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The Trauma of Adoption is More Severe Than the Trauma of Abortion (Ep. 263)

December 9, 2021 49m 12s Full transcript available
The Trauma of Adoption is More Severe Than the Trauma of Abortion (Ep. 263)
0:00 / 49m 12s
In this episode, we tackle the harsh realities of adoption versus abortion, exposing the lies that adoption is an easy alternative. The trauma of adoption is often overlooked, and we need to confront the pro-abortion narrative that seeks to diminish the value of life.
Transcript
825 segments
0:00 "This is Undaunted Life, a Man's Podcast."
0:21 I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
0:23 Let's get into it.
0:24 "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light
0:29 for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter."
0:32 That's Isaiah 5.20.
0:33 Guys, thanks so much for listening in to the podcast today.
0:35 We do appreciate it.
0:37 Just a quick reminder from the top of this.
0:38 If you have not left a positive review yet, I don't know where you're listening to this,
0:42 could be on iTunes, could be on Spotify, iHeartRadio, wherever, wherever you can give
0:45 us a five-star rating and a positive review, please do so because the algorithms love that.
0:50 But also, there are a lot of guys in your life that can probably benefit from this type
0:54 of information.
0:55 We tackle a lot of subjects that equipment to push back darkness, and we tackle subjects
0:59 that a lot of pastors don't want to touch with a 10-foot pole.
1:01 So we definitely want you guys to share this around.
1:03 So I'm giving you a little bit of a call to action right here from the very beginning.
1:06 And that is to text this show, whether it's this particular episode or just the entire
1:11 show, to three of your buddies.
1:13 Just three.
1:14 I could have said five.
1:15 I could have said a hundred.
1:16 But I'm just saying three guys in your life that you know or think that aren't already
1:20 fans of what we're doing here.
1:22 Share it with them.
1:23 Do not keep us a secret.
1:24 Guys, here's the thing about what we do on this podcast.
1:27 As I've already mentioned, we talk about tough subjects.
1:29 We talk about tough subjects a lot.
1:31 We talk about the toughest subjects.
1:33 And maybe the tough subjects you can possibly talk about as a human is the subject of abortion.
1:38 Okay?
1:39 And abortion is especially on the top of everyone's minds right now because of what's currently
1:42 going on in the Supreme Court.
1:44 So last week, we saw the oral arguments for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization
1:49 in the Supreme Court.
1:50 Okay?
1:51 So that's Mississippi's late term abortion case.
1:53 The reason why so many people are paying attention to this case is because there's a potentiality.
1:57 I don't think it's a high potentiality again.
1:59 We'll get way more into the case later on a later episode or something like that.
2:02 But there's a potentiality that the Supreme Court could rule in this case in a way that
2:06 would effectively overturn Roe v. Wade, which again would not eradicate abortion here in
2:12 the United States.
2:13 But what it would do is it would return the abortion rights and abortion laws to the states.
2:18 So presumably the red states that actually care about the unborn, they could actually
2:22 ban abortions out right now.
2:24 That's where a lot of people are kind of confused as to kind of like, well, my state has a this
2:27 week abortion ban or a heartbeat bill or these things.
2:30 Would that become the law of the land essentially whatever laws on the books in the states would
2:33 become the law of the land unless Roe v. Wade is kind of made a federal law or something
2:37 like that.
2:38 So anyway, everyone's paying attention to it.
2:40 And then even here recently on episode 257 of this podcast, we talked about how to engage
2:45 pro-abortion arguments.
2:46 Okay?
2:47 Now specifically in that episode, we went through, I don't know, a dozen, maybe more different
2:51 arguments that people will make that are on the pro-abortion side of those things.
2:55 And in that episode, we mentioned when people say something along the lines of, you know,
2:58 even if the baby is taken to term and born, there wouldn't be anyone to adopt them.
3:02 Now we dealt with that objection because it's not that there are too few families that are
3:06 willing to adopt.
3:07 It's that there are too few babies available to be adopted and that's because of abortion.
3:12 And Planned Parenthood has a lot to do with this because basically, you know, for every
3:15 one referral that they give for an adoption center, they kill over a hundred different
3:19 babies. And again, there's usually around 40 couples in the United States waiting for
3:23 every one baby that has placed for adoption.
3:25 But here's the thing that's crazy that we've seen over the last week or so.
3:28 I mean, we're seeing things that we thought we'd never see.
3:31 But the pro-abortion lobby, the pro-abortion news and the pro-abortion side, they are so
3:36 unbelievably desperate to affect public opinion on the subject of abortion that they're willing
3:41 to go to some crazy links to do so.
3:44 And in no way was that more apparent than what we saw in the December the 3rd, 2021 edition
3:49 of The New York Times.
3:50 They posted a guest essay by Elizabeth Spears called, "I was adopted.
3:54 I know the trauma it can inflict."
3:57 So right there from the jump, the title is weird.
4:01 The title is ominous.
4:03 And I remember whenever I first read the title, I was adopted, I know the trauma it can inflict.
4:07 I was thinking, okay, this is going to be about somebody that was adopted.
4:10 They were adopted into what seemed to be a nice family, but they were abusive family,
4:14 whether they were violent or sexually abusive or something like that, or they were taken
4:17 advantage of in some sort of other way.
