They stood on the sidewalk, most of them elderly, all earnestly holding signs imploring young women to “Choose Life.” If you were driving through Philadelphia in the mid-1980s, perhaps you saw my adorable mug plastered on some of those signs.
I’m adopted. This has been a simple fact of my life for longer than I can remember, like having brown eyes or being an American citizen. No drama. No big family secret.
The author with her grandmother
I was also raised Catholic. Like my entire intensely Catholic family, my grandmother was passionately pro-life. On Saturday mornings, she would pack up stacks of homemade posters and stand along Roosevelt Boulevard advocating for fetuses. She had prints made of my preschool portraits and cut out dozens of copies of my face, sticking them to posters all bearing iterations of the message “Her Birthmother Chose Life.” On special occasions, she’d schlep on a tour bus to Capitol Hill or Harrisburg to implore her senator to vote pro-life. Sometimes she would take me with her, using yarn to make a sandwich board out of two posters, hanging my face below my face. Double impact!
My family is really, really pro-life. The thing is, I was too. When you’re completely immersed in the culture it seems so obvious that the question even sounds ridiculous. But as I grew up, I began to have strong feelings about autonomy. I no longer felt sure that life began at conception. I learned about rights, and inequality. And if that wasn’t enough to sway me into the pro-choice camp, I met my birthmom.
I found my birthmother shortly after I graduated from college, and for the most part it’s been a Hallmark movie ever since. Mary Jo is, perhaps, an even bigger bleeding-heart liberal than I am, a semi-reformed wild child, and a total holdover hippie Deadhead. But even knowing all that, I was still nervous to learn about her beliefs regarding abortion. Once upon a time, she must have declined the option, and I wasn’t sure what that meant. Like me, she had grown up in an intensely Catholic family and been schooled by nuns through 12th grade. I wondered if she ever believed it was an option for her at all.
We rehash the story of my adoption often, the way friends retell the same party stories over and over again. She was a freshman in college, so afraid to tell her parents she was pregnant that she simply didn’t until it was time to go to the hospital. (There’s a lot you can hide behind generous boobs, baggy shirts, and the idea that the Freshman 15 could be the Freshman 40.) She told me that her birth plan was to go to the Jersey Shore over the summer and have me there, away from her parents. But I arrived earlier than planned (possibly the last time this could ever be said about me), and so after being in labor at home for some ridiculous number of hours, she finally woke her father to take her to the hospital. Surprise!
As MJ and I got more comfortable with each other, I finally asked if she had ever considered not going through with the pregnancy.
There was a pause. “I did,” she answered.
“Good.” I nodded.
My birthmom is 100% pro-choice. Abortion wasn’t the right choice for her, but she had a choice. The decision to carry her pregnancy to term was a separate one from her decision to parent or place me for adoption. Pro-lifers often tend to set up a false dichotomy, with adoption as the selfless alternative to abortion, but for many birthmothers, they are two different decisions. For my birthmom, adoption was not the alternative to abortion; it was the alternative to raising me herself. When we talk about abortion, she is adamant that she would never take that choice away from another woman. She felt that way before getting pregnant, and the experience did not change her mind — it strengthened her resolve.
The author with her birthmom
When pro-life people voice concern for mothers, they usually focus on the emotional consequences for some who choose to terminate their pregnancies. They rarely talk about the emotional consequences for those who give up babies for adoption. I think it’s getting better — there are more resources for birthmothers now, more open adoptions. But my birthmom had a really, really rough road after my adoption, and she is one of the success stories. Mary Jo watched her friends from a support group fall away as she struggled through addiction and depression.
Over the years, I have met some of the friends and family who saw her through the worst, and the relief I see in them is a hint as to how bad it got. They look at me like I am the cure they prayed for, and love me at first sight because she loved me so much it almost killed her to give me up, and now she is all right. It’s a lot to live up to.
Of course, many birthmothers don’t go through what MJ did. There isn’t one uniformly perfect or terrible solution for every unplanned pregnancy. There are only choices, and figuring out which is the best for each person.
My grandmother was well-intentioned; I know that. Standing with a little girl on the side of a twelve-lane highway, I am certain she believed we were saving lives and souls. She emphasized the choice my birthmom made, a vein of guilt behind it: “You wouldn’t abort this cute face, would you?” I know she hoped that abortion would be illegal again in her lifetime. It was not until after her death that I began to test the limits of my own beliefs.
