Having your excruciating experience dismissed or invalidated is like an unbearable scalding to your soul.
Telling someone they had a choice, when their actual feeling was that they had none, is invalidating.
Why not ask 'what made you feel you didn't have a choice? What made you feel in such a corner? Do those same things still exist today, that might make someone else also feel the same way and do the same thing?'
Reducing a situation to an individual making a free choice is to erase all context & to depoliticise that situation. But we don't live in isolation, free from influence. And we don't all have the power to make a free choice.
I spent 30 years taking sole responsibility for a choice I made, even though I did not want what I had supposedly chosen. Then the Internet was invented.
I read how countless other disempowered or disapproved-of pregnant women had the exact same phrases said to them as were said to me.
I read how social workers & adoption agency workers were trained in psychological methods to persuade new mothers to overcome their natural desire to keep their child and instead relinquish him or her. I experienced this.
I read how pregnant women were groomed to believe they were simply baby-making vessels and not in fact their child's mother. I experienced this.
I watch, globally, as each historic adoption atrocity is finally revealed after years of individual and private suffering. My family experienced this.
I see the U.S. adoption industry shining up the same clever stiletto methods of winkling the babies they want from bewildered mothers-who-are-so-dazed-by-grooming-they-don't-even-believe-they-are-mothers-anymore (though they'll feel the loss like one)
I see women falling into the black hole of adoption created by either those who want their babies, or those who disapprove of their motherhood, and it is global. It is underpinned by structures.
So telling women - usually young or poor or socially shunned or unsupported - that they are making an individual free choice and should take responsibility for it assumes they have greater agency than they may actually have.
Such misrepresentation and dismissiveness of our actual experience simply adds more pain on top of already existing and intolerable pain of losing our children and, in the case of closed adoption, not knowing where they were.
As a young mother in the 70s, my choice was keep your child and ruin his life or give him up for adoption so that he will thrive. What kind of a choice is that to present to a mother? It is an illusion of choice, a fake choice, with only one answer.
Now I am mature & resourced I can make free & knowledgable choices. But saying I & others could when we were minors/poor/resourceless dismisses our experience. It points the finger at the struggling individual rather than the rapacious machinery that benefits from her struggle.
@threadreaderapp please unroll