4:19 And then maybe they were put up for adoption again.
4:21 That's what I thought we were going to get, okay?
4:23 But that's not at all what this article was and just a little side note on Elizabeth Spears.
4:26 I think it's Spears, but it might be Spires, but I'll just say Spears.
4:29 She's a Democratic digital specialist, which the fact that she's a Democrat is going to
4:32 be readily apparent when I start reading this article.
4:34 And she was actually adopted as an infant.
4:37 Now what I'm going to do real quick is I'm going to read through the entire article.
4:40 It is not very long.
4:41 I'm going to read through it first without making any stops, but then we're going to
4:44 go back and break it down and make sure you stick around to the end of the podcast because
4:47 we're going to talk about the reasons why this article is so important.
4:50 So let's talk about this article.
4:51 I'll go and read it here.
4:52 I was adopted.
4:53 I know the trauma it can inflict by Elizabeth Spears on Wednesday as a Supreme Court heard
4:58 oral arguments from state attorneys seeking to uphold Mississippi's 15 week abortion
5:02 ban.
5:03 Justice Amy Coney Barrett kept getting at one question.
5:06 Why was abortion necessary when women who do not want to be mothers can simply give their
5:09 babies up for adoption as an adoptee myself.
5:12 I was floored by justice Barrett's assumption that adoption is an accessible and desirable
5:17 alternative for women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant.
5:20 She may not realize it, but what she is suggesting is that women don't need access to abortion
5:25 because they can simply go do a thing that is infinitely more difficult, expensive, dangerous
5:30 and potentially traumatic than terminating a pregnancy during its early stages.
5:34 As an adoptive mother herself, justice Barrett should have some inkling of the complexities
5:38 of adoption and the toll can inflict on children as well as birth mothers.
5:42 But she speaks as if adoption is some kind of idyllic fairytale.
5:46 My own adoption actually was what many would consider idyllic.
5:49 I was raised by two adoptive parents, Alice and Terry.
5:52 From the time I was an infant, I grew up in a home where I knew every day that I was loved.
5:56 A few years ago, I found my biological mother Maria and three siblings I didn't know I
6:00 had via a DNA test and Facebook.
6:03 The first time I spoke to Maria on the phone, she lives in Alabama, not too far from my
6:06 parents and I live in Brooklyn.
6:08 She apologized repeatedly for giving me up and she told me she loved me and that I would
6:12 always be family.
6:13 You are blood, she would say later.
6:15 I told her and continue to tell her every time she brings it up that an apology is unnecessary.
6:19 I had a wonderful childhood and I believe that she made the right decision, but she remains
6:23 heartbroken about the years we missed together.
6:26 Both Maria and my mom, Alice, oppose abortion on religious grounds.
6:30 My mom is white and southern Baptist, Maria is Hispanic and Pentecostal.
6:34 Both like to point me to justify their belief, point to me to justify their beliefs saying
6:39 that had Maria gotten an abortion, I would not exist.
6:42 It's a fairly familiar argument and the anti-abortion movement likes to invoke Nobel Prize winners
6:47 who might never have materialized or potential adoptees who might have cured cancer if they
6:51 hadn't been aborted at eight weeks.
6:53 I'm no Nobel Prize winner, but I still resent being used as a political football by the
6:58 right.
6:59 I believe that abortion is a form of health care and that every woman should have access
7:02 to it if she needs it.
7:03 But perhaps more than that, I resent the suggestion by people like Justice Barrett that adoption
7:08 is a simple solution and I rescind it on behalf of Maria, who found the choice she made traumatizing
7:13 and still feels pain 44 years later, even when an adoption works out well, as it did
7:18 in my case, it is still fraught.
7:21 When I echo Maria in saying that she gave me up, the language always wrinkles adoptive
7:25 parents because it introduces an unpleasant complexity, implying that the birth mother
7:29 was not completely happy with her choice, or worse, that it made her miserable.
7:34 But that is sometimes the case, even when adoption is the best option for all involved.
7:38 Adoption is not always an unalloyed good.
7:40 It's a complicated choice in a situation that has no right and no wrong answer.
7:45 If the court overturns Roe v. Wade, many women will be forced to give birth to children
7:49 they did not want or do not feel that they could afford to support.
7:52 While pregnant, they will undergo the bonding with a child that happens by biological design
7:56 as an embryo develops into a living, breathing, conscious human, and within the child will
8:02 be taken away.
8:04 The right likes to suggest that abortion is a traumatic experience for women, a last resort,
8:08 a painful memory.
8:09 But adoption is often just as traumatic as the right thinks abortion is, if not more
8:13 so, as a woman has to relinquish not a lump of cells but a fully formed baby she has lived
8:18 with for nine months.
8:20 I'm a mother myself to an adorable six-year-old self-proclaimed Fortnite expert, and as is
8:24 often the case, I did not know I was pregnant with him until the unusual symptoms appeared
8:28 a few weeks into the pregnancy.
8:30 As anyone who has gestated with a human will tell you, there is a vast difference between
8:34 the fourth week of a pregnancy and the 40th.
8:36 By the 40th, you're familiar with your baby's regular rhythms of kicking, moving, and moving.
