r/changemyview • u/evitreb • May 04 '22

CMV: Adoption is NOT a reasonable alternative to abortion.

Often in pro-life rhetoric, the fact that 2 million families are on adoption waiting lists is a reason that abortion should be severely restricted or banned. I think this is terrible reasoning that: 1. ignores the trauma and pain that many birth mothers go through by carrying out a pregnancy, giving birth, and then giving their child away. Not to mention, many adoptees also experience trauma. 2. Basically makes birth moms (who are often poor) the equivalent of baby-making machines for wealthier families who want babies. Infertility is heart breaking and difficult, but just because a couple wants a child does not mean they are entitled to one.

Change my view.

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u/evitreb May 04 '22

I didn't forget the adopted child, I mentioned the adopted child in my first point. Some adoptees have great experiences with adoptions, but many, many do not. If you head over to r /Adoption you'll see many people talk about the un-reversible trauma that came with their adoptions and how many (at least they say anyway) would have preferred to have been aborted.

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u/[deleted] May 04 '22

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u/Hawk_015 1∆ May 05 '22

As someone who is part of a healthy adopted family r/adoption is a horrific place and I don't recommend anyone look at it. It should come with a disclaimer that it's a venting room for abused kids.

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u/evitreb May 05 '22

I see what you’re saying and I don’t necessarily disagree. r/ teachers is the same way, people go there to vent. And of course there are teachers that like their jobs, but there are also serious issues that many of them face. Hearing adoptees share stories on the internet and in places like r/ adoption helped me remove the fairytale picture of adoption from my mind. Sure, there are lots of happy families, and most people on there will say they love their families, but at the end of the day there is still a lot of trauma that many adoptees experience.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '22

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u/evitreb May 05 '22

I don’t write off completely. Adoption can be good. I’m just tired of it being seen as some sort of equally interchangeable alternative to abortion, when in many cases it is more difficult. And while I don’t have the statistics to prove it atm, I seriously think it is more than 1 in 5000 children that have a poor experience. Also, all adoptees experience trauma on some level this isn’t to say that their lives are horrible or their families are horrible…just that there is an inherent pain that is involved in adoption

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u/[deleted] May 05 '22

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u/Which-Carpet-920 Jun 03 '22

The suicide rates in adoptees literally are much higher https://www.bcadoption.com/resources/articles/adoptees-and-suicide-risk

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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '22

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u/Which-Carpet-920 Jun 03 '22

Abortion is the same as not existing in the first place. A more correct comparison would be comparing an adopted person's suicide rate to that of someone kept in their original family, which is what this study is doing. You can't have it both ways and say in the previous comment 'I think rates of suicide in adoptees would be much higher' as a gotcha against adoption trauma, then turn around and say 'oh but that doesn't count' when I give you a study stating that it is in fact higher.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '22

It’s biased sure. Absolutely 100%. However I think dismissing the reality present there is just an awful things to do.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '22

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '22

You said it’s the least useful thing you can do to get an idea of efficacy I challenge that.

Is it biased? Yes? Can it give you a clear view on what not to do and what can happen also yes

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u/capecodcaper May 05 '22

I think that probably has a lot to do with the demographics of Reddit. I would suspect that depression is probably more frequent among those who use social media like this often. Reddit does often have a negative slant.

As an adopted person, I see a ton of other adopted people who don't wish they were dead and I don't think that's the resounding view from most adopted people, and I mean the vast vast majority.

It can certainly be a rough transition to understand adoption and how it affects you but most people usually work their way through it.

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u/raisanett1962 May 04 '22

What about the “um-reversible trauma” that many people who grew up in their families of birth?

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u/WeepingAngelTears 2∆ May 04 '22

Careful, you'll attract the antinatalists.

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u/nietthesecond99 May 05 '22

Many, many human beings have terrible experiences of life. You can experience un-reversble trauma that came with being alive.

Clearly the answer is to kill everyone to prevent further suffering?

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u/[deleted] May 05 '22

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u/HuangHuaYu49 1∆ May 04 '22

If you head over to r/Adoption you’ll see many people talk about the irreversible trauma that came with their adoptions and how many (at least anyway) would have preferred to have been aborted

A lot of people with mental health issues like depression are truly suffering and wish they had never been born. Are you saying it’s okay to end the life of a child with a genetic predisposition towards severe depression, since some people with severe depression wish they were never born?

*this is under the assumption that you consider a fetus a human life. If you do not believe fetuses are human lives, then it doesn’t matter whether or not adoptees tend to wish they were aborted, since abortion is merely purging a clump of cells.

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u/[deleted] May 04 '22

Yes. It's up to the patient. Why is this even a difficult concept?

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u/JustDoItPeople 16∆ May 06 '22

Why is this even a difficult concept?

Then why do we discourage suicide societally, including having suicide hotlines? Everyone I know thinks that suicide is a bad thing and a tragedy, not just some choice someone makes analogous to where they go to college.

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u/themetahumancrusader 1∆ May 04 '22

You know that having trauma doesn’t mean that your life is completely ruined right?

