A friend of mine who is very anti-abortion has mentioned a few times just how horrible she thinks abortion is and how lots of families want to adopt. She, of course, would never consider adopting a child into her family (talking about potential future fertility problems brought it up). Is it hypocritical at all to push for "adoption over abortion" yet be unwilling oneself to adopt? It's interesting because her parents adopted from foster care and are very emotionally and verbally abusive to that little boy.

And it's been far and away the toughest thing either of us has ever done. And we haven't led charmed lives. You are taking on not only the raising of a child but a child who has been damaged by the people who came before. This is a SERIOUS undertaking not for the faint of heart. There will be times when you will understand how someone could verbally abuse a child.

That being said, I wouldn't take any of it back. It is something I decided on years before I met my wife. I'm lucky to have met her and she decided the same before she met me. Seriously, don't get kids, bio or otherwise, unless you are ready and REALLY want them. Otherwise you will ruin their lives along with your own.

There are hundreds and hundreds of kids out there who desperately need homes. People who want kids should at least consider this option. They are where they are through no fault of their own. Please consider helping them, but only if you're really ready.

...any couple with fertility issues would be required to adopt before they'd be allowed fertility treatments. They want a kid so badly? Then take an existing one first.

Well thank god you don't make the rules. Your post is offensive and completely ignorant.

I think this sounds like a pretty good idea.

Edited to clarify that I am referring to StrayMutt's idea.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2013 11:04PM by truthseeker.

And you're equally ignorant and offensive

I agree. Wow!

+1 Wow!

Glad to hear about how to deal with my infertility. Not that I really have any other options aside from egg donation via IVF which I'm not interested in and adoption, but just the audacity of being told about what I NEED to do makes my blood boil. I've been through enough with my fertility issues, telling me and other couples how we need to deal with them to have children is a slap in the face.

+1

Perhaps we've been considering the anti-abortion argument the wrong way. If life is what's so frickin' important then perhaps we should be introducing bills that make it mandatory that every single person is typed and matched for organ, blood, bone-marrow donation. And every child that dies in an accident but still has useable organs? Well, they HAVE to be donated because life is paramount. And everyone with bone marrow that matches someone who needs it? Well, you have to donate it. It's not like the risk it very high and that life is paramount -- right? What do you think?



Because what anti-abortion stances break down to for me is: I have no right to determine what happens to my body if someone else's life is at stake.

I like the way you think!

The thing that bothers me so much about the "pro life" movement is that it is NOT pro life, it's pro birth and then they don't give a rip about the child.

To Devoted ExMo: I'm so glad to finally hear someone say that out loud about the "pro-life" folks. I have always thought "You want these kids to be here but that's where it ends!" You don't care if they eat, are taken care of, have an appropriate education or anything else. Oh, and then Pro-lifers are most likely "pro" hurry up and kill them if they get into any kind of trouble (instead of rehabilitate them). Pro-life people for some reason always remind me of the very piously religious slave owners who talked about God while they were literally and and figuratively screwing their slaves. So hypocritacal that they could make babies with a slave and then STILL deny it's humanity.

I'll +1 that.

But a fetus growing inside a woman is NOT her body. It's a separate person.

In fact, that cancer patient is far more a "person" than any fetus. So let's all urge our representatives to start that bill, shall we? Because LIFE is all important and FAR more important than your "right" to decide whether or not to undergo a simple, almost-completely safe medical procedure.

Which of course is the right not to have your body commandeered by the government to keep someone else alive.

We were unable to have children so we adopted our daughter 37 years ago and our son almost 34 years ago. We did not go through the LDS church. We cannot conceive of what our lives would have been like without them...

Ron Burr

ps: I'm adopted so I knew exactly what we were getting into and how to properly raise an adopted child....like they are your own flesh and blood and with all the love you can muster....

+1

Long story short. After two years of my TSCC marriage, still no little one. We resorted to a strange things in order to get my wife pregnant. Once we found out that I was sterile, I suggested adoption so we could have a family. I even mentioned her going to a sperm bank if she wanted to be pregnant. Both ideas were met with a "you gotta be kidding.....and a resounding no.

One could look at that issue and say, "Yea, some guy, shooting blanks....some man." I looked at it in a way of saying, "Wow, there are lots of kids that need good loving homes; which I felt we could have provided. She wanted a divorce. I refused to move out and slept in the guest room for a couple of nights figuring she will get over it. When the ice lady started speaking to me, I figured, well she is over it so that first night she and I talked, I assumed things were better so I crawled into bed. The very first thing out of her mouth was, "Well, if you think we are going to have sex you are out of your mind, I waisted my virginity on you, for what."

