Shotgun Adoption

[Joanne98]

Carol Jordan, a 32-year-old pharmacy technician, was living in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1999 when she became pregnant. She'd already decided against abortion, but she was struggling financially and her boyfriend was unsupportive. Looking through the Yellow Pages for help, she spotted an ad under "crisis pregnancies" for Bethany Christian Services. Within hours of calling, Jordan (who asked to be identified with a pseudonym) was invited to Bethany's local office to discuss free housing and medical care.

Bethany, it turned out, did not simply specialize in counseling pregnant women. It is the nation's largest adoption agency, with more than eighty-five offices in fifteen countries.

When Jordan arrived, a counselor began asking whether she'd considered adoption and talking about the poverty rates of single mothers. Over five counseling sessions, she convinced Jordan that adoption was a win-win situation: Jordan wouldn't "have death on her hands," her bills would be paid and the baby would go to a family of her choosing in an open adoption. She suggested Jordan move into one of Bethany's "shepherding family" homes, away from the influence of family and friends.

Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), the nonprofit pregnancy-testing facilities set up by antiabortion groups to dissuade women from having abortions, have become fixtures of the antiabortion landscape, buttressed by an estimated $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds. The National Abortion Federation estimates that as many as 4,000 CPCs operate in the United States, often using deceptive tactics like posing as abortion providers and showing women graphic antiabortion films. While there is growing awareness of how CPCs hinder abortion access, the centers have a broader agenda that is less well known: they seek not only to induce women to "choose life" but to choose adoption, either by offering adoption services themselves, as in Bethany's case, or by referring women to Christian adoption agencies. Far more than other adoption agencies, conservative Christian agencies demonstrate a pattern and history of coercing women to relinquish their children.

Bethany guided Jordan through the Medicaid application process and in April moved her in with home-schooling parents outside Myrtle Beach. There, according to Jordan, the family referred to her as one of the agency's "birth mothers"--a term adoption agencies use for relinquishing mothers that many adoption reform advocates reject--although she hadn't yet agreed to adoption. "I felt like a walking uterus for the agency," says Jordan.

Jordan was isolated in the shepherding family's house; her only social contact was with the agency, which called her a "saint" for continuing her pregnancy but asked her to consider "what's best for the baby." "They come on really prolife: look at the baby, look at its heartbeat, don't kill it. Then, once you say you won't kill it, they ask, What can you give it? You have nothing to offer, but here's a family that goes on a cruise every year."

Jordan was given scrapbooks full of letters and photos from hopeful adoptive parents hoping to stand out among the estimated 150 couples for every available baby. Today the "birthmother letters" are on Bethany's website: 500 couples who pay $14,500 to $25,500 for a domestic infant adoption, vying for mothers' attention with profuse praise of their "selflessness" and descriptions of the lifestyle they can offer.

Jordan selected a couple, and when she went into labor, they attended the birth, along with her counselor and shepherding mother. The next day, the counselor said that fully open adoptions weren't legal in South Carolina, so Jordan wouldn't receive identifying information on the adoptive parents. Jordan cried all day and didn't think she could relinquish the baby. She called her shepherding parents and asked if she could bring the baby home. They refused, chastising Jordan sharply. The counselor told the couple Jordan was having second thoughts and brought them, sobbing, into her recovery room. The counselor warned Jordan that if she persisted, she'd end up homeless and lose the baby anyway.

"My options were to leave the hospital walking, with no money," says Jordan. "Or here's a couple with Pottery Barn furniture. You sacrifice yourself, not knowing it will leave an impact on you and your child for life."

The next morning, Jordan was rushed through signing relinquishment papers by a busy, on-duty nurse serving as notary public. As soon as she'd signed, the couple left with the baby, and Jordan was taken home without being discharged. The shepherding family was celebrating and asked why Jordan wouldn't stop crying. Five days later, she used her last $50 to buy a Greyhound ticket to Greenville, where she struggled for weeks to reach a Bethany post-adoption counselor as her milk came in and she rapidly lost more than fifty pounds in her grief.