8:41 When I woke, my son would wake up shortly after and I'd feel him turning and stretching,
8:48 or at least pleasantly jamming his precious little foot into what felt like my cervix.
8:52 This is one of the paradoxes of pregnancy, something alien is usurping your body and
8:56 sapping you of nutrition and energy, but your program to gleefully enable it and you to
9:01 become desperately protective of it.
9:04 It is a kind of biological brainwashing.
9:07 This often happens whether you want to be a parent or not.
9:10 Justice Barrett is well aware of the kind of biological brainwashing that occurs during
9:14 pregnancy.
9:15 She gave birth to five children, and yet she belied seems to assume that a mother can simply
9:19 choose not to bond with a child she's gestating solely on the basis that she is not ready to
9:23 be a mother or believes that she is unable to provide for the child.
9:27 She assumes that the mother will be supported financially and otherwise throughout the pregnancy
9:31 even in a country where maternal mortality statistics are abysmal, and she assumes that
9:36 children surrendered for adoption will find a home and not a bed in the foster care system.
9:40 She probably assumes these things because she cannot fathom being in this position herself.
9:45 These are assumptions that stem from the privilege of being financially secure, having never
9:49 needed an adoption, and perhaps the assumption that women who do have done something wrong
9:54 and must face the consequences.
9:55 In my experience, some on the right believe that the trauma, adoption, inflicts is a consequence
10:01 of irresponsibility, but unexpected pregnancy is not a de facto function of bad decision-making.
10:06 It can be a failure of contraception, the product of rape, a mistaken belief that a woman is
10:11 infertile.
10:12 There is no justifiable reason to inflict harm on women and the babies that they might produce
10:16 in any of these situations regardless of judgment.
10:19 The trauma doesn't just affect mothers either, researchers have a term for what children
10:23 who are adopted even as infants may suffer from later in life, relinquishment trauma.
10:28 The premise is that babies bond with their mothers in utero and become familiar with
10:32 their behaviors.
10:33 When their first caretaker is not the biological mother, they register the difference and the
10:36 stress of it has lasting effects.
10:39 I probably got off easy in that respect in part because I did spend a few months with
10:43 my biological mother before I was adopted, but that had the unintended effect of traumatizing
10:47 my older siblings who remember me as a baby who was there and then suddenly was gone.
10:52 This was driven home to me by my older sister, Bobby, whose first encounter with me was over
10:56 Facebook.
10:57 All I can say is I remember you, she wrote, "I have loved you and missed you my entire
11:01 life."
11:02 What justice Barrett and others are suggesting women do in lieu of abortion is not a small
11:06 thing.
11:07 It is life-changing, irrevocable, and not to be taken lightly.
11:11 It often causes trauma even when things work out and it's a disservice to adoptees and
11:15 their families, biological, and adopted to pretend otherwise in service of a neat political
11:20 narrative.
11:21 Now, I know for a lot of you, that was punishing to hear, probably as punishing it was for
11:26 me to read all that out loud, but hey, we got it all out there, but now we need to break
11:30 this thing down because there are a lot of issues here.
11:33 So let's go ahead and dig in and I'm going to go ahead and kind of read the sections
11:35 and then kind of dig in.
11:36 So here's from the very beginning.
11:37 On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments from state attorneys seeking to uphold
11:41 Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban, Justice Amy Coney Barrett kept getting at one question.
11:46 Why was abortion necessary when women who do not want to be mothers can simply give their
11:49 babies out for adoption?
11:51 So this is an entirely reasonable question for anyone to ask, especially Justice Amy
11:55 Coney Barrett, who's going to be one of the people trying to decide this case.
11:59 But the inclusion of this question framed in the way that it is in the first sentence
12:03 of the article is not an accident.
12:05 What she's trying to do, what Ms. Spears is trying to do, is to imply that the premise
12:10 of the question is problematic and wrong for someone to ask, well, why wouldn't someone
12:15 just give this baby up for adoption as opposed to killing it from the very beginning of this
12:19 article?
12:20 They're trying to pose that as a ridiculous thing to think, much less say out loud, okay?
12:24 Then she says, as an adopting myself, this is an appeal to authority.
12:27 Obviously, she's trying to say, hey, I know better because I'm actually an adopting myself,
12:31 which depending upon how you're framing the article could be accurate.
12:34 But in her case, not so much, she goes on to say this, I was floored by Justice Barrett's
12:38 assumption that adoption is an accessible and desirable alternative for women who find themselves
12:43 unexpectedly pregnant.
12:45 This is a ridiculous thing for this woman to say because it is totally accessible.
12:48 I mean, do you know of any woman on the planet that so fervently wanted her unborn baby to
12:54 be adopted and they found no organizations, no clubs, like no companies, no businesses,
13:00 like no one could help them, no churches, no ministries?
13:04 That doesn't exist.
13:05 It's a false thing.
13:06 Also, she says it isn't a desirable outcome.
13:09 It's not a desirable alternative.
13:10 Now, there are reasons that abortion is not or that adoption, rather, is not a desirable
13:15 outcome for women.
13:16 The first is that a lot of these women are selfish.
13:19 I know that that's hard for some of you to hear, but they're selfish.
