As I began reading "The baby I turned away" by Jessica Berger Gross I thought it was SATIRE!
Jessica tells her miscarriage and continued attempts to become pregnant, and finally her conclsuion to adopt because of her "need" of a baby....but not an open adoption, because she "couldn't handle" "ongoing contact with my child's birth mother." (Is it becoming obvious why I thought this was a put on?).
So she scans the other sources and decides on India because she had long "romanticized about the country and because she did YOGA! (I am NOT making this up!) She begins to fantasize about going to pick up her new daughter while she'd be "dressed in an Indian blouse and worn leather sandals." She decides that she and her husband are "better people for having chosen adoption"! Chose? After not wanting to, but being unsuccessful at fertility treatments. And this "better person" talked herself out reading anything "more critical" or "complicated" about adoption!
In an expensive restaurant in India she thinks about the "ethical issues surrounding international adoption: the extreme poverty that causes girls and women to give up their babies and the global inequalities that lead those babies to homes overseas" and amits knowing that they were to "benefit from an unwed mother's impossible choice."
Her PRIME concern, however: "that we'd be matched with a child who wouldn't strike me as adorable. " That was because they had checked all the boxes and been assured that the child they were traveling to meet and take home was assured to be healthy.
As the title of the article reveals, the child, though adorable, did meet her requirments and was left in the orphanage that has already left the child manurished with failure to thrive. Probably better than having been taken here and then dumped in foster care or abused, for not meeting expectations.
But no need to cry for Jessica...she's now pregnant.
One can only hope for the sake of her unborn child that it is adorable, perfect, and perfectly healthy -- lest it too be rejected. Or is blood really thicker than water and are we made more accepting by our maternal hormaones and biological connectedness???
And when and why has it become fashionable for people like this to admit such a gross act publicly and seek pity, or even understanding?
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