I recently asked a question about why APs are the "bad guys" in adoption. I pointed out that the decision is made by the expectant mother without any input or involvement from the PAPs.
One of the answers claimed that adoptions would not occur if it were not for the adoption agencies’ ads.
Again, I ask why the ads and PAPs are responsible?
We are all faced with advertisements every day. Are we not responsible for our debt when we were enticed to use credit cards by credit card ads? Is a drunk driver not responsible for hurting others just because alcohol is advertised? Smoking is advertised, but not everyone smokes. Isn’t it our responsibility to exercise judgment in making our decisions and resist ads when they are not in our best interest?
Just to be clear, I am not bashing birth mothers in any way and I am not referring to birth mothers in the past who were faced with bad laws and extreme coercion. I understand that horrible practices in the past took advantage of expectant women. There is no excuse for that and no way to compensate these poor victims.
Also, today’s birth mothers are making a terribly difficult decision that they believe to be in the best interest of their child. I am not trying to bash them in any way.
I just don’t understand why today’s PAPs are to blame, when they don’t participate in any of the decisions. (PAPs get involved at the tail end of the process after the expectant mother calls the agency and makes an adoption plan. All PAPs do is put together a booklet for the expectant mother to review AFTER those steps are taken.)
Before you give another "supply and demand" argument, please remember Economics 101. Eliminating demand does NOT eliminate supply. It just affects price. In addition, adoption is not a true capital market where the true supplier (ie, the birth mother) is directly motivated by profit.
@ Rosie, adoption is not a true capital market. In puppy mills, the supplier of the puppies (not just the pet store) is motivated by profit. The supplier sells puppies to the pet store for a profit and the pet store sells to the public for a profit. If customers stop buying at the pet store, there is no profit for the pet store and, in turn, there is no profit for the puppy suppliers. Nothing motivates the supplier to continue to supply puppies. This is why supply and demand will seek equilibrium.
In adoption, the agency earns a profit. So they may go out of business if demand slackens. However, the supplier (the birth mother) does not sell her child to the agency for profit. (That would be a felony) She is not motivated by profit. Therefore, the loss of profit will not affect supply.
I don’t know why you need to broadcast that you have an advanced degree. So do most of us. WTH?
@ Sunny, in the last two days, there have been two women who have talked about relinquishing without an agency. One used the safe haven law and the other is seeking a non-agency adoption. Just more evidence that supply exists outside of agencies and independent of agencies’ marketing efforts.
On another, humorous note: Your assumptions about me are waaay off base. For example, why would I have disgust for women who can produce their own children when I am one of them myself? In fact, it is a little too easy for me. lol
I have tremendous respect and admiration for birth mothers. I just don’t have disgust for PAPs and APs like you do.
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am so sick of being viewed as the bad guy and I adopted from foster care! While that is more widely accepted here, it’s still wrong in many people’s eyes.
Plenty of women DO NOT WANT THEIR BABIES. How do we think thousands of abortions happen?! Yes, it’s beyond evil and horrible that people get coerced or tricked. It’s being horrible that some mothers carry their child and don’t think they can do it or are convinced they can’t. Obviously in a perfect world, children would stay with their biological parents.
The reality is that will ALWAYS be women who don’t want to/ can’t care for their children or get them taken away by the state. Without the PAP’s, they would be where??
Thank you for sticking up for the nice, open and honest adoptive parents like me. I don’t think I deserve an ounce of the crap I am dished out about adopting my girls.
God bless
They exploit the vulnerable
And if aggressive marketing didn’t increase supply people wouldn’t spend so much on advertising, duh.
If you really believe coercion doesn’t happen today then you are uneducated as it does still happen, Coerced/forced adoptions are on the up in the UK depsite being illegal.
Just because an expectant mother considers adoption doesn’t mean she is 100% certain she wants to go through with the adoption. There are times when expectant mothers feel pressured to continue with an adoption plan as they feel guilty for wanting to parent, made to feel that they are selfish, not good enough and not rich enough. This happens whether you believe it or not.