13:22 And we know this from the data that if they don't want their baby, if they've made the
13:26 decision that they don't want their baby, they don't want you to have their baby.
13:31 A lot of these women would rather their babies be dead than for you to have them.
13:35 And organizations like Planned Parenthood and other organizations that kill babies as
13:39 their practice, as their business, they convince these women that the baby will be destitute
13:45 or be physically or sexually abused.
13:48 And that's all that basically could happen if they can actually get adopted.
13:52 They're like, you know, basically, you know, if it can even get adopted and not just end
13:56 up in the horrible system, it'll probably be a horrible life for this kid.
13:59 That's what they do.
14:00 It's their business.
14:01 They want you to give them five or 600 bucks to kill your baby.
14:04 That's what they want you to do, right?
14:06 So let's get back in the article here.
14:07 She may not realize it, but what she is suggesting is that women don't need access to abortion
14:11 because they can simply go and do a thing that is infinitely more difficult, expensive,
14:17 dangerous and potentially traumatic than terminating a pregnancy during its early stages.
14:22 Wow.
14:23 Okay.
14:24 So first of all, difficulty and expense is not a good excuse to kill someone, right?
14:29 Because if you apply that standard to some human being that's in the womb, you should
14:33 be able to apply that to a standard to a person that has been born is now in the world, right?
14:38 Whether you're talking about your two year old that you don't like their tantrums anymore,
14:40 or you're talking about a 16 year old that is completely dependent on you because maybe
14:43 they have some severe, you know, mental disorder or deformity of some kind.
14:47 The fact that it's difficult and expensive is not a good excuse to kill someone.
14:51 Also she mentions that it's dangerous.
14:53 Now abortions might kill mom.
14:55 Okay.
14:56 Cause that's always a potential outcome of any surgery is that you may not actually wake
15:00 up.
15:01 You know, there's a lot of situations in surgery and when the leading causes of death every
15:03 year in the United States, even though we're the most advanced medical country that there
15:07 is in terms of technology, most of the time you have people that die because of issues
15:11 that happen with doctors.
15:12 It's just something that happens, right?
15:14 But it might kill mom, but almost 100% of the time, unless it's a botched abortion,
15:19 it 100% of the time kills baby, right?
15:22 So you're talking about danger and you're only talking about mom, you're not talking
15:25 about the baby, but that she also says it's potentially traumatic.
15:28 Okay. So the funny thing here is that she's automatically assuming that having the baby
15:33 will be traumatic, but that killing one won't be and she's automatically assuming that putting
15:40 a baby up for adoption will be traumatic, but the killing of the baby won't be.
15:45 How interesting.
15:46 Think of just think about how she's framing that and again, she's essentially positioning
15:50 abortion, you know, otherwise known as baby murder as the more humane and loving option
15:54 than allowing the baby to live, right? Hey, you know, abortion, it might be a hard discussion,
16:00 which again, if it's morally neutral, why would it be hard to kind of figure out whether
16:03 or not you should get an abortion?
16:04 But in this case, and in the case of her, she's saying basically for all these people
16:08 involved here, which we'll get into more here in just a second, with all these people involved,
16:13 abortion is probably a better option than adoption, right?
16:15 So let's get back into the article here.
16:17 As an adoptive mother herself, Justice Barrett should have some inkling of the complexities
16:21 of adoption and the total can inflict on children as well as birth mothers.
16:24 But she speaks as if adoption is some kind of a dealic fairy tale.
16:28 Now, is almost every single adoption scenario, idealic?
16:33 I mean, from the perspective of the children, because the options for most of these children
16:38 are to be orphans or to be in an adoptive home, typically with people that are loving,
16:43 right?
16:44 So almost every single adoption scenario is ideal, like not perfect, not, you know, flush
16:48 with cash, not amazing, but it's certainly ideal to compare to the other options, right?
16:53 And also, you can assume that every single adoptive child in America, even the ones that
16:57 are living in poor conditions, they'd rather be in those poor conditions as opposed to
17:01 being dead.
17:02 And we talk about this all the time, it's like, oh, well, you know, if this baby is giving
17:06 up for adoption, it might go to a family that doesn't have a lot of money, the family might
17:09 abuse them, the family might not be emotionally stable.
17:13 And as bad as some of those things can be, and I don't mean to diminish them, I'm saying
17:17 compared to death, they're definitely preferable, right?
17:20 Like, I'm not crazy to say that, am I?
17:23 Let's get back into the article here.
17:25 My own adoption actually was what many would consider idyllic.
17:28 I was raised by two adoptive parents, Alice and Terry from the time I was an infant and
17:31 grew up in a home where I knew every day that I was loved.
17:34 A few years ago, I found my biological mother Maria and three siblings I didn't know I
17:37 had VA DNA test and Facebook.
17:40 The first time I spoke to Maria on the phone, she lives in Alabama, not too far from my
17:43 parents and I live in Brooklyn, she apologized repeatedly for giving me up and she told me
17:47 she loved me and that I would always be family.
17:49 You are blood, she would say later.
17:50 I told her and continue to tell her every time she brings it up that the apology is unnecessary.
17:54 I had a wonderful childhood and I believe she had made the right decision, but she remains
17:58 heartbroken about the years we missed together.
