Adoption: A Loving Alternative?

"Adoption: a Loving Alternative" is a fairly popular pro-life slogan.  It assumes that an unexpected pregnancy offers two alternatives: kill your unborn baby or give it way, and suggest the later is the kinder, more loving choice.

Of course, the major facility with slogans such as this and the less subtle one it seems to have pretty much replaced: Adoption Not Abortion...is that both leave out the most naturally loving choice: supporting mothers to in need of assistance keep and, raise, and care for their children as family unit. This is clearer still in the latest form of this slogan: Consider Adoption, a loving alternative to parenting."

One blogger asks at 411Mommy if this doesn't imply that that parenting is a non-loving option?  Is that not it's subliminal intent?

Yet if adoption is such a loving choice, why is it almost always a last resort after those who want to be parents try every other methods they can possibly afford first, second and third?  Why do people who discover difficulty conceiving or carrying pregnancies tie themselves in knots and undergo painful and emotionally draining procedures and surgeries before resorting to adoption is it such a "loving alternative" to expectant mothers?  If it truly were a "loving alternative" why wouldn't more people simply go that route first?  Could the answer be because being a mother is a natural process and women naturally desire it? Could it be that not men and women prefer to raise children who are their flesh and blood?  Why can't all who accept that without hesitation as a given, recognize the converse is also true...that it is far more natural and desirable for mothers to raise their won babies than for strangers to do so and that children would also prefer to be raised by and live in a family with their blood kin...people who look like them?

Put another way, if adoption is such a "loving alternative" to parenting why doesn't anyone who is able to have more than one child give one away?  After all, every young expectant mom is told of all the loving "deserving" couple out there who are just dying for the child they cannot have themselves and to give them one would be a loving choice, the most special gift of all...

Or...perhaps "adoption is a loving alternative to parenting" means that adoptive parenting is alternative parenting?  Do adopted children to receive alternative or substitute parents?  Is adoption not a substitute for the real thing,like baby formula which always compares itself to mothers' milk...this brand has all the nutrients of mothers' milk, while that brand is most "like" mothers' milk.  Yet none ARE mothers' milk, are they? All are alternatives; substitutes; stand-ins; replacements for mothers nature's most natural and perfect way.

Loving? Perhaps...but an Alternative!  


All throughout the 1970's as the hippie generation became the soccer moms of the day, Dena Dietrich starred as the forest matron, Mother Nature, in a series of successful 30-second commercials for Chiffon Margarine telling Americans that "It's Not Nice Too Fool Mother Nature."

In America today, it would be absurd to taut baby formula as the "loving" or preferred choice. It's almost immoral though Nestle and other manufacturers used to promote Enfamil and Similac (a name which says simulated lactation) and other baby formulas here in the 40's and 50's as the more efficient and sophisticated way. Bottle-feeding as soon after birth as possible fit well with Rosie the Riveter's campaign to get women into the workforce to replace their soldier husbands and still is promoted as optimal in other parts of the world.  

But today we still promote, encourage and advertise publicly and openly encouraging the separation of mothers and babies for profit, driven by a demand. We and pretend that the unnecessary and unnatural separation of mothers an babies - documented to cause both of them a lifetime of irreparable damage - is in their best interest just as we used to allow cigarettes to be advertised as making people cool, sexy, popular, desirable, powerful (like the Marlboro Man who died of lung cancer) when it was known to kill them after prolonged painful illness.