Barrett: If you can give up your baby when it's born, why does forcing a woman to go through pregnancy affect her life at all?
— Kaili Joy Gray (@KailiJoy) December 1, 2021
Here is the verbatim quote and clip of Barrett's question: https://t.co/reodaIaWHs pic.twitter.com/f90ho1qDcM
— Kaili Joy Gray (@KailiJoy) December 1, 2021
It is a fact of life that no Republican can imagine a scenario that has not personally affected them, so it can be assumed that Judge Comey Barrett herself had uncomplicated pregnancies and ‘easy’ deliveries (not to mention the best prenatal care money could buy). Presumably she has been able to explain to the children she bore that they were never considered potentially disposable commodities, unlike the offspring of lesser vessels. And we have a pretty good idea how Judge Comey Barrett thinks about her adoptive children, because at her confirmation hearing she described them the way normal people talk about rescue puppies: The most pitiful, neglected little things — but see how loving & happy they are now!
Periodic reminder that the State Department later prohibited the adoption agency she used to adopt a Haitian child just after earthquake from being involved in international adoptions. https://t.co/paBUDLDVqh
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 1, 2021
But Chief Justice Roberts and his wife also have adoptive children, two adorable blonds who must be in their twenties now. At the time of his confirmation hearings, there was some public bitterness among his fellow CHUZ LYFE!!! believers that the Roberts were insufficiently committed to the cause of ensuring a steady market of healthy white newborns for eager adoptive parents, because that well-to-do lawyer couple ‘just happened’ to have found not one but two Irish nationals choosing to give birth in a Latin American country with lax cross-border adoption laws, avoiding the much more forbidding rules then in place on the Auld Sod. Perhaps the Roberts children take comfort in knowing that their parents were willing to go the extra mile(s) to obtain the closest purebred matches to build their happy family. If one must be a commodity, surely better to be an expensive, high-value commodity.
uh ya know the fact that those things haven’t been done already is kinda a big fuckin tell about the odds of those things getting done https://t.co/FFZsHITiSU
— kilgore trout, uatx professor of turnip studies (@KT_So_It_Goes) December 2, 2021
But even those of us who have not been personally affected by adoption know it’s seldom that easy, not for the birth mothers, and not for their ‘handed off’ children either. Pregnancy and childbirth is not comparable to a temporary job that can be left off one’s personal resume. Nor is being adopted (even as a newborn, even to ‘perfect’ loving parents) as inconsequential a factor as eye color or blood type…
SCOTUS is talking a lot about adoption, so here's what the data show. An extremely quick thread. ??
The vast majority of people who want abortions are not meaningfully interested in adoption. If they are denied access to abortion 91% of them will parent instead of relinquishing.
— Gretchen Sisson (@gesisson) December 1, 2021
This 9% is significant because it mirrors EXACTLY the proportion of non-marital white births that were relinquished for adoption pre-Roe. Yes: the adoption rate TODAY for people denied abortion is the same as the pre-Roe rate.
— Gretchen Sisson (@gesisson) December 1, 2021
Adoption is thus the choice of the choiceless: for people who want abortion but can't have one, for people who want to parent, but feel powerless to do so.
This is not a scenario that leads to good outcomes.
— Gretchen Sisson (@gesisson) December 1, 2021
I don't know if it's true that there's more trauma now, but I do think there's more gaslighting now (which, yes, probably does make it worse — I just don't want to minimize what was clearly traumatic about earlier relinquishments). (Also, I am working on this!)
— Gretchen Sisson (@gesisson) December 3, 2021
I'm glad to have many people on this thread who've probably not thought deeply about adoption before. I'd love to share this thread from last month, with some of my data from women who've relinquished. I hope you'll take a moment to read their stories.https://t.co/VbRq9Y74OP
— Gretchen Sisson (@gesisson) December 1, 2021
The post The SC(R)OTUS <em>‘Choices for Me, But Not for Thee’</em> Option: Brood ‘Em, Birth ‘Em, Drop ‘Em Off appeared first on Balloon Juice.