In a religion class, the nun with whom I was tentatively debating asked, “Well, Elizabeth, aren’t you glad your birthmother chose life?”
Yes. Yes! I am so glad to be in the world. But I wouldn’t want it to be because my birthmom had no other options.
Today MJ talks flippantly about the things that hurt her, turning her most vulnerable moments into anecdotes. (This is a genetic trait, I guess.) It has taken years, almost a decade now, to tease out tales of our years apart, and I am still not entirely sure about the timeline and the particulars. I don’t know if I ever will be. She is focused on our happy ending, our happy beginning, but I am well aware that there was a lot of story that came before. I am not to blame for any of that pain, but I am, in the most basic sense, responsible for a lot of it. This is not to say I feel guilty about it, but I am aware of its weight.
And she chose it. She felt pressure from her family, certainly. She found a priest by her hospital bed several hours after I was born, informing her that adoption was the right choice for me. But however imperfect her options were, she had them.
I hate the idea that my life is trotted out as an example of why we should take these options away from others. It makes me feel like a prop in a twisted morality play. It is also profoundly disturbing to imply that adopted kids should feel lucky to be alive, which is exactly how it felt every time my grandmother (or religion teacher, or other various and sundry well-intentioned commenters) spouted off some iteration of “your birthmother chose life.”
I am as grateful that my birthmom chose to have me as any person can really be that, say, their parents had sex at the given moment they were conceived and then chose to have them — a different outcome is too abstract and difficult to fathom, and I would literally never have known the difference. I am also grateful that MJ fought to be here and to be healthy, that she had support to help her through the hard times, and that we have so many years ahead of us. My birthmother chose life for herself, and that is the choice that has made my actual life better.
This is so great!
This is an issue close to my heart, so thank you so much for sharing your story. And, Nikki, thank you for choosing to run this piece and others like it this month.
This sums up my feelings on this issue much better than I ever do on my own. Thank you. My story is fairly similar except I haven’t met my birth mother. She was devoutly Catholic, already a mother 6 times over, and in the middle of a divorce. She told my adoptive mother that she had considered abortion and had chosen against it because of her beliefs. But she CHOSE. So many people say, “Isn’t it a good thing your birth mom chose to have you?” And I think that it is, but I think it means much more to me that she chose to do it. Being devoutly Catholic I’m sure there was outside pressure that informed her decision to a large degree. But whenever my adoptive mother told me that my birth mom loved me and just couldn’t raise me, the idea that she had chosen helped me to believe it.
Exactly! If it were forced on her, I can’t imagine the burden I would feel!
That’s the bit that boggles me. Like, how is, “Aren’t you glad your mother was legally forced to carry you to term against her will?” substantially different from asking someone who was conceived during a sexual assault, “Aren’t you glad that someone […]” (I am leaving the rest of that sentence unsaid because I think it’s too awful even to type out.) How could anyone want a child to be grateful that that burden was placed on their mother? Who would put that burden on a child?
I feel that this is probably part of the centring of adoptive parents’ experience that has been written about on the Toast before, especially by Nikki. It’s not really about the gratitude of the child; it’s the child being required to parrot and validate the gratitude of the adoptive parents and wider family. I guess I find it easier to get my head around a purely spiritual idea that abortion is a sin than one which relies on that emotional appeal of “We are so happy in our daughter that we would like more women to be forced through pregnancies so other families can enjoy our happiness too.”
“For my birthmom, adoption was not the alternative to abortion; it was the alternative to raising me herself.”
Gut punch. WOW. How awesomely succinct and clear. I can’t believe I never connected it that way before – you are SO RIGHT. Thank you for this wonderful viewpoint.
This is incredible; especially that last line. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
When pro-life people voice concern for mothers, they usually focus on the emotional consequences for some who choose to terminate their pregnancies. They rarely talk about the emotional consequences for those who give up babies for adoption. I think it’s getting better — there are more resources for birthmothers now, more open adoptions. But my birthmom had a really, really rough road after my adoption, and she is one of the success stories. Mary Jo watched her friends from a support group fall away as she struggled through addiction and depression.
Oh my goodness. I’m a adoptee, from the 80s, in Philadelphia, from Catholic social services. So, hi, alternative self! This is, to the letter, exactly how I feel about all of this.
