The Dobbs Decision: An Adoptive Mother’s Perspective

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.” —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

1. Megan

She was fifteen years old. It was just a hook-up at the local mall with the twenty- one-year-old ex-football star all the girls had a crush on. He left Megan with a venereal disease that took her to the doctor, where she found out she was preg- nant. It was too late for an abortion, and Megan was still living with her mom, who was already struggling to raise Megan and her two other children. With a husband in jail and a single not-very-substantial income, Megan’s mom made it clear to Megan that bringing another child into the picture was just impossible. Megan understood, but being realistic didn’t soothe her sadness. In a daze, attending school with other pregnant teenagers in an RV converted into a makeshift classroom tucked behind the main high school, she submitted, feeling her fate was out of her hands.

My husband and I met her and her family three months before Cassie was born. I returned and stayed in Texas for three weeks before the birth. Cassie’s birthmother Megan and I had talked on the phone, and Megan and her mother seemed delighted with the fact that Edward and I were professors and that we wanted an open adoption, with ongoing communication and visits. But when we all actually met, at the restaurant on the ground floor of the Embassy Suites, everyone was strained and frightened. Megan, buttoned up to her chin in a demure blouse, seemed to be concentrating all her energies on simply enduring, saying “thank you” when required, and producing an occasional wan smile. She seemed depressed. She wouldn’t look at me.

She was also angry. But I didn’t know that at the time. Like most adoptive parents, I was fumbling along, looking for rules that didn’t exist for situations that I was completely unprepared for. So I relied on Megan’s mother and the doctor who had passed our brochure on to them to lead the way. They reassured me that appearances to the contrary, Megan wanted the adoption, that she liked us very much, and that she was just nervous about meeting us.

2. Reality Check

It was what I wanted to believe, so I did. And so when Megan’s mom invited us to accompany them to Megan’s next sonogram and her doctor handed that precious photo to me, I took it, weeping with joy. I took my cue not only from the doctor but also from cultural imagery. After all, hadn’t I seen moments just like this in “Immediate Family” and all those Lifetime adoption movies?1

Megan had been silent throughout the sonogram. But as soon as the photo of Cassie was handed to me, she jumped up from the table, dressed hurriedly, and ran angrily out of the office to the parking lot and into her mother’s car, slamming the door behind her, refusing to talk to any of us. I ran after her and begged her to open the door, but she remained stony and stormy, her mouth set in an expression that I have since come to know quite well when our daughter gets in an angry mood. The next day, I took her to the mall, bought her Chik-fil-A sandwich (her favorite pregnancy meal) and tried to melt the ice, with no success. My husband and I left Texas shortly after that, and waited.

This was no Lifetime movie.

The sonogram, as our adoption counselor soon found out, meant a great deal to Megan. It was for her a concrete symbol and reminder of the fact that, although she was going to relinquish Cassie to me after her birth, during those nine months she was still her mother. She wanted us all to acknowledge that. Instead, we were treating her like a pregnant child.

I had many sleepless nights after that, and not only because I was afraid Megan would change her mind. I was haunted by her loss—by the violence life had done to her in not giving her the resources to raise her baby—resources, both emotional and material, that I had in such shameful abundance. One morning, in fact, sobbing to my husband that I couldn’t take Megan’s baby away from her, I al- most changed my mind myself. I was horrified at my past behavior at the doctor’s office. I had stood there conducting transactions over the prone, semi-undressed body of a silent, sad, and withdrawn young woman, and let myself be lost in the illusion that it was all okay because she was so young.

I immediately sent the sonogram back to her, express mail, with a note of apology, and an admission of my own cluelessness. It was a turning point in our relationship. I had acknowledged the sadness she was feeling. And my becoming Cassie’s mother no longer depended on either of us ignoring that sadness.

3. The Callous Indifference of Dobbs

“Less Abortion, More Adoption. Why is that so Controversial?”—Representative Dan Crenshaw, R, Texas.

Ah Dan, so unimaginative, so callous, so oblivious to reality!

But astoundingly, Crenshaw is only echoing the views of the so-called “conservative” members of the US Supreme Court, who argued, in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, that “modern developments” such as “safe-haven” laws (which allow mothers to drop their babies off at fire-stations or hospitals without fear of criminal prosecution) have rendered abortion unnecessary.

Samuel Alito, from the Dobbs decision: “A woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home.” And, not only that, but (praise be!!) she will also be helping solve a “supply problem,” as “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.”

I’m always surprised to see pictures of Alito. He’s actually a few years young- er than I—another Boomer, but of the right-wing backlash variety—but in my mind he is ancient, a relic who quotes, in Dobbs, from a seventeenth-century ideo- logue who uses religious tracts to justify his position on abortion. Even more surprising—as she has both been pregnant and has adoptive children—is Amy Coney Barrett’s support for the Alito position, as she argued during the Dobbs hearings: “Both Roe and Casey emphasize the burdens of parenting, forced motherhood . . . [and] the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy—why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem?”

