Is giving up a child for adoption giving or selfish?

Giving

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by Shannon Lawrence

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With options such as abortion or child abandonment out there, adoption is a wonderful choice to make for those who cannot keep a child for any reason. It allows a child to be placed with someone who cannot (or chooses not to) have a child of their own, someone who will love that child and provide more than just the basic needs. The alternatives are far worse, and adoption helps those on both sides of the issue by providing solutions both can live with. Rather than being kept in an unhappy home or killed before there has been a chance at life, a child can be given a new and better home.

There are many reasons someone might give a child up for adoption. Perhaps they are too young to have a baby. Maybe they simply don't want or don't like children. It could be that they can't afford a child or that they're in an abusive relationship and worry about the safety aspects of life with a little one. One could brainstorm a billion different scenarios that justify adoption. The sad thing is that all of the same justifications could be assigned to validating abortion, and that is exactly where the benefits of adoption come in. In many ways, it is far easier to go through with an abortion than to nurture a life only to ultimately give it away. To a lesser degree, this is also true of child abandonment, where a baby is left in a garbage can or a doorstep, though it is puzzling that someone would go through pregnancy and birth, only to leave a baby somewhere that cannot guarantee the safety, survival or placement of that baby.

Adoption and abandonment are not the only disturbing options in this discussion. Many children are kept by their birth parents, only to face abuse, neglect and mistreatment, sometimes resulting in their deaths. My husband was adopted out at five years old. It wasn't actually his mother and step-father who chose to do it, but his adoptive parents who demanded it. His mother was young and suffered from alcoholism; his father had disappeared when he was a baby. What his adoptive parents witnessed was a young child playing outside at all hours, being force fed pudding and Jell-o as his main form of sustenance, and overall being neglected. They approached his mother and gave her the option of giving him up for adoption to them or being reported for child neglect. His mother made the right decision (in this case) and gave him up for legal adoption to the people who became his new parents. His quality of life was greatly improved, he got a good education, and he was well fed and cared for. In his original home, he was just an inconvenience that got in the way of partying and cost far too much. Who knows what would have happened if he had stayed in that "home."

His story is a very minor story compared to the issues children face across the United States. In 2005, approximately 899,000 children suffered mistreatment, with 62.8 percent of them being neglected and the rest being physically, sexually or psychologically abused. Of these children, almost 1500 perished. These statistics are available in the 2005 "Child Maltreatment" publication put out by the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), but we hear stories about abuse all over the news on an almost daily basis. Most often, we hear of the ones who did not make it, though the numbers above show that the vast majority survive, at least physically. The psychological damage is impossible to accurately gauge.

For simplicity's sake, let's just look at those 1500 children who died. In their cases, would it have been better for them to have been given up for adoption? I believe everyone would agree that it would have been the better option, because those children would most likely be alive now, barring other crimes or accidents. Not only that, but their quality of life would most certainly have been much improved over what these doomed children dealt with before death finally claimed them. At the very least, they would have known love. Was it selfless of their parents to make the choice to keep them instead of giving them up for adoption? Not at all. In fact, it was probably the most selfish decision of their lives.

Someone who carries a child, takes care of themselves during the pregnancy, then gives the child up for adoption to a better home is entirely selfless. Making a decision like this must be incredibly hard. As a mother, I could not imagine going through the highs and lows of pregnancy, and the agony and beauty of birth, only to give that precious life away to someone else in the end. But many women make this choice over adoption or simple abandonment in order to give their children better lives in one way or another, and they don't have to make that choice. There are so many people out there who want a child to love and care for, who deserve to have children of their own, and they only have this ability due to the selflessness of these mothers who give such a large part of themselves in order to make it happen.

Children love blamelessly and without restriction. It only seems right that they have the same kind of love returned to them, and that they be given the chance for a better life. Every child has that right. Unfortunately, it can be far more work to carry a child and give it up for adoption, so these children must depend upon the selflessness of their mothers to provide a better life for them in any way available to them. Adoption is a giving thing for a mother to do, both for the adoptive parents and for that precious child. A mother should never be considered selfish for making this decision.

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