I am also so aware of the weight. My birthmom will mention her “lost years” and it’s hard not to feel guilty–but of course I have nothing to do with it. Except I have everything to do with it.
On one hand I want to share this far and wide, and on the other hand, I don’t want to rock the social media boat with such an intimate thing.
Thank you for sharing this–you put into words so eloquently what I feel to be true.
Love this! “Pro-lifers often tend to set up a false dichotomy, with adoption as the selfless alternative to abortion, but for many birthmothers, they are two different decisions. For my birthmom, adoption was not the alternative to abortion; it was the alternative to raising me herself.” Well put. And also THIS, from a fellow Catholic-schooled adoptee who heard the same thing too many times to count: “It is also profoundly disturbing to imply that adopted kids should feel lucky to be alive.”
Thank you for writing this nuanced, thoughtful essay. My reaction to people who posit adoption as a “solution” to the Horrible Abortion is often so knee-jerk I disengage instead of trying to explain, and your essay does such a good job of explaining why you can be thankful for a specific choice without being obligated to be a proponent of pro-life.
Thank you! Loved your piece on toxic gratitude!
As another fellow adoptee who was raised extremely pro-life (and is now very grateful for a more nuanced view of bodily autonomy), thank you for writing this. I haven’t yet had the courage to ask my birth mother about that pivotal decision, but I look forward to that day.
Thank you for writing this and sharing it here!
I am not adopted. But my mother had a lot of trouble conceiving, and was starting to look into adoption when the pregnancy that eventually became me began. She also was a pastor. She also was counseling people who were pregnant and weren’t sure whether they wanted to be. If someone determined that they wanted to carry the pregnancy to term, she helped them find the resources to do so. If someone decided that they wanted to terminate the pregnancy, she wrote them the referral that they needed (which I think may have been a legal requirement at that time, in that state?).
Someone asked her, “How can you go into a meeting with a pregnant teen, knowing how much you’ve wanted to have a baby and how difficult it’s been to start and maintain a pregnancy, and let her decide to abort? And Mom said something like, “I’m married. I’ve been through college and seminary. I am not going to get fired for being pregnant, or for taking maternity leave. I have determined I can financially afford a child. I have supportive relatives. People are excited for me. It is a good time in life for me to be pregnant and to parent. That’s not the case for everyone.”
I love this about her.
This is an awesome story. I feel like the fact that a member of the clergy would actually write referrals for abortion makes it even more awesome. To sum up, I really like your mom. She seems awesome.
I really like her, too! 🙂
That is worldclass Adulting, the empathy and ability to separate the needs of self from the needs of others. #doingitright
My husband and I are dealing with infertility and wanting to raise a child, and I have been asked this very thing. My response is kind of, “that’s the point of pro-choice, my desire to raise a child shouldn’t control some other woman’s ability to choose.” The worst (ok, one of the worst) one is when people say, “but doesn’t it make you mad?” Ugh. No. I have plenty of other things to be mad about. (and then I run away after punching their nose and setting off a smoke bomb)
I have a daughter now, but for a long time we thought it wasn’t going to happen and I found the idea that it would have an impact on my feelings about abortion baffling. CHOOSE. CHOICE. If anything, it just showed me how intensely personal and deepseated and not-rationally-chosen my feelings about having a child were, and how could I use something so intensely personal to make a decision about how someone else should feel?
I hope things work out for you, in whatever way.
I am so glad to be in the world. But I wouldn’t want it to be because my birthmom had no other options.
yes! this is just perfectly put.
Thank you so much for writing your story, and your birthmom’s story! Amazing and powerful.
Thank you so much for this. I have gotten the “aren’t you glad your mom didn’t abort you”–mostly as a child, as some really poorly considered way of instilling anti-abortion sentiment. My mom was very young and not terribly ready to have a kid when she had me. Abortion was not really on the table, morally, because of her religious family. But, the more pregnant my mom was with me, the less she found she was able to consider putting me up for adoption. My mom kept me at great personal cost, but she thought the cost was greater to her to give me up, at least by the time I was born.
People give me a weird face when I say this, but I am pro-choice precisely because of my background, and I am firmly of the opinion that it would have been a totally valid and justified choice for her to have had an abortion. As far as my existence goes, you can’t regret never having existed, by definition. As far as hers goes, it would have likely been far more safe and far less awful if she didn’t have me. I really wish she hadn’t been held hostage my only potentially “cute face” and I really wish no one required me to be grateful that this happened to her.