18:00 Now, let's talk about Maria.
18:02 Maria, her mother is heartbroken because of the decisions that she made that led to her
18:08 becoming pregnant in the subsequent decisions that she made that led to her giving up her
18:12 baby daughter for adoption, right?
18:16 Maria wasn't raped.
18:18 She wasn't forced to get pregnant, right?
18:21 She had consensual sex and decided to give away the baby that resulted from that sexual
18:26 encounter.
18:28 That's what quote unquote happened to Maria.
18:31 She made decisions.
18:32 Now Maria, she's feeling the tremendous guilt that only a mother can feel when she abdicates
18:38 her number one responsibility on earth and that's being a mother and caring for her child,
18:43 right?
18:44 So that's this supposed trauma that the author of this opinion piece is saying is that the
18:49 trauma here is like, look, she's missed me all this time.
18:52 Well, wouldn't it be worse if she didn't miss you that if she gave birth to you, hung
18:57 out with you for a few months and gave you away as if you were like some extra football
19:01 she had lying around in the garage, like wouldn't we expect her to feel this way?
19:06 I mean, again, she's trying to pit this as some sort of horrible, traumatic thing.
19:10 And I would agree with her, but she's missing the point.
19:12 The point is that Maria made decisions that led to this action, right?
19:16 And luckily she made the decision that conserved life back into the article here, both Maria
19:22 and my mom, Alice, opposed abortion on religious grounds.
19:25 My mom is white and Southern Baptist, Maria is Hispanic and Pentecostal, both like to
19:29 point to me to justify their beliefs saying that had Maria gotten an abortion, I would
19:33 not exist, which is obviously true.
19:35 It's a familiar argument, the anti-abortion movement likes to invoke Nobel Prize winners
19:38 who might never have materialized or potential adoptees who might have cured cancer if they
19:43 hadn't been aborted at eight weeks.
19:45 I'm no Nobel Prize winner, but I still resent being used as a political football by the
19:49 right.
19:50 I believe that abortion is a form of health care and that every woman should have access
19:53 to it if she needs it.
19:54 But perhaps more than that, I resent the suggestion by people like Justice Barrett that adoption
19:58 is a simple solution.
19:59 And I resent it on behalf of Maria, who found the choice she made traumatizing and still
20:03 feels that pain 44 years later, even when an adoption works out well, as it did in my
20:08 case, it's still fraught.
20:10 So for the writer of this article, she resents the fact that she's alive today because the
20:17 Christian biblical worldview invaded the minds of her biological and adoptive mothers.
20:24 And that prevented her biological mother from killing her and astonishing admission.
20:32 She resents that that happened, which, how can you resent that?
20:37 Because the only other option is you're not here to write this, you were, you were nothing
20:43 in terms of this world, right?
20:45 You would have never gotten to this point.
20:47 And also, she describes abortion as health care in this section.
20:50 But this is just straight out of the leftist pro-abortion playbook.
20:52 You basically can't pass go without saying this.
20:54 It's a required mantra that he, you have to repeat ad nauseam.
20:57 But we obviously know that this is a euphemism.
20:59 Health care doesn't result in the death of a human because duh.
21:02 But also, here's the thing that she says in this section.
21:05 She's building the case that since her biological mother Maria still feels pain and guilt all
21:10 these years later, because she gave her daughter up for adoption, that it would have been better
21:16 if she hadn't.
21:17 It would have been better if she had gotten an abortion.
21:21 That supposedly, it would be better for Maria to have blood on her hands rather than guilt
21:27 in her conscience, right?
21:29 That's the underlying assumption.
21:31 Even if she doesn't outright say it, that's the underlying assumption that she wants you
21:34 to pick up not so subtly as you read through here, that man, wouldn't it have been better
21:38 for Maria and the older kids and for her if she had just never been born, if she had just
21:45 been snuffed down the womb, if they just stuck a tool into the uterus and started pulling
21:50 out limbs and then crushed the skull and let the brain matter fall out and then pull out
21:54 the pieces and then scrape the uterine wall and then basically put the baby together on
21:58 the table to make sure you got all the pieces, wouldn't that have just been better?
22:01 That would have been better, right?
22:03 Back in the article, when I echo Maria in saying that she gave me up, the language always
22:07 wrinkles adopted parents because it introduces an unpleasant complexity, implying that my
22:11 birth mother was not completely happy with her choice, or worse, that it made her miserable.
22:16 But that is sometimes the case, even when adoption is the best option for all involved.
22:20 Adoption is not always an unalloyed good.
22:22 It is a complicated choice in a situation that has no right or wrong answer.
22:27 Now, let's talk about that.
22:28 She says that adoption is not always an unalloyed good.
22:32 Here's the reality.
22:34 Adoption isn't an unalloyed good because it points to a post Genesis 3 brokenness because
22:42 we're supposed to live as one man and one woman and we're supposed to procreate and
22:46 fill the earth, right?
22:48 But we live in a broken system now in a post Genesis 3 world where that doesn't always
22:52 happen.
22:53 Now, there are some children that have to be adopted because their mother died in childbirth,
22:57 right?
22:58 That's a result of the fall.
