Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Whatever you think about contraception, abortion, or adoption you probably want to read a guest post from an anonymous birth mother over at Milissa McEwan at Shakesville.

It’s pretty hard to decide where to begin excerpting, and besides you should probably just grab a box of tissues (for tears) and a leather strap (for gnashing your teeth in fury) and read it yourself. It’s very powerful. And, judging from comments, a real eye opener for a lot of people.

The upshot is that for all the useless blather coming out of the “pro-life,” pro-adoption community they — surprise! — don’t give a rat’s butt about birth mothers after they’ve “relinquished” their newborns. There’s virtually no support, no encouragement, and pretty much zero follow-up or acknowledgment. Despite considerable evidence that it’s… persistently and systemically traumatic. (Trivia: virtually all “counseling” begins, and ends, with reassurances that having “replacement babies” as soon as… you’re old enough to get married legally, of course… will make it all grand again. Trivia: Up to 60% of birth mothers never voluntarily become pregnant again.)

I completely understand why the “pro-life” side of the aisle keeps their lip zipped about this — if word got out rates of voluntary relinquishment would plummet. (Especially today when the stigma of keeping a child is so much lower and the support infrastructure for doing it is… relatively anyway… so well developed.) I’m sort of curious why it’s such a surprise on the progressive, pro-choice side of the fence though.

I can’t be the only person in the blogosphere who knows someone who’s surrendered a child to be raised by strangers, or to know the effect it’s had on them.

There’s certainly room in the world for adoption, and I know some darn solid parents who’ve been conscientious and clear as you can possibly be. And some rock-solid reasons why it’s sometimes not only necessary but a good idea. But adoption being superior for the birth mother (and father?) Especially considering all the hand-wringing about abortion? Once again, here’s that link.

Via Echidne.

See also:

• Linking grief: abortion, adoption, miscarriage, stillbirth, infant mortality.

• Bridget Crawford: Krawiec on “Price and Pretense in the Baby Market”

Oh, and another excellent point by Andrea Zanin of Sex Geek — again specifically addressing ways for S&M community members to deal with abuse, but applicable way outside that single community.

2. Remember that submissives are not idiots. Anytime the idea of “protecting the poor helpless submissives / newbies” comes up, it makes my skin crawl. It is condescending and inaccurate to think that someone in the submissive or bottom role is any less likely to stand up for themselves than anyone else; any less likely to take proper precautions to protect themselves in the first place; and any less likely to know their limits, know how to defend themselves, and know how to make wise choices. They may be marginally more likely to find themselves in a vulnerable position within a scene, but this doesn’t make them airheads who can’t take a moment to think about relative risk and commonsense safety precautions.

She said it here.

What started out as just ferrying an out-of-town guest turned into an unexpected invitation to a dinner party the other night. One of the other guests was an MPA grad student who, among other things, spent a year as a caseworker working with traditionally underserved young, often undocumented women who were either pregnant or had very young children. She said the same thing I keep hearing over and over again from pretty much everybody who works with (instead of maybe tries to heroically “rescue”) new and prospective teen mothers.) Bottom line is same as Sexgeeks: they’re not idiots. In fact they’re often not just bright but very bright. To the extent there’s a problem it’s more often external to the young parents themselves.

Same with, oh, say, sex workers, undocumented immigrants, the impoverished, and other heavily “othered” demographics.

I might add that there are more than moral or ethical reasons for remembering that othered members of the “underclass” aren’t idiots, there are practical reasons as well. For instance they may not recognize themselves in our descriptions. They may resent our characterizations. And consequently they may not respond to our attempts at outreach… even, once burned, attempts that might actually be respectful and helpful.

So this evening I caught maybe the last 15 seconds of a public-radio story having something to do with a 14-year-old girl and her newborn daughter both in child-protective custody and… someone with a male name — the baby’s father? Her father? — on the lam. So that’s, like, literally all I know about it.

Except for one more thing. The last line mentioned that couples were coming forward with offers to adopt the baby, as if it was a good thing.

And it might have been. The 14-year-old mother might be in trouble herself. She and her infant might be in custody because the infant had been in jeopardy. That’s one of the consequences of knowing only a fragment of what could be a far more complex story.

But knowing no more than I did, it struck me as odd that couples were stepping forward to adopt the infant but not his or her mother.

And, again, maybe if I’d heard the story that would have made perfect sense. The mother could be in trouble with the law in her own right, she may have been an unsuitable mother as well as an unsuitable age, her health might be compromised… who knows.

