They who walk behind the rows have really made a mess of things in Nebraska. There is a lot to read about on the Children of the Corn blog that shows us just how dangerous these thinly-disguised attempts to plump up the infant adoption market really are.
Nebraska has been in the news for weeks, now, for passing a law that turned into a sad, dark joke. Now they are scrambling to amend the law to keep from receiving any more tweens and teens whose parents felt they were out of control. They are looking in the wrong direction. The only real "fix" is a full repeal.
As a senior mother of two, I can speak, with some authority, on the idea of secret, closed adoption where the mother has no idea who has her children and the adult children have no idea of their heritage and beginnings. It is NOT an idea that is new, but a different approach to an old "solution" to what shouldn't even be considered a problem. The only people safe haven benefits are the government adoption facilitators and the infant-hungry, potential adopters.
Here's an idea. Let's take the stigma away from the idea of single and/or poor and/or young people becoming parents. Let's encourage better sex education and open access to birth control for everyone. Let's educate the public on the consequences of the primal wound..separation of mother and child. Let's take a realistic view of adoption and see if for what it really is...a market, a form of eugenics and a one-sided benefit for the few "elite."
If these young girls who have been accused of throwing their newborns in the trash were not given cause to be afraid of the reactions to their act of giving birth (and they are a minority, in any case), I doubt that this particular isolated tragedy would occur very often. The irony here is that, for every story, screaming from the media, about dumpster babies and infanticide, there is a story of foster parents and adopters abusing and even murdering the children they were so avid to bring into their homes. Now what is wrong with THIS picture?
All safe haven laws do is create another generation of mothers in pain and children growing up with no way to access their personal information. America and Nebraska? We've been there and done that and it doesn't work!
Maya Angelou stated, in an interview on National television, right after the Obama Presidential win, that we, as a nation, were "growing up." I wish I could agree, but racial issues are not the only ones we face. Until we can have a healthier attitude towards the realities of human sexuality, until we can appreciate the fact that it takes two to make a baby and that the mother is not the villain in the piece, until we can recognize that, in the majority of cases, a child belongs with his or her mother, married or not, we are still in our prurient adolescence where we are obsessed with the sex lives of others. Until our government and churches get out of the business of eugenics and back to seeing to the good of ALL our citizens, we are still sitting in caves around a little fire seeing monsters out in the dark.
I am sending some emails to Nebraska state legislators, speaking, not as an advocate of open records for adoptees, but as a Senior Mother who has been through the ultimate pain and watched her adult, reunited children suffer for it. Just as safe haven laws disenfranchise, even further, the adult adoptee, they also continue to stigmatize and criminalize the mothers.
The time has come to kick these idiotic, pieces of crap, legislation to the curb.
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