Adoption was NOT an option for her; it was for me. Maybe it is situational.

I will hand it to some of those pro life groups, they care for pregnant women (pre-natal doctors and housing) and either seek to adopt the child to a christian home, or provide help/after care for single women who want to keep their child

I don't understand anti-abortionists whatsoever. People should have a choice regardless of the circumstances. And I say that because of my own experience and not because of political choices.

I'm a mother through adoption. Adoption can be wonderful. Best thing dh and I ever did. I am a huge supporter of adoption. But I see it for what it is, not for what people want it to be.

But it is not the opposite of abortion or a cure for abortion. Making abortion illegal does nothing to decrease the rates of abortion. It just makes it unsafe and illegal.

Placing a child for adoption is a very, very unpopular thing to do these days. I've discussed this with my teenaged daughter at some lengths. She, and all her peers, would never do such a thing. Even though she, by her own admission, has a very happy life and is glad she is part of our family, she thinks terminating a pregnancy is a much better choice than carrying a fetus to term and placing the baby with a different family. She thinks keeping a baby, even if you cannot afford it and are not emotionally prepared to raise it, is better than placing it for adoption. This is a pretty common opinion among her peers.

Many birthmothers spend the rest of their lives being sad about their decision. It's not something that goes away for them. Carrying a fetus to term is not an easy thing and it's not anybody's call but the pregant woman's to decide if she's willing to do in order to place a baby with someone else.

As for the idea that anyone with fertility issues should be forced to adopt, what rot. Adoption isn't a cure for infertility. The fertile have just as much responsibility for children in foster care as do the infertile.

I wonder how many of the types that go scream pro-life stuff at political rallies really understand that circumstances other than just flat out "I-feel-like-killing-a-fetus-today" are not that uncommon. I had been trying to get pregnant for 7 years (well, I'd pretty much given up actively "trying" before the whole 7 years had passed but was not using protection and was still holding out hope). I was ecstatic to find out I was pregnant. I went to my first prenatal and the doctor couldn't see an embryo on the ultrasound, but the lining was that of a pregnant person and the yolk sac was visible. Since my body does not do anything "on schedule," she told me not to panic....I probably was just not as far along as I thought (which made sense to me based on erratic cycles). When my lab work from that visit came back, his office called me and said they needed me to know my pregnancy hormone was very high for only being that early in the pregnancy, which usually either means twins or a problem. They told me signs of ectopic pregnancy to watch for.

Fast forward a couple weeks and my husband was rushing me to the ER because I was in such pain I couldn't sit, couldn't lay down, couldn't stand, couldn't do anything. When I got in there, I didn't care about the pain; all I wanted was for them to tell me the baby was okay. They did more ultrasounds and more blood work. They found the baby in the fallopian tube, which was being blown open by the growing baby and I was bleeding internally. They also told me my pregnancy hormones had continued to climb and were now quite a bit higher than they were on the chart from my last office visit. They told me that I would bleed to death if they did not take the baby out. This is the definition of abortion, isn't it? They tried to console me by telling me that they had been unable to detect a heartbeat and, even if they had, it was 100% chance that this baby would not make it, partially because it couldn't grow right in such a confined space and mainly because an embryo can't survive in a dead mom. I wondered if they only told me they couldn't find the heartbeat to comfort me.....if the baby was already dead why did the pregnancy continue to progress and my hormones continue to show I was getting further and further along with a baby?

So I had the surgery where they took the baby out and I was no longer pregnant....in other words, I had an abortion of a baby I desperately wanted. I still feel sad years later thinking back on how much I wanted that baby and how much it hurt to have to end the pregnancy. Sometimes when I hear people screaming about how pro-choice people are baby killers and such, I wonder if they really know the background that leads up to having an abortion. It is definitely not a black-and-white topic, IMO.

Thank you for sharing that story. It makes an excellent point about how sometimes abortion is very necessary... and really nobody else's business but the woman's and her doctor's.

I'm so sorry you had such a difficult time with your pregnancies. I can completely understand what you went through. I have had 2 ectopic pregnancies, and definitely wanted those babies. One pregnancy I was having twins: I lost the one in my tubes, then due to endometriosis, lost the other one 2 weeks later. Several years later I got pregnant in the tube I had left!

