Truth Can Really Be Inconvenient

"An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary film with Al Gore, made a point about more than just global warming. While that was the focus of the film, another fact it brought home to me is how much we human beings like to be told just what we want to hear. If it impacts our lifestyles, gets in the way of our wants and desires, or throws a bit of a monkey wrench into the gears of the commerce that keeps us fat and sassy, then we don't accept it or listen to it.

It's like the church in the middle ages. They held a lot of power and they definitely didn't want to hear the truth about the nature of the Universe. Just in the late 19th century, there was a battle between superstition and science brought about by the discovery of the probability of evolution. Now we have a bunch of Bible-thumpers wanting to call the "theory of intelligent design" a science. I wonder when and if our human race will ever grow up and stop trying to engineer life and science in our own image?

Here, on this blog, and on others, the truth is being told about adoption, about loss, grief, pain and the dark underbelly of an Industry that traffics in human babies. People don't want to hear this. They don't want to think of the pain experienced by the mother and the pre-verbal grief and identity problems of the adopted person. They just want to see that warm, fuzzy story where an infant is presented to Mr. and Mrs. Perfect, fairies and unicorns frolic and fart rainbows, and all live happily ever after. MYTH

Those who have adopted and those who plan to adopt want to look upon the transaction as that kind of fantasy. They want to believe that the mothers are all willing and ready to turn over their babies without a qualm. The ones who didn't know us, loved to manufacture images of careless tramps or courageous sacrificers. Those that are in open adoptions are so sure these mothers wanted nothing more than to place their infants in the homes of the adopters. MYTH...they don't want to hear that the industry and the government and churches have done a real bang-up job with their brainwashing and that the greatest help they could give a young mother would be to help her keep and raise her own child. They don't want to know that the mother bites her tongue in order to protect what little contact she has been able to get with her child. I know many adult adoptees who wish someone had been kind to their mothers, kind enough to help them stay together.

People don't want to hear that most of the mothers of the BSE were stripped of every last bit of fight and self-respect in an ongoing campaign to take their babies. They are, again, sure that we wanted our "shame" erased. They want to see us, now, as fragile flowers, hiding in the closet and demanding anonymity. MYTH...This is very clever manipulation, again, by the industry, to put adoptees and their Natural Mothers at odds with each other. They blame US for closed records when the truth is that the only reason records were closed was to protect the adopters from the upsetting intrusion of the Mother. When in doubt, follow the money.

Oh, and about the money....I have heard insistent arguments that "no one made a penny off our adoption." MYTH....Really? Did the attorney that drew up the papers do so pro bono? Did the agency workers or the social workers decline their salaries? I've seen actual agency price lists with newborn, Caucasian females at the top of the list. These are some expensive little girls. It's a business, people! It brings in excess of $1.6 BILLION big ones a year. And, as a business, it follows the bottom line and that line has no room for caring about the welfare of the mother or the infant "product."

And, the noble adopters...MYTH...This industry is not about a home for a needy child, but about a baby for a needy adult who cannot accept their lot in life. There is NOTHING of altruism in infant adoption. These people are NOT saints and they are NOT noble. They are human beings who want what they want when they want it and they don't want to know they are hurting someone in the getting of it. Those that do get an inkling of the truth are quick to redirect their thoughts.

Yes, the truth about adoption IS uncomfortable, inconvenient and not very politically correct. It's a mark of the insanity of a society that is on the wane. The "leading nation of the free world" is woefully behind a lot of other countries in correcting this melange of money, coveting and social engineering. Adoption, in the US, is sanctioned by both church and government which really makes me want to go back and read the Constitution, again because something stinks.

Here is the scariest truth of all. Right now, in this country, the Industry, in collusion with Right Wing Christian reactionaries, is trying to drag us all back to the bad old days of Victorian attitudes, homes for "unwed mothers" and twin beds in the bedrooms on TV and in the movies. Like the Puritans of old, they are showing more interest in what goes on in the bedroom than in the boardroom where the real sinning is taking place. I am sure that getting people all riled up about the supposed cost of unmarried mothers is a great distraction and keeps the wheels of commerce turning.

Well, we Senior Natural Mothers have been there and that is a bad place to be. We don't want our daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters victimized again by a heinous double-standard. I'll be damned if I will let some fat cat in an Armani suit force any of my descendants to sacrifice their own children to Mammon.

TRUTH: This is about men controlling women and women being in collusion with those men. Adoption, as a dear friend of mine says, is "woman's inhumanity to woman."

TRUTH: We need to take a close look at where we are going with a lot of these state legislations. Someone is doing some manipulation and it isn't Natural Mothers.

TRUTH: If the church and the government get any closer, they are going to be attached at the hip and then every family, wed, unwed, poor, middle-class, will have to worry about keeping their children.

TRUTH: People just don't want to hear this, do they?