones charity project, a fetus, "saved from abortion," "should have been aborted," "almost was aborted," "could have been aborted," an example of why women should choose, an example of why women shouldn't be allowed to choose.......those are all things that I am not. 

Sorry anti-choice, sorry adoption, this adoptee will never be your poster-child.

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