I have one child (who was a preemie but she made it). After my first child I got pregnant when she was 4 months old. Due to my abusive marriage and because I was young; still in college, and felt I couldn't handle two children (and still get the divorce I knew I was going to have to obtain), I had an abortion. I cried when they were terminating that pregnancy. For a long time I thought God was punishing me for that abortion by making me have tubal preganancies.

I have long since made my peace with God, and now know my endometrious and very fragile cervix were the likely causes of all those miscarriages and ectopics. I have 4 lovely grandchildren now who are the light of my life; as is my one daughter who bore them. So you are correct: there are many different reasons people go through abortion; none of them easy or simple. It's no one else's right to decide what you can do with your own body-because when all is said and done it's between that woman and God. Those same Prolifers would begrudge a single mother food stamps to feed that same baby after it's born. Pharisees and Hypocrites.

Why abortion is so bad?

Its pretty simple, despite the fact that if a fetus is alive or not, or if its your body or not...:

A DNA chain is unique and irreplaceable, you might have dozens of kids after an abortion, but you wont be able to have "that" kid again.

If you steal, or lie, or harm in anyway to any person, or even yourself, u still have a chance to fix the consequences of your acts...

But when it comes about abortion, murder or suicide, you just cant fix what you did and people needs to live with that luggage all their lives..

So logics is pretty simple, if u borrow a car and u crash it, u will need to be able to fix it, otherwise u just dont borrow a car.

The question has always been whether or not it should be legal. And, your example is pretty lame. You can't miss something you've never had.

"Why abortion is so bad?

Its pretty simple, despite the fact that if a fetus is alive or not, or if its your body or not..."
-------------

While I would not personally choose to abort a child for reasons of convenience or because I didn't want the child (never had the experience of being anything but overjoyed at a positive pregnancy test), I am more pro-choice than ever now that I had that heartbreaking experience of being told, "You have two choices. One is to not have the surgery to remove the pregnancy and you will continue to bleed internally, as you are doing right now, and you will die. Your embryo is already doomed. We can't find a heartbeat even now, and if for some reason we are wrong and it is still alive, very shortly it will not be if you do nothing because if you bleed to death your embryo dies. Your other choice is to let us do the surgery, stop the internal bleeding, and save your life. We can't save the embryo either way."

I don't understand the logic that says orphaning my other child is preferable to both me and my much-wanted unborn child dying together. Aren't children worth anything once they have been born? Shouldn't we be concerned about the child who has already been born still having her mom around to raise her? Even if I didn't have another child who would be lost without me, what does it accomplish for the mother's death to cause the embryo's death rather than a necessary medical procedure causing it?

Again, I would not choose abortion for myself given any other reasonable alternative. However, there is a lot of gray area where someone who is not the woman in the situation might not know the details and would just assume all abortions are being done for convenience sake. What happened to me is not that uncommon -- unfortunately, medical science can't solve every problem with a happy outcome as much as we would like it to be able to. I was told there was absolutely nothing they could do to save the unborn child. Me dying with that child would have just hurt the child I already have.

Sorry, but as someone with first hand experience on all three options (having a child, adoption - I am an adoptee, and having an abortion), you're completely wrong here, ldx.

Between the three, abortion was the decision that caused the least pain. Was it an easy decision? No. But it was the right one for me at the time.

Being an adoptee is a life-long weird thing - you never quite belong. I tired of the "so who are your REAL parents" question before I was out of grade school. Going through pregnancy as an adoptee with no genetic background? It's a pain in the butt. Medical staff looks at you like you have two heads because they can't fathom you honestly don't know what's in your background.

And pregnancy has been 90% misery. I'm now 8 months pregnant. I've been nauseous the whole time, I've developed gallstones. I haven't slept more than 2 hours at a time since late August. I'm exhausted. Pregnancy frankly sucks. Yes, there's something amazing coming at the end. But I made a decision about three months ago - this will be the only pregnancy I ever go through. It's pure hell.

I can't even imagine what my biological mother goes through, having given up a child and never knowing what happened. Now going through pregnancy, I can't fathom enduring all of this pain and sickness just to give the child up. To me - that's the endless luggage you refer to.

Going through pregnancy has made me even more firmly pro-choice. NO woman should ever have to endure this pain and frustration if she doesn't want to. A DNA chain being irreplaceable as a reason to punish women? No. Sorry. Not good enough.

Of course if ldx actually cared about those unique DNA chains they'd be pushing for bills making organ donation and bone marrow donation mandatory. But it has never really been about life -- it's about punishing women for daring to have sex.

Right, do we weep and gnash our teeth over the sperm that didn't meet the egg? All those irreplaceable DNA chains, sob.