When Jordan called Bethany's statewide headquarters one night, her shepherding mother answered, responding coldly to Jordan's lament. "You're the one who spread your legs and got pregnant out of wedlock," she told Jordan. "You have no right to grieve for this baby."

Continued>>>
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090914/joyce

This is the complete article

[Tikki]

1. This has been going on for a very, very long time now....

I once suggested that wouldn't it be grand if these organizations like
Bethany Christian Services dedicated themselves and their volunteers helped to
make easier the lives of a single mother by dedicating their services to helping a crisis pregnancy mother
through pregnancy, labor, finding a home for mother and baby, helping with the bills and baby care and
babysitting when mother returns to work...
...but wait...babies are a commodity.:sarcasm:


I guess the only way to get attention and help from the public is to have more than five babies at a time.


Tikki

[Deja Q]

3. Seconded.

Babies are not a commodity. Jordan's emotions are not commodities. Mothers are not commodities. Places like Bethany are not commodities.

Since men are typically the pursuers, it'd be nice if he were found and paid his fair share. Life is not a commodity, but you still have to pay for it or else everyone else pays (in far worse ways, such as Jordan's situation.)

[Shallah Kali]

6. It looks in their mind the babies are the property of good 'Christian' parents not sinful single Mom

those who get pregnant outside of marriage deserve to suffer just like they deserve to get diseases because condoms are evil too. what was it that Sen. Brownback's aide said to Jeff Sharlet -

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2008/2353921.htm

It's one of the most dismaying tragedies in the fight against AIDS. Uganda was a country that had really turned around. It had a high AIDS rate, and through using this program had turned it around, had actually successfully rolled back the AIDS rate. But because it became so enmeshed with the American Christian Right, and the American Christian Right is part of President Bush's AIDS program, was able to put pressure on these countries to drop the 'C' from the ABC. So they still want Abstinence, they believe in abstinence, but they don't want Condoms. And indeed Uganda backed very sharply away from condoms, and as predictably as any scientist could have told you, the AIDS rate skyrocketed, and people are dying again. And the most horrifying part about that, for some of these people, that's not a problem. I spoke to Senator Sam Brownback about this, who has worked actually with Senator Clinton to change the laws governing US foreign aid to make it so that we can't give money to any organisation that works with prostitutes. The example Brownback's Chief Legislative Director gave me, he said he would rather a Thai prostitute die of AIDS than have her soul imperilled by using a condom. And it's just an absolutely horrifying vision of what the Gospel says.

I am adopted and know my birth mother. She went through agony, just went to pieces after giving me up as a teen. If there was welfare back then no one told her so she had a choice of living on the street or taking me home to the step-father from hell who abused her. There was a place the agency sent the mothers and I pray it was not like the one the lady in the story went too :* No woman should ever be forced to give up their child.

[Deja Q]

2. She may have spread her legs before wedlock (and relationships ARE best, period),

Jordan did not deserve that quote "You have no right to grieve..." or the pathetic attitude.

Indeed, stories like Jordan's are precisely why having a loving relationship is important. We'd end up with fewer cases like Jordan's.

Love and sex cannot be separated. Doing so only leads to this sort of incident, amongst scores of others. :(

Everyone can flame away; the story's tragic and most people aren't going to think of the big picture anyway...

[comtec]

4. this is just sick

I wish it could surprise me but nothing that has to do with the church surprises me anymore.
bunch of self centered, evil assholes they are.

[Chemisse]

5. That is sickening

I have the highest regard for a woman who gives up her baby for adoption. It is a selfless act. But the emotional consequences are profound, and nobody should ever be coerced into making that choice.

This all seems illegal, or it should be.

[alarimer]

7. Baby brokers, nothing more.

Irredeemably disgusting.

They need more white babies to sell.

[sfwriter]

8. Holy Crap

This is going up on my facebook this week.

I have a few anti-choice people who are always saying adoption is the best choice you obviously can't trust a mother out of wedlock.

It makes my skin crawl.