Times may have changed and tactics may have changed BUT the reality of our world is that not all mothers who surrender do so because they really want to.
Eager to adopt parents who will pay market prices in a dropping supply situation drives the adoption industry to produce infants ready to be adopted. Demand drives up the supply of new born adoptions in ways that would not happen if not interfered with.
The same way people who buy at pet stores contribute to the economy that makes puppy mills lucrative. Stop buying puppies from pet stores and puppy mills will be shut down as demand slackens off.
The same way that expensive exotic wood furniture contributes to the cutting down of rain forests. Stop paying people for raw goods that are not sustainable and when the demand lessens to a trickle, they will stop cutting up forests to feed the demand.
The same way that we drive gas guzzling cars contributes to the off shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Reduce our consumption of refined oil and we would not need to be taking dangerous attempts to drill miles below the ocean floor.
The same way that end users of cocaine and heroin contribute to the violence in South America and Mexico and the poppy fields wars. No end users, no profit, no drug wars.
There is not enough ’supply’ to meet the ‘demand’ in the adoption industry. It’s not a straight line, it’s been an exponential increase in demand and a sharply dropping decrease in supply in the white baby market in the last 10 years at least.
Supply is increased and created where it would not exist by persuasive tools and coercive tactics. Some adoption agencies are predators.
No wait. I’ll take that back. ALL adoption agencies are predators.
Pregnant minors and women in distress situations should be protected by legislation and moral codes and social codes. They do not give consent willingly. It is impossible for a distressed person to give informed consent if they are lied to. Adoption is a Woman’s Issue and a Class Issue.
Boycott Newborn Infant Adoptions. It’s the right thing to do.
Some people on here will do anything to get their point of view across & not listen to other views. I take most of what I read here with a grain of salt & accept that not everyone will agree with me & try not to let it get me down.
So far I’ve agreed with everything you’ve said, you seem to have a lot of common sense.
The adoption industry depends on surrenders. Surrenders are secured through laws. Laws are secured through lobbying by adoption agencies and adoption attorneys. These groups have lobbied for laws which allow for laws which make it difficult for mothers to ‘change their minds" once a baby has been placed with PAPs, even in cases where the mother has supposedly been given the option to rescind the surrender.
Agencies and attorneys push, through "counseling" to match mothers and PAPs as early as possible, pre-birth if possible, because that is when the mother may not yet understand how she truly will feel about her child. To some mothers, the unborn baby is still somewhat abstract, and the emotions the mother feels for her child don’t come forth until after the baby is born.
The laws are written to trap the mother into a "decision’ that has been made when the mother did not understand her own feelings. A mother makes a ‘decision" based on what an agency tells her, then she gives birth, and suddenly her instincts and bonding for the child take over and she realizes ‘this is my child" and she knows she cannot give her baby away.
But, the law says otherwise….the law says the PAPs are the ‘parents’ because they have her baby and they are the "only parents the child knows"…because the baby has left the hospital with them…
The reason for this is the "best interest of the child" standard in the law. This was placed in the law, in my state, by adoption promoters, and adoptive parents. I work in the state legislature and I was present when it was debated and passed.
Adoptive parents have had a great deal of influence on laws and practices, as well as social policy.
Adoption is nothing but a huge social program as well as a private industry of baby transfer. it serves those who wish to gain children and those who profit from that business.
Your language is manipulative. Most women who give children up to adoption haven’t "decided" to do so as you claim, they’ve surrendered under the pressure of family, society, and of course the agencies.
And your insistence on calling them "birth mothers" is malicious–your intent is to "bash". Pretending otherwise is silly–who do you think you’re kidding? Your disgust (and jealousy?) for women who are able to produce their own children is obvious.