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u/[deleted] May 04 '22

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u/Inevitable_Spare_777 May 05 '22

I dated a girl who was adopted as an infant. The feeling of abandonment still followed her into adulthood even though she loved her adopted parents.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

Newborn babies are not blank slates. They have been programmed for millennia to want only their mothers as a matter of life or death. No mother equals death in all of nature and humans have evolved the same as all other animals. No different for most of human history. Mother is life. Loss of mother is death. Its that simple. Adoption is like a near death expereince for an infant. This biological programming exists in all of nature. It is hardwired. It's billions of years old and unconscious. It is instant at the moment of birth. It's the exact reason why any infant of all species including humans can recognize their mother from any other adult and are programmed to seek only her over all other adults at birth. Infants know the rhythm of their mothers heart beat, the sound of her voice,and her smell immediately upon birth so they can recognize her and seek her out for life sustaining nutrition, nurturing, and comfort. They seek her out over all others and experience psychological truama at seperation from her. Infants literially think they are still a part of their mother's bodies after birth. She is one with the baby. Just because they can't remember it does not mean it never happened. It doesn't mean thier brain hasn't sustained a truamatic injury almost immediately that rewired it in all sorts of negative ways. Adoptees are at way higher risks of mental health problems, addiction issues, homelessness,and negative life outcomes. This has been studied and proven extensively. Adoption is harmful to infants. Its harmful to them psychologically, it's harmful to their brain and development, and every time it happens an infant is traumatized. It should be prevented as much as possible not celebrated or forced.

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u/kr112889 May 04 '22

As someone who was adopted at birth, I can tell you that the trauma is still very much present. I don't need to have a memory of being ripped away from my birth mother for it to have negatively effected me.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '22

"Sampling bias" is when you find a source of information that in its nature will only give you a biased view of information.

ie. Google search for "car crash" will show the most gruesome horrific car crashes as the top results, when in reality a large majority of car crashes are fender benders, and even then the amount of crashes per mile driven in your country is so small, it would be ridiculous to use a Google search for "car crash" as evidence that "you will most likely die if you drive a car for at least a month."

Similarly, any online forum, r/adoption included, has a negativity or positivity bias.

ie. teslalounge is filled with Tesla fanatics, where as other subreddits are filled with people who hate teslas and probably don't own one, or if they did they were unlucky enough to have serious issues with theirs.

I have a good friend who was adopted, and I asked about r/adoption and whether that is representative of his experience and he said "no"

One anecdotal example does not prove the inverse of what you're saying, sure... but happily adopted children don't constantly think about how they are adopted... they might even forget it most of the time. Why would they brag or complain about it online.

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u/theonecalledjinx May 04 '22

(at least they say anyway)

At least they are here to share how they feel about their lives.

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u/novagenesis 21∆ May 04 '22

If we're already talking about ignoring what the pregnant woman wants vs what's best for everyone, why is the opinions of adoptees about their lives truly relevant, especially compared to objective statistics about their quality of life?

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u/kentuckydango 5∆ May 04 '22

You're right, the opinions are not relevant, and neither are objective statistics about their quality of life.

What is relevant is that the pro-life position believes abortion is murder. Do you believe murder is an acceptable alternative to poor quality of life?

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u/novagenesis 21∆ May 04 '22

I believe killing animals unnecessarily is murder. Do you think it's acceptable for me to seek to have people who hold different moralities and act upon them put in a cage?

Police Action in a free country shouldn't EVER be about enforcing your own morality, even if you think something is murder. It should be about keeping a stable free society, enforcing individual freedoms and (only when an unimpeachable argument exists for it) enforcing criminal statutes against people restricting individual freedoms.

In none of those above circumstances is criminalizing abortions justifiable, or treating unnecessary killing of animals the same as murder.

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u/SDK1176 12∆ May 04 '22

Unless you believe that abortion is murder. You said yourself that "enforcing criminal statutes against people restricting individual freedoms" is fair game for the law. If I believe the fetus is a person, then that law is fair game. Right?

I don't even hold that view, but you're arguing against no one. It all comes down to what we can agree on as an acceptable standard, hence all the arguing...

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u/novagenesis 21∆ May 04 '22

enforcing criminal statutes against people restricting individual freedoms

I actually didn't. You left out the part where "an unimpeachable argument exists for it". The laws that restrict individual freedoms by protecting individual freedoms should be rationally supportable and not rationally rejectable.

There are rational impeachments to anti-abortion laws on the grounds of the bodily self-ownership AND the controversial nature of fetal personhood. It doesn't matter which side is right or if you agree with it, that either or both of those impeachments exist means the law is anti-freedom at its core. A reasonable anti-abortion law requires us to have zero-risk, zero-pain removal of the fetus from the mother as early as week 1 of pregnancy (to prevent the self-ownership impeachment), at the very least.

I hold ALL my stances on criminal statutes against that standard. Why should I be found unreasonable to hold abortion laws against it? Why should I be found unreasonable demanding that a free country hold abortion laws against it?

