I think this is a bit disingenuous and problematically oversimplified for several reasons.
1. A lot, if not most, private adoption programs are already run and/or dominated by Catholic and evangelical organizations.
2. The rhetoric around adoption is…extremely problematic, to say the least. Talk to an adoptee or a first mother, I have learned a lot from people who have had first-hand experience with the system like that and have very detailed critiques of what is wrong with it. There’s classism, racism, sexism, all kinds of crap like that tied up in it and it’s very troublesome.
So it’s just not as simple as “adopt a child, problem solved.”
3. As an example of the above, it would be very hard for a working class family to adopt. Impossible, almost. Very hard for a person with a history of depression and who is overweight. For many lesbians and gays (yes there are pro-life lesbians and gays, I call some of them my friends).
4. As another example of the above, how many of these “waiting children” are there because their parents were unjustly treated by a racist, classist, homophobic and misogynist “family services” and justice system? Maybe a better way to reduce the numbers of kids in foster care would be to stop oppressing people so fucking much that it shatters their families.
5. Most people who oppose abortion truly believe that it is the killing of a human being. This has nothing to do with anyone’s personal family plans, stance on adoption, or anything else. You can passionately disagree with their feelings on this, but it really has nothing to do with the decision to adopt.
6. Why aren’t pro-choicers giving “unwanted children” these “permanent homes”? Including the person who made this image macro?
Oh, I totally agree. I’m pro-choice with a strong preference for abortion over adoption. I don’t know too much about adoption. But I know that in BC (I don’t know about the rest of Canada, it’s probably the same), if a non-Aboriginal family wants to adopt an Aboriginal child, the social workers must go through every single family member of the Aboriginal child to see whether or not they would like to adopt the child first. They try to keep Aboriginal children within the family/community, which is a good thing because Aboriginal children seem to be a lot worse off when put into foster care. Not a lot of non-Aboriginal people are very keen on adopting Aboriginal children anyways due to race and class discrimination.
What can I say here? I'm a pretty simple person who likes to occasionally blog out some of my life events. Even though I'm simple I'm also a little complex, a little enigmatic, a little different, a little special as a person in general.