Thank you for this piece. Most of the other birthmothers I know personally are pro-choice (as am I); we can’t imagine having what we went through forced on someone. I grieved so hard after the placement that I fell apart–I started hearing phantom baby cries–it was a pain that I could not have imagined. Abortion wasn’t a choice that I made for myself, but as a devout Catholic myself, I am horrified by the idea of taking that choice away from another woman.
Thank you for writing this!! I also wonder about my Catholic biomom. I’ve been debating whether or not I want to reach out to her after discovering recently she did register for with the agency for potential contact. I worry about the answer. I find I’ve created my own idea of what her reasons would be – don’t we all craft a fiction for ourselves in lieu of answers? I’m glad that things worked out so well for you, and I nodded a lot during this article.
such a heartfelt piece – thank you so much for writing it
I had one abortion and two children, and I am so so grateful I had a choice for each one of those.
Yes! Thank you! I only recently made contact with my birth mother, and she did mention that she considered abortion when she was pregnant with me. It broke my heart the way she told me, as if it were something she were ashamed of. I was relieved to hear it, actually, for this very reason. She chose to have me, it wasn’t forced on her. Thank you for explaining this so clearly! I am so loving these essays this month!
Thank you for this article. I was adopted long ago, in the early 60s. My adoptive family was horribly abusive, and most of the extended family saw my brother and me as outsiders who should be grateful. When I met my birthmother in the 90s, we tried hard to make it as glorious as an Oprah episode, but it didn’t work out. So, as you might imagine, the romanticism pro-life people like to propagate is particularly galling. Am I glad to be alive? Sure. Would I have known any different if my mother had aborted me? No. And in fact, it might have been the better decision.
I was raised Catholic in the 60’s and 70’s, but I never heard abortion discussed. I became pro-abortion (also pro-choice with the belief that abortion is the morally better option) in part because of my Catholic upbringing. We were taught to care about the poor, the sick, the downtrodden. Love others as yourself. Since there are 7+ billion of us on a planet that can only sustain about 2 billion people in the long term, creating more of us just seems entirely self-centered and mean. I wish more people understood that when a wonderful person exists because their mother did not choose abortion, someone else just as wonderful is denied the chance to exist. I am able to exist because my ancestors wiped out the Native Americans. Resources are limited. If you spend them raising children, they are not available for others.
Thank you for this.
I found this article on Facebook, having been shared by the man who adopted the child of myself and my girlfriend, at the time. We are all very close, extended family, and despite my life and that of the Birth Mother being still sort of trainwrecks (why we chose Not to try to care for a child on our own), we are always welcome as family members and influences on the life of the child we brought into the world, and allowed a loving couple the ability to rear as their child. She is happy, healthy, and adored by dozens.
But abortion was a very real option.
Since there was very little stigma around the option of abortion for myself and Marie, (the birth mother) and very little…pressure to make a decision one way or another, we were permitted to contemplate with reason and care what we should do about the tissue twitching to life in Marie’s womb. We decided that, in our case, with no medical or social disasters imminent on childbirth, we could easily carry the child to term, therefore contributing, cosmically, to the Happiness of no fewer than 5 human beings, wherein with abortion that Happiness, or more likely simply Relief, would only be known by two, Marie and I. So we were able to calmly and rationally choose to contribute the potential happiness of the childless yet deeply loving adopting couple, and that of a brand spanking new human being. Whennseen upon this scale, it was an easy decision. The alternative being my and Marie’s relief, and a scrap of tissue decomposing back into earth so near the miracle of life.
It was the availability of this Choice that allowed us to weigh our prospects in the most personal, meaningful way we could. As naturally rebellious types, I know for certain that in a world where we were stripped of choice, Marie and I would express our independence by rebelliously pursuing an illegal abortion, just to prove that we are in control of our lives, and not beauracrats who know nothing of our lives or situations.