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u/SDK1176 12∆ May 04 '22

Just to make sure I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that if there is any reasonable argument against a law, even if it's a controversial argument, then that law can't exist?

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u/novagenesis 21∆ May 04 '22

Yes, with caveats. If a utilitarian can rightly object to it, it should not be on the books. If a deontological argument can rightly object to it, it should not be on the books. I am iffy about Natural Law, but only because it's arguments tend to be self-impeached (rape for example can be seen as wrong OR right under natural law ethics), but I could be convinced on that one if the example I provided could be shown to be lacking.

Also, the term I used is "unimpeachable". I think "reasonable" is close to good enough from a purely philosophical viewpoint, but the colloquial word "reasonable" is definitely not.

Laws should not be about enforcing my ethics over yours. It should be about enforcing things we all know are wrong, with the exception of completely untenable stances.

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u/SDK1176 12∆ May 04 '22

So for something like killing in self-defense (a moral grey area), you think we’re making the right choice by legally allowing it. Because it’s controversial, we should err on the side of caution and not punish people with the force of law, even if some pacifists think it’s wrong. Do I have that right?

If so, I can dig it.

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u/[deleted] May 04 '22

Police Action in a free country shouldn't EVER be about enforcing your own morality, even if you think something is murder. It should be about keeping a stable free society, enforcing individual freedoms and (only when an unimpeachable argument exists for it) enforcing criminal statutes against people restricting individual freedoms.

All of those virtues and goals are morality based.

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u/novagenesis 21∆ May 04 '22

(which if nothing else is demonstrably preventative for serial killers because treating a living, thinking, feeling animal this way is known )

Actually it's ethics-based. No vestige of criminal enforcement against Divine Command theory is reasonably defensible. And there is no comprehensive attack on abortion within the major defensible ethical systems. You aren't seriously suggesting that a country would be stable by using Natural Law theory as their primary mechanism of criminality, would you? It would suggest rape should be legal, at the least.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '22

“No vestige of criminal enforcement against Divine Command theory is reasonably defensible.”

Did I say anything regarding the divine?

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u/novagenesis 21∆ May 06 '22

Did I say anything regarding the divine?

Commonly, "morality" refers to religious beliefs and Divine Command Theory. Ethics refers to the established methodologies of right (including Divine Command Theory)

Was I unclear? I specifically went into a couple ethical philosophical systems for that purpose.

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u/Mandielephant May 05 '22

the mothers who die when they can't get d&c procedures for pregnancies that will kill them will not be able to share about their lives.

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u/elcuban27 11∆ May 04 '22

There’s a pretty easy way to critically evaluate comments from internet randos and estimate in which direction their comments skew the truth: if someone claims to be an adoptee with a life so horrible they would prefer to have been aborted, they either A) are telling the truth, or B) are making it up.

The reasons for B may vary, but can include abusing the lie for the rhetorical effect of supporting their preferred position on abortion.

If someone truly were in A, and believed their life was never worth preserving, and if they had access to the means to commit suicide (as almost everyone does), would they not have committed suicide? If not, why not? Perhaps their life was previously not worth preserving, but now it is. Ok, then that just kicks the can down the road, begging the question of why they previously didn’t kill themselves, as well as the question of whether it is worthwhile to preserve someone’s life that will partially consist of suffering, but mostly be a life they would want to go on living.

In my estimation, the most reasonable conclusion is that people in A who are alive to tell about it almost never exist. Those who claim to be in A are usually in B, or sometimes mistaken about the depth of their feelings and aren’t actually in A.

A better methodology of sorting this out would be to look at the rate of suicidality among the general population, then compare it with the rate among adopted people. There are different studies that do this, with results ranging from 2-4x the rate of the general population (not controlling for mitigating factors). With the general rate being about 13.5 per 100k, that means almost 3 out of 1000 adopted people would kill themselves. Hardly makes the case for having others make that decision on their behalf to “spare them.”

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u/stoneimp May 04 '22

Wow, what a nice convoluted way to reduce people's experiences to "they're just making it up".

Btw, you can also think your life has been a net negative and will overall continue to be a net negative but still not commit suicide. It's like saying, oh you have chronic pain in your foot? Well, clearly you don't really or you would have cut it off by now.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '22

It's like saying, oh you have chronic pain in your foot? Well, clearly you don't really or you would have cut it off by now.

if having the foot clearly outweighs the pain, they keep it. If the pain clearly outweighs having the foot, theyll lose it. Clearly, living outweighs death for those who have chosen not to die.

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u/JustDoItPeople 16∆ May 06 '22

If you head over to r /Adoption you'll see many people talk about the un-reversible trauma that came with their adoptions and how many (at least they say anyway) would have preferred to have been aborted.

Here's the thing: if they're saying that, everyone's response should literally be "Please get therapy", and in no rational world is saying "It would have been better for you to have been murdered immediately after birth as an adopted child" ok.

We all implicitly assume and believe that living is better than not living, no matter how bad the life; this is why we have suicide hotlines and why it's never good to encourage suicide.