22:59 There are, you know, kids that are given up for adoption because the mother was raped
23:02 by somebody and she doesn't want to look at a kid that kind of looks half like her rapist,
23:06 right?
23:07 That's part of the fall.
23:08 There are mothers that make a bunch of bad decisions and the state ends up taking the
23:11 child away and they are put into the adoption system or put into the foster care system.
23:15 That's a result of a broken world, a broken world that was broken by sin that entered the
23:20 world when Eve ate the apple, right?
23:23 But again, we're describing reality by describing that that's happening in these situations,
23:29 but at what point are we advocating that abortion should be better than adoption?
23:33 Because she also claims in this section here that this situation has no right or wrong
23:38 answer, right?
23:39 She's being Pontius Pilate here.
23:40 She's like, I'm going to wash my hands of this.
23:42 This situation has no right and no wrong, right?
23:45 But this is obviously ridiculous because this is a postmodern thing that you say, ah, there's
23:50 no right or wrong answer.
23:51 I guess, you know, rightness or wrongness is in the eye to be holder.
23:53 No, no, no, no.
23:54 This is either a morally acceptable thing to do or a morally reprehensible thing to do,
23:59 right?
24:00 Again, remember back in the day, it was safe, legal and rare, but in modern contexts is
24:03 why does it have to be safe, legal or rare?
24:06 Like if it's morally neutral, like if a fly were to land on me and I were to flick it
24:09 off of my, my forearm, Peter wouldn't be too happy about it.
24:12 But at the end of the day, that is not a morally reprehensible thing for me to do.
24:16 Setting up my pin and setting it back down is not a morally, morally represent reprehensible
24:21 thing for me to do.
24:22 It's morally neutral.
24:23 Now if I pick up this pin and stab you in the eye with it, right?
24:26 That becomes a morally reprehensible thing.
24:28 It's no longer neutral.
24:30 This situation, there's either something bad happening or there's not, right?
24:34 We can't use this postmodern lens to look at all this.
24:36 All right, back to the article here, short section.
24:39 If the court overturns Roe v. Wade, many women will be forced to give birth to children.
24:42 They did not want or do not or did not feel that they could afford to support now.
24:46 Again, she's saying that they're forced to give birth.
24:49 This is a common pro-abortion trope, you know, oh, it's, you know, handmaid's tail.
24:52 You're forcing all these women to give birth.
24:54 The problem with the thing from the handmaid's tail is these people, you know, these women
24:57 were raped and forced to give birth.
24:59 You made a consensual decision.
25:00 Now we're just telling you as the government, you can't kill what you've done, right?
25:05 You can't kill this baby to get rid of the mistake that you now think that you've made.
25:08 Okay, back to the article.
25:10 While pregnant, they will undergo the bonding with a child that happens by biological design
25:13 as an embryo develops into a living, breathing, conscious human.
25:17 And then that child will be taken away.
25:19 Uh, yeah, yeah, this happens by biological design.
25:25 I wonder why that is.
25:27 I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that you are designed to want to care
25:31 for this baby when it leaves your body.
25:34 Otherwise, as with a lot of animals in the animal kingdom, as soon as they give birth,
25:38 they take off.
25:40 Like we have this idea that also all creatures are mammalian where basically mother bears
25:44 like hanging out and protecting the cubs until they're able to live on their own.
25:47 That doesn't happen in almost the entirety of nature, right?
25:51 And so there's some sort of a biological component to that that our designer gave us
25:55 that said, Hey, as soon as you get birth to this thing, you don't just leave it there.
25:58 You take care of it until it's able to take care of itself back to the article.
26:02 The right lights to suggest that abortion is a traumatic experience for women, a last
26:05 resort, a painful memory, but adoption is often just a traumatic just as traumatic.
26:10 As the right thing, abortion is, if not more so, as a woman has to relinquish not a lump
26:15 of cells, but a fully formed baby she has lived with for nine months.
26:19 So this crazy person, this crazy person thinks that adoption is just as traumatic.
26:28 If not more so than abortion, that adoption, adoption is more so traumatic than abortion.
26:38 How, how, on what planet is that even, even sort of reasonable?
26:47 What are you talking about?
26:49 A baby being passed from a parent that either doesn't want it or can't care for it to a
26:54 family that can care for it, that that is somehow more traumatic than if that baby had
27:00 just been snuffed out, ripped to pieces, thrown in the trash, flushed out the toilet.
27:06 What's she talking about?
27:07 And here's the other thing that I will say about this section is thank you for actually
27:11 acknowledging what we all knew all along, which is that it's never just a clump of cells,
27:16 like at any point, it's always a living human being with value.
27:20 So thank you at least for admitting that.
27:22 Let's go to the next section here.
27:23 I'm a mother myself to an adorable six year old self-proclaimed Fortnite expert, which
27:27 by the way, why is a six year old playing Fortnite?
27:29 But anyway, as is often the case, I do not, I did not know that I was pregnant with him
27:32 until the usual symptoms appeared a few weeks into the pregnancy.
27:35 As anyone who has just stated a human will tell you again, oh, you haven't just stated
27:39 a human, but here we go.
27:40 There's a vast difference between the fourth week of pregnancy and the 40th.