Sorry I ramble, I am just so grateful to have read your article. See, the thing is, once I manage to pull my life together (I’m still a bit of a mess) I will love to lend my strength and talents to a movement drawing awareness, in a wholly rationa, responsible, and compassionate way, to the beauty of the Open Adoption alternative, a brilliant 3rd alternative to the “raise a child I am not ready for” vs “abort a life for no reason beyond convenience”, and in fact a radiant alternative to casting your child into the system of Catholic or Government organized adoption. The personal search and connections created in the Open Adoption process are rich, and have the potential to grow families exponentially, allow birth parents the comfort of knowing the sorts of person caring for their offspring, and to customize the level of involvement in the child’s life. I feel I am poorly articulating the virtues, but they are incredible. And they are most valuable in a world where we are let to choose our response to sparking life in our indiscretions… The beauty of Choosing Life is stripped if we are not allowed to Choose. And the nuances of a mother’s life are so complex at the time of an unplanned pregnancy that to endeavor to quantify every instance where abortion is ” acceptable” from a legislative level is a presumptuous and impossible venture. We can break the dichotomy of Abort or end up with a child I cannot cafe for far easier with a focus on the rich and rewarding potentiality of adoption, and I personally feel like the newer system of Open Adoption is the most radiant 3rd alternative we have. I would love to see a massive campaign that shows the joyful potential of this option…
Wow. I hope you do get your life together and go on to have children that you can raise. You have much love and insight to share.
So if I have love and insight then I should create a brand new human being to share them with? What about helping humanity by sharing them with some of the 7.3 billion people who already exist?? I bet I could find a few people that could use a bit of love and insight. Dear Ja, I hope you will continue to enlighten us with your interesting and well written posts, rather than spend your time raising yet another child on this overburdened planet.
I know a woman who had an open adoption. The adoptive parents moved to Canada and did not continue their legally-obligated contact. The woman I know does not have the resources to fight them. I’m glad that open adoption worked for you, but one has to be careful. Couples who are desperate for a child do not consider the desires of the birth mother.
Thank you. I’m a birthmother who also considered abortion. Bonnie is 34 now and we have a relationship. Having a choice meant everything to me.
This beautiful essay hits close to home for me. My mother, who recently passed away, had several health complications due to Type I diabetes and was told that she had the choice to not carry her pregnancy to full term so that she could live. She chose to give birth to me anyway, even though I was born 3 months premature and spent that same amount of time in the ICU developing my respiratory system (I'm fine now, btw).
I know what it meant for me to give birth to me and I'm grateful. And I know she'd want any other woman to have that same choice because not everyone is capable of handling pregnancy or raising a child, whether because of health, poverty, or other issues. So thank you for writing this story and bringing that argument to light.
I found my birth mother when I was 40. She said that very thing to me directly: “You know, I CHOSE to have you. I didn’t have to”. It actually sounded threatening. I felt like I was supposed to say “Thank you”, but I didn’t say anything. People are weird. I hope I don’t say heart changing things to my kids. Being given up for adoption has shaped my relationships and life. In the end, I believe I was raised by the right people. I also have no desire to tell other women what they should and shouldn’t do with their bodies and lives.
To quote Tamora Pierce ‘When [people say a knight’s job is all glory], I laugh and laugh and laugh. Often I can stop laughing before they edge away and talk about soothing drinks’
That’s my reaction when people ask if I’m grateful my birth mother chose not to abort me.
Because I wasn’t adopted as a baby, I was adopted as a traumatised eight year old out of foster care. Shit which happened to me prior to being removed from my abusive bio parents and prior to my being adopted has fucked me up for a long time. So yeah, if my bio parents had decided to abort me I wouldn’t be alive, but I also wouldn’t have had to go through that. When I say that I’m not usually thinking about suicide, but occasionally musing on non-existence is oddly calming.
Oh and when people ask my mom when she found out she couldn’t have kids the look she gives them is hilarious. It was always made clear to us that we were not an alternative to ‘real’ kids, that she and my dad chose to adopt us with all our issues and everything.
So yeah, I’m staunchly pro-choice because I’m an adoptee.
Thank you for this. I have always been on the side of legal abortion. However, I did get pregnant out of wedlock and like your birthmother, I decided not to have an abortion. I still want abortion to be legal, safe and available, even though it was not the right thing for me. I’d like to add that one thing that is so often forgotten in the falsely dichotomous arguments of pro-life/pro-choice is the reality that – regardless of when you believe life begins – wherever abortions are illegal, abortions do not stop. I read somewhere that in Brazil where abortions are illegal, there are still millions of abortions performed. That’s a whole lot of extra-legal, potentially fatal to the mother operations going on. Illegality is not stopping abortions.