Reproductive Exploitation/ Predator and Prey

I am so very disenchanted with the women's equality movement. I was all for the ERA, went to local NOW meetings and considered myself quite the feminist. Of course, I was also in deep denial of my adoption loss grief, buried anger and pain.

When I reunited and started becoming really, genuinely educated about what had happened to me and millions of other women, I wondered where the feminists stood on this issue. I certainly had never heard it addressed in all the meetings I attended or spoken about at demonstrations.

As the years progressed, I saw some of my activist sisters who were a bit further along in the justice for moms and natural family preservation arenas apply to NOW and the movement for recognition and support. It never came and the reason was bitingly evident. Many of these women who purported to stand for the rights of all women were adopters. They were able to "have it all" by becoming predators who preyed on their more vulnerable sisters, taking their babies as if by right, and calling themselves "mothers."

It has already been established as scientific fact that one of the leading causes of infertility among women is delayed childbearing. As a woman ages, her eggs become less viable and conception is less likely. Building a career, making sure that all the "right" things for a "successful" life were in place, takes precedence over giving birth, and other considerations such as starving oneself to stay thin or becoming obese or smoking, etc, can tilt the balance of the fertility scales even more. Then these women become the object of great social empathy, the poor, barren women and no one sees that it is usually their own damn fault. They are quick enough to blame us, though, for being human, sexual and fertile.

The feminist movement said that a woman could and should have it all, a career, a family, prestige and a comparable paycheck to a man's. Perhaps that is where this attitude of self-entitlement comes from when the little stick they pee on in the bathroom keeps showing up as "not pregnant." I wonder if they see it as their due...they worked hard to get where they are, graduated with their degree, got a career, then married the right man, or joined the right political action committees and those who were "careless" enough to get pregnant before doing all these fine things just didn't deserve that baby as much as the infertile feminist. Rather than reaching out to their less affluent, less educated, less successful sisters with help and support, they prey on them like crocodiles on zebras. Rather than filling hungry stomachs like the animal predators, they just fill a crib with a child to whom they are genetic strangers.

I used to call myself a feminist, but now, if a woman cannot be respected for doing the one thing she can do that a man can't, if she is just seen as a brood mare by her sisters, then I don't think I want to be called a feminist. The National Organization for Women does not speak for me or for all the women who still fall into the hungry jaws of the adoption industry to feed the demand for healthy infants. We are disregarded, ignored and used as much by these "champions of the American woman" as we ever were by any man.

The adoption and surrogacy industries are anti-woman, as anti-woman as pornography or prostitution. We are not people but fertile bodies to be used and then kicked to the curb like an empty can.

I'd love to tell the John Birchers and Moral Majority mavens that it isn't political liberals, homosexual rights or "free love" or lack of sufficient religion that is the biggest threat to the family. Plain and simple, it is the failure to respect the bond between mother and child....it is Eugenics with a capital "E." It is self-entitlement and everyone out for themselves and what they want and to Hell with who they have to walk on to get what they want. It is sitting in judgment of a pregnant teen or a poor family with more than two children that is bringing us down. It is elitism and arrogance, and I remember there was a lot of that involved in the fall of Rome.

We no longer have a social conscience. If we did, I don't think that mothers of adoption loss would be so summarily dismissed as unimportant by one of the biggest, most powerful women's groups in the country. As long as women treat other women like convenient incubators, there are no true feminists, just female predators and female prey.