Barrett is lucky, as I was, to have been on the privileged, receiving end of the adoption experience. That privilege doesn’t extend, however, to the ability to make birthparents “disappear” entirely. In my case, Cassie’s birth relatives have had an actual presence in her life. But even when adoptive parents don’t know (or perhaps, as is the case with some, don’t want to know) birthparents, most adoptive children at some point become curious about the circumstances of their adoptions, often perplexed as to why they were “given up.” I wonder what Barrett might have answered if asked this question. Surely it wasn’t: “Well, thanks to safe-haven laws, your birthmother knew she couldn’t be prosecuted.”

And when Barrett was pregnant herself, did she regard her own body as little more than protective padding and nourishment for a fetus? Or did she expect those who loved her to be tolerant and caring of changing moods and anxieties? Perhaps pregnancy didn’t affect her at all, perhaps she simply embraced the experience of being a fetal incubator. Whatever Barrett experienced or didn’t, to assert that safe-haven laws “take care of the problem” is to regard pregnancy as a less than fully human experience, to imagine the pregnant body as a “thing” (as de Beauvoir would put it) rather than a profoundly transformed way of “grasping the world” and one’s situation in it. This is true whether one has an “easy time” or suffers constant morning sickness—or worse.

The denial of reproductive freedom is thus both existential as well as political. It’s political in that it turns women into less-than-equal subjects under the law. (No one else is ever forced by the courts, who historically prize autonomy and bodily consent, to give over their body to sustain the life of another.) It’s existential not only in the fact that it deprives us of “choice” but turns the pregnant body into a numb and mute fetal delivery system, without human subjectivity, a provider of baby “stock.”

The Dobbs decision made it clear that the same conception of the pregnant body undergirds both the Alito/Barrett attitude toward adoption and their positions on abortion. And it’s not just dehumanizing of women (and transgendered individuals who become pregnant). Actually, the babies that are relinquished don’t fare much better. Before birth, when they are still fetuses, they are virtually “super-subjects” who have rights that supersede not just the rights of their mothers, but are more extensive than those granted to anyone else in our society. Who else besides the fetus can make a claim on another person’s body to operate as a life-support system for them? Even those who decline to take simple blood tests to determine their compatibility with a dying relative whose life their donation of blood or marrow might sustain cannot be forced to. Yet after birth, the fetus loses all its super-privileges, and becomes part of a dwindling “supply,” diminished stock for the market in babies. Pump up the supply, get them placed, and forget about them.

4. Postscript

However hard they try to deny us our personhood, we are humans, not things. And even the best decisions—which we all felt our adopting Cassie to be—do not magically banish loss and grief. When Megan came to visit months after Cassie’s birth, she held her tenderly and gave me a great gift: “I just love the way you and Edward talk to her.” But there were many times when I caught her gazing at Cassie with an expression that’s hard to describe. It was as though she was saying to her: “Beautiful Cassie, I wish I could have kept you. I’m so glad you have Susan and Edward. And I’ll always love you.”

Megan has since married and has two teenage children whom Cassie regards as her siblings—which they are. And if Megan had known about her pregnancy in time to have an abortion? This kind of “argument,” which gets implicitly trotted out on every anti-choice sign featuring a baby thanking her mother for not abort- ing her, is perverse. If Cassie had not been born, the entire course of all our lives would have been different, just as they would be if I had not had an abortion when I got pregnant in graduate after a reckless, ecstatic night with another student. I might have a forty- five-year-old son or daughter today, and I might be a grandmother. It’s insulting to me, to Megan, and to Cassie, to engage in this kind of hypothetical mind-game.

The reality is that Cassie, who it is impossible to imagine my life without, was born. And as over the years I recognize more and more of my stubbornness, my snarkiness, my iconoclasm, and my tender-heartedness in her, I also see Megan’s shyness, and the physical power and presence of her birthfather (who disappeared from the scene, as many birthfathers do, shortly after Cassie’s birth). She is my daughter, but they live in her body and through her body will forever shape her grasp of the world, her situation in it, and the “project” of her being.

We make choices, and our lives issue forward from them. That’s the right— and the burden—that comes with being human.

****************************************************************

A longer version of this was originally published in a special edition of Adoption and Culture: “We All Grieved: Abortion, Adoption and the Callous Indifference of Dobbs”

Works Cited

Alito, Samuel, et al. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. US Supreme Court, no. 19-1392, October Term 2021, 24 June 2022. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pd- f/19-1392_6j37.pdf.

Bordo, Susan. “All of Us Are Real: Old Images in a New World of Adoption.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 21, no. 2, 2022, pp. 319–31.

Crenshaw, Dan. “Less Abortion, More Adoption.” Twitter, 2 May 2022, 11:34PM. twitter. com/dancrenshawtx/status/1521332386184769541.

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. 1949. Vintage, 2011.

O’Dwyer, Jessica. “Amy Coney Barrett’s View: Adoption, Not Abortion.” Opinion: Letters.

The New York Times, 18 Dec. 2022. www.nytimes.com/2021/12/18/opinion/letters/ amy-coney-barrett-abortion-adoption.html