27:43 By the 40th, you're familiar with your baby's regular rhythms of kicking and moving.
27:46 When I awoke, my son would wake up shortly after and I'd feel him turning and stretching
27:50 or less pleasantly jamming his precious little foot into what felt like my cervix.
27:54 This is one of the paradoxes of pregnancy, something alien as usurping your body and
27:58 sapping you of nutrition and energy, but you are programmed to gleefully enable it.
28:02 And you become desperately protective of it.
28:04 It's a kind of biological brainwashing.
28:06 And this is often what happens or this often happens whether you want to be a parent or
28:10 not.
28:11 Now, I got to say, I've never heard the phrase biological brainwashing.
28:16 Never heard that.
28:17 But it's kind of true.
28:18 In a degree, I know some people got their hackles up over that.
28:20 Oh, it's biological brainwashing, but it kind of is, right, that there are even studies
28:25 about how women, you know, they go through the pains of childbirth and, you know, that
28:29 can be a horribly traumatic thing.
28:30 If you go through something that's extremely painful, it'll make you want to avoid that
28:33 thing again.
28:34 But there is some sort of endorphin or some sort of thing that happens inside the brain
28:37 of a woman that helps her quickly forget about the pain and discomfort of childbirth and pregnancy,
28:42 right?
28:43 So that's a biological brainwashing.
28:44 I wonder why that is possibly because we need to propagate the species properly, you know,
28:48 possibly because we need to, you know, be fruitful and multiply.
28:51 Maybe that has something to do with it.
28:52 So yeah, it's sort of biological brainwashing, but she kind of talks about it in a negative
28:56 sense, not a positive sense.
28:58 And then she says this, and this often happens whether you want to be a parent or not, which
29:03 means that your desire to or not to have a baby is irrelevant because it's what you're
29:10 supposed to do.
29:11 Again, these are people that have kind of this biological worldview, you know, we're
29:14 all just, you know, start us bumping into other start us.
29:16 We're just, you know, slimy or we're descendants of fish and apes and all these other different
29:20 things.
29:21 But these people all of a sudden want to ignore the biological reality that your body in your
29:24 mind is preparing you to care for you for this child.
29:27 And if you decide not to do that, that that's broken, that that's not something that you
29:30 should do.
29:31 Isn't that interesting that they ignore that part of biology when it doesn't fit their
29:35 narrative and their arguments?
29:36 Back to the article here.
29:38 This is Barrett is well aware of the kind of biological brainwashing that occurs during
29:41 pregnancy.
29:42 She gave birth to five children.
29:43 And yet she so blithely seems to assume that a mother can simply choose not to bond with
29:47 a child.
29:48 She's just stating solely on the basis that she is not ready to be a mother or believes
29:52 that she is unable to provide that child.
29:54 Okay.
29:55 For the child.
29:56 Now here's the thing.
29:57 This is completely unfair to Amy Coney Barrett.
29:59 She's never once even implied this, right?
30:01 Never once.
30:02 So this is kind of a straw man that she's building back to the article.
30:05 She assumes that the mother will be supported financially and otherwise throughout the pregnancy,
30:08 even in a country where maternal mortality statistics are abysmal.
30:13 So she states this as a fact, okay, that, you know, maternal mortality statistics are
30:18 abysmal in the United States.
30:19 She assumes that you're apparently not going to notice that she said this and she neglects
30:23 to cite even a single piece of data to corroborate that claim because did you know when that
30:28 be breaking news that we have abysmal maternal mortality in the United States?
30:33 Did it be because she's full of crap and that's not true?
30:35 Because that's more likely back to the article and she assumes that children surrendered
30:39 for adoption will find a home and not a bed in a foster care system.
30:42 She probably assumes these things because she cannot fathom being in this position herself.
30:46 These are assumptions that stem from the privilege of being financially secure, having never
30:50 needed an abortion and perhaps the assumption that women who do have, who do have done something
30:55 wrong and must face the consequences.
30:57 So she brings up this quote, the privilege of being financially secure.
31:01 Okay.
31:02 Are you assuming that poor people can't care for children?
31:05 Because I think for, oh, I don't know the entirety of humanity that there have been plenty
31:09 of poor people that were able to care for their children and love their children, right?
31:13 So, you know, poor people can't care for their children.
31:15 So they should probably just kill them, right?
31:17 Is that what?
31:18 Is that what this author is saying?
31:19 She's also saying that having never needed an abortion, right?
31:22 But the reality is, is no one needs an abortion, right?
31:24 And you talk about, oh, well, the mother's life's in danger.
31:26 Well, at that point, you're not doing an abortion because the abortion is the intentional
31:29 destruction of an innocent human life, that's what an abortion is.
31:32 When you're providing care to a mother to preserve her life and the baby dies, that is
31:36 just a horrible consequence of trying to save and preserve her life.
31:39 But she also says, and perhaps the assumption that women who do have done something wrong
31:43 and must face the consequences.
31:45 She's talking about this as if, you know, raising a child is a consequence.
31:48 Oh, Jimmy, you might have to raise a child as a consequence.
31:52 You know, what about a blessing for a lot of people, especially people that are on the
31:56 infertility track, you know, being able to conceive and give birth to a child is maybe
32:00 the biggest blessing they could possibly get.