And while I LOVE Rosie’s arguments, I’ve always thought that the expectant mother is more like a hooker, (woman in distress, because most don’t engage in that activity–what you would probably a ‘career choice’–because it gives them pleasure. They fall into it because of desperation) the agency is like the pimp (gets all the cash for someone else’s labor) and the potential adopters are the johns, with the cash to exploit the situation, get what they "need" and move on.
And if the agencies hadn’t expanded their reach into the third world to find product for their growing, ever needy clients, American adoption agencies WOULD be out of business. The agency I was adopted from has been absorbed into an another agency, as many others have. No, the only way to come up with fresh product from mothers who have few options and little support is to move into corrupt countries. Some of these countries even *grow* product to fill infertile adopter dreams (Google Guatemala baby farms) and their own wallets. And if you’ll notice, most women who give up infants in the U.S. are usually from more religious (Baptist) communities in the South, and LDS girls in the West. They make up great demographic for the agencies, attorneys, and potential adopters.
These young women are not usually supported by their families and communities are easier to press into submission. If YOU had a limited ad budget, and wanted to score a baby–where would YOU place your ad?!
But that too will change. The infertiles are growing, and the women who might have submitted to coercion in the past are becoming more educated. Thank God for the Internet! We’re winning, slowly but surely to advise and educate.
ETA: LOL, the ’safe haven’ "woman" as you call her, was an obvious troll–maybe you?
Because if the relentless pressure AND acceptance for child abandonment wasn’t there, then there’d be less people abandoning their kids.
Quoting from a site I tripped over earlier, and that made me physically sick:
<quote>
Aggressive Birthmother Outreach Helping You Adopt A Beautiful Newborn Baby
We are results driven!
Unlike many state-regulated adoption agencies … can advertise and market more aggressively to quickly present you with an adoption opportunity.
… places extensive Nationwide Internet advertising specifically targeting suitable Birthparents
Millions of dollars spent on Birthmother advertising annually.
</quote>
And my utter utter favourite part – not:
<quote>
Aggressive grassroots marketing and outreach programs to reach other birthmothers who might not otherwise find us through more traditional forms of advertising and marketing. We market to:
Maternity Homes
Family Planning Clinics
Crisis Pregnancy Clinics
Hospitals and Medical Clinics
Teen Pregnancy Programs
Church Groups
Chat Rooms
Civic Organizations
Abortion Clinics
Bulletin Boards
Pregnancy Hotlines
Physicians
Community Referrals
Social Workers
High Schools, Colleges and Universities
</quote>
Sorry, but vulnerable, confused, and scared women DO NOT NEED to be "aggressively marketed" to abandon their babies.
Now if some of those millions of dollars were spent on helping these women be able to raise their kids themselves, the world’d be a much better off place.
And actually, yes, some ARE motivated by profit, which you can see from the posts that appear on here asking how much they (the pregnant women) are allowed to ask for off the PAPs.
The same reason it is manipulative (though to a lesser degree) to park carnival barking credit card hawkers on the campuses of colleges and universities. You exploit an entire population of people who are probably wondering how they’re going to eat today, and who also are woefully uninformed about the hazards of excess unsecured debt, particularly when there is a lack of viable income to service it.
I find it interesting that they are cracking down on those companies, preventing them from advertising in certain places (like campuses) in order to prevent students from ending up in a bad way, but they are not cracking down on agencies, or regulating the amount/type of "advertising" that potential adopters can do in order to solicit a "b*rthmother" (ahem) to give them a child.
Let’s just say that I’d rather be in kabillions of dollars worth of debt than lose my child.
Because they psychologically cannot accept responsibility for their decision. Never mind that without parents to adopt the children, they STILL would not be able to care for them. Never mind that the child would end up in a group home. That’s like saying that if someone adopts a dog from the SPCA, they must have forced the previous owner to abandon it there, despite probably never knowing them. Despite that the probable alternative is euthanasia. It’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard