Facilitator Uses Old Scam as Editorial

Gloria Whitcraft, adoption facilitator for the Shepherd's Gate adoption agency used the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel for a thinly-disguised piece of adoption propaganda. In this piece, she contended that mothers who "made an adoption plan (yeck!)", made a HEROIC decision.

If I had a nickle for every time I heard that one, I'd be living in a mountain cabin watching my hubby play with his power tools, right now. The more things change, the more they stay the same. We were fed the same line of bull back in the EMS (Era of Mass Surrenders) and then were summarily kicked to the curb and seen as sluts, threats and non-persons.

I was told I was a hero. I never felt like a hero. I felt like a grieving mother, a beaten and bereft leftover from the adoption machine's function. The mothers of today aren't told that truth. They are handed that saccharine crap that Whitcraft spewed in her ad for Shepherd's Gate..ooops, excuse me....her editorial.

For anyone who doesn't believe that adoption is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry, just check out these agencies. They have "counseling" for the birthmartyr that, essentially, counsels her to accept her "decision" and get on with life....same s***, different day. If they were truly there to serve, then why don't they have an unbiased panel of those of us who have been there and done that on the payroll that can tell these new mothers of today just what is REALLY in store for them? The loss of a child to adoption, for most caring and normal mothers, is a detrimental and damaging, life-long experience.

Where are the brochures and flyers describing the social services for families and mentoring programs for new moms? Where is the humanity that sees that expectant mom as a person with a heart that can be broken, that sees that fetus as a child that can grow up with feelings of rejection and identity problems? The adoption industry is just one of the many examples we are seeing, right now, of capitalism run amok and the arrogance of the eugenicists.

Like all the rest of the economy, infant adoption is in a recession and that is because the true heroes are the mothers who take responsibility for the conception of a child which means they keep that child and raise him or her in the family of their origin. THAT'S heroic! That is really being child-centered and putting the welfare of that baby before anything else. "Things" and faux daddies and social standing cannot substitute for that feeling of genuinely belonging to one's own people. All it takes is a bit of family support and mom becomes a hero for real.

Whitcraft pointedly avoids the fact that a new mother will not always be single/poor/young and all the other things that the industry-hired "experts" say will make her a poor mother. My sister became a mother after being married for three years and was no longer in her teens. Yet, she called me or our mother every day because EVERY NEW MOTHER FEELS SOME SORT OF INSECURITY!! The adoption industry would make that into a life-long problem and that sort of reasoning is specious to inane. It's advertising...it's propaganda and it's a flavor of Kool Aid that no one who understands how it feels would ever want to drink.

This is National Adoption BEwareness Month and, in eight days, we will be observing National Sad and Mournful Day. If you see a woman wearing a black, red and white ribbon badge, ask her why she wears it. Learn something about true heroism.