Unsung Heroes? --Then why did I feel like a slut?

Well, I just discovered what an unsung hero I am: I gave my daughter up for adoption! According to Gloria Whitcraft, director of Shepherd's Gate, a Lutheran adoption agency in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that is what my "selfless" act made me. Holy cow, I didn't know I was such a saint. Writing in the Fort Wayne, Indiana News-Sentinel, Ms. Whitcraft, says that women who turn over their babies to total strangers are making the"most loving and selfless things anyone could ever do."

Expletive! #@$!!!%$

If that's the case, then how come when I first met my daughter and we did some "play acting" about how she felt about being given up for adoption--excuse me, being made a part of an adoption plan--one of the first things she did is put her hands around my neck and pretend to choke me? If my decision was so loving and selfless, why wasn't she grateful? Answer me that, Ms. Whitcraft. My daughter was raised in a religious, stable, hard-working two-parent family of six in a middle-class neighborhood. She wanted for nothing materially. She had three brothers. She loved and relied on her adoptive mother. She even said she understood how she came to be given up to be adopted, but still--well, let's just say the girl had issues.

Ms. Whitcraft goes on to decry that often women who are surrendering their babies do not receive support from "family, friends and society" for considering such a terrific option. Progress! These family members sound like they have figured out what happens what someone is given up for adoption--the whole family loses a member, the first mother will most likely grieve all her life, and the kid...goes up to total genetic strangers who don't understand why he isn't a whiz in math like the rest of the family who scored perfect 800s in the math SATs. I know I'm getting a little cranky here, but the kind of BS that your editorial postulates is what is wrong today when adoption is considered simply an alternate way of making a family.

Although Ms. Whitcraft says she and her trusty band of adoption operatives never --no, non, nien, nyet, niec--never "pressure them into a decision" that leads to adoption, she is so gung-ho about the unsung heroes that we first mothers are, her words ring hollow. It's likely that as the number of selfless mothers goes down, Shepherd's Gate doesn't have enough sheep to tend, and then there goes her job. As for the prospective parents who don't want mothers pressured, I suspect that at least some of their magnanimity has to do with not wanting to have a mother who changes her mind and ends up in court fighting to get her child back. Look, I don't think every adoption social worker is Attila the Hun, or every prospective adopter a member of the hordes pillaging our young women for their babies, but I do not buy this kind of blatant advertisement to encourage adoption wrapped up in pious, self-righteous prose.

Ya' all might want to comment at the site of this nefarious editorial and leave us a word below. And thanks to Maybe for alerting us. Thanks