So I won’t comment on that particular case…

But I wonder…

There are so many other very young girls who become pregnant, and so often (assuming she’s been prohibited from terminating the pregnancy or chooses to remain pregnant of her own free will) the assumed best thing is for her to give her baby up to one of those couples who are always so quick to volunteer. And maybe that often is the best bet… maybe it’s just a coincidence that those who long-ago surrendered their children of teen pregnancy are uniformly more wistful, more regretful than those who terminated their pregnancies instead. Maybe so.

And I don’t know, maybe the 14-year-old in the story, the one with all the couples lining up to “take” her baby should it be offered to them… or if not her then other girls like her…

Golly, maybe it would be nice if a few couples stepped forward and offered to adopt them both! Because goodness knows if someone, even a child, goes to all the trouble, the risk, the labor of having a child of her own, then would it be too much to ask to give her a home to raise her child in? I’d imagine quite a few have needed it.

And, I don’t know, I guess I’m also imagining that couples who look forward to adopting an infant child might not find it so tough to adopting an infant grandchild, and her young mother, instead.

I wonder if anyone’s offered in this case? My partner and I already have our hands full, and I can’t say without waking her to ask whether she’d consider adopting both rather than splitting parent and child. But after those few seconds of airtime I have to admit I’d think seriously about it, and I think other couples might as well.

I just wonder if its come up before and if so how it’s worked.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, speaking of a recurring complaint about hormonal contraception, puts the issue into a perspective that was very, very common back in the days before Roe v. Wade that we seem a little more confused about…

[T]he real side effects of the pill have a genuine benefit over the alternative. (Remember: Forefront of mine. We’re talking about the option between pill and pregnancy, not just pill and not-pill.) Minor weight gain is a highly touted side effect of the pill,* but major weight gain is a side effect of pregnancy. But even if you suffer really severe consequences, you can get un-pilled pretty rapidly by not taking them. To un-pregnant yourself, you have to engage in an invasive medical procedure and/or wait nine months to push out a baby in a manner that’s hard on fully grown women, and much, much harder on younger women. What bothers me about a lot of the hand-wringing over the pill from women who’ve experienced side effects is how condescending it is to the rest of us, like we’re too damn stupid to understand what they figured out, which is that if the pill starts to bother you, you have the option to go back to the doctor and either change prescriptions or change methods. The notion that taking the pill once locks you into a lifetime of it is insulting. You don’t see that kind of, “Oh my god what will you do if you have side effects? Surely you can’t go back to the doctor and manage the side effects!”-type thinking with any other drug. The lurking sense that side effects is a biological punishment for slatternly behavior is hard to scrub off.

She says it here.

“...the option between pill and pregnancy, not just pill and not-pill…” You know, I talk a lot about how back then it was “a whole ‘nuther world“ back in the 1960s and early 1970s. But different doesn’t automatically mean worse. I wouldn’t go back to the era of Nixon and Bobby Riggs and “You’ve come a long way, baby” on a bet, but back then we were drilled on what would now be called risk abatement or mitigation of risk in a way that’s obviously still out there but also obviously (or Marcotte wouldn’t be so testy about having to bring it back up) the consideration that the pill trumps abortion which in turn also trumps pregnancy to term.

Marcotte’s also delves deeply into current and traditional antipathies to the pill as they relate to self-determination. Like it or not (and all right-thinking people obviously don’t) the pill is opposed because male cooperation is not required.

A girl that’s having sex at a too-young age has a vanishingly small chance of having the personal power to negotiate the condom. Period. So if you limit girls this young to only a male-controlled birth control option, many to most will simply go without, afraid to say no to unprotected sex.

...

...we have every reason to believe that young men who are highly interested in having complete control in a relationship are drawn to very young, vulnerable, easy-to-control young women…

Birth control pills are easy to hide, and only the most egregiously monitored girl or woman can’t get away for the two minutes it takes to palm a pill and then swallow it with water. The same can’t be said at all about condoms, or diaphrams, or withdrawal, or — even though I think it’s great — vasectomies, all of which require male cooperation.

I still passionately believe in discreet, reliable contraception for every individual who is or (and this is a big one) might possibly be sexually active voluntarily or (another big one) involuntarily, and I believe it’s equally critical for both women and men. Because nobody should be forced to trust anyone else when it comes to something as fundamental as reproductive choice. But I also have to acknowledge that whereas condoms are wonderful contraceptives and still the gold standard for disease prevention they only work as well as the partner who’s willing to use it in good faith. The pill? You don’t have to trust anybody else. Which, sadly, is sometimes the least worst we can get.