32:02 But again, this is about hatred for the unborn, right?
32:05 Because they can't be human.
32:06 They can't be something that's worthy of our protection.
32:09 Because if you think of them in that way, it's so much harder to kill them.
32:12 It's so much messier and so much more difficult to really kind of get through our heads back
32:16 to the article here.
32:17 In my experience, someone the right believe that the trauma adoption inflicts is a consequence
32:22 of your responsibility.
32:24 Again, she assumes that adoption always causes trauma, which is ridiculous.
32:27 But again, in almost every single case, almost 100% of cases of abortion or people that are
32:32 trying to get an abortion or trying to give their baby up for adoption, these people
32:35 had consensual sex and they conceived a baby, right?
32:38 So I don't know what you're talking about.
32:39 Then she says this, but unexpected pregnancy is not a de facto function of bad decision-making.
32:44 But here's again, what I just said, it's almost 100% the de facto function of bad decision-making
32:49 and a moral decision-making, right?
32:52 That's how this comes about, right?
32:53 This is supposed to be between one man and one woman inside a covenantal union of marriage,
32:57 right?
32:58 So if you do that outside of marriage, again, almost 100% of babies that are aborted are
33:02 aborted by people that aren't married, right?
33:04 It's not like, oh, you get married and five years into your marriage, you know, you get
33:08 pregnant and then it's like, oh, we should probably get rid of this thing.
33:10 Most of the time those kids live.
33:11 I wonder why?
33:12 Maybe because that's how we're supposed to do it.
33:14 Back to the article here.
33:15 It can be a failure or contraception, the product of rape, a mistaken belief that a woman is
33:19 infertile.
33:20 There is no just file of a reason to inflict harm on women and the babies they might produce
33:24 in any of these situations, regardless of judgment.
33:26 So in this section, she had to bring up rape.
33:28 It's her shield every time they bring up the rape arguments because they know that their
33:31 argumentation is faulty and that they can't really lean on it.
33:34 So that's why they bring up rape back to the article.
33:36 The trauma doesn't just affect mothers either.
33:39 Researchers have a term for what children who are adopted, even as infants may suffer
33:42 from later in life relinquishment trauma.
33:45 The premise is that these babies bond with their mothers in utero and become familiar
33:49 with their behaviors.
33:50 When their first caretaker is not the biological mother, they registered the difference and
33:53 the stress of it is a lasting effect, which obviously this part begs the question here,
33:58 the obvious question.
34:00 Is it better to be dead than to experience relinquishment trauma?
34:04 Because I know if I'm given two options and it's like, we're going to rip you to pieces
34:08 and you'll die or later in life, you might have some issues with relinquishment trauma,
34:13 whatever that entails.
34:14 Right?
34:15 I think I'm going to choose to stay alive.
34:16 Back to the article here.
34:17 I probably got off easy in that respect, in part, because I did spend a few months with
34:20 my biological mother before I was adopted, but that had the unintended effect of traumatizing
34:24 my older siblings who remember me as a baby who was there and then suddenly was gone.
34:28 This was driven home to me by my older sister, Bobby, whose first encounter with me was over
34:32 Facebook.
34:33 All I can say is I remember you, she wrote, I have loved you and missed you my entire life.
34:37 Okay.
34:38 So the author here, she, you know, her assumption is that her older biological siblings would
34:45 be less traumatized if she were just murdered.
34:48 Like, is that the assumption?
34:50 Like, oh, her older sister, Bobby, she missed her entire life.
34:54 Well, would it have been less traumatizing if it's like, Hey, you know, that sister you're
34:57 about to have?
34:58 Yeah, we ripped her to pieces.
35:01 I mean, what exactly is she trying to prove by making that statement?
35:04 All right.
35:05 Back into the last section here and then we'll, uh, we'll wrap up with justice Barrett and
35:08 others are suggesting women, women do in lieu of abortion is not a small thing.
35:12 It is life changing irrevocable and not to be taken lightly.
35:16 It often causes trauma, even when things work out and it's a disservice to adoptees and
35:20 their families, biological and adopted to pretend otherwise in service of a neat political
35:25 narrative.
35:26 So she's talking about the political side, trying to assume that, you know, Amy Coney
35:29 Barrett's going to be political, which again, she, she replaced somebody, you know, uh,
35:34 basically who was way more political than she is.
35:37 We'll say that.
35:38 Right.
35:39 You know, she was a Hack.
35:42 She was a political Hack and she used judicial activism and so she's kind of replacing her.
35:48 So I guess she's, you know, the right wing, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
35:51 But here's the thing, as you can expect as with the entirety of the rest of this article,
35:56 this author gets this case exactly wrong, okay, because she talks about adoption as being
36:01 life changing irrevocable and not to be taken lightly, which technically is true, but abortion
36:07 is life changing, abortion is irrevocable, abortion is not to be taken lightly because
36:18 in all these circumstances, again, if the abortion goes through as planned, it results
36:22 in a dead baby, not a dead mom, but a dead baby, a separate life from her.
36:27 That was just existing inside of her, right?
36:29 But she's again talking about it like, no, no, no abortions over here, but don't look
36:33 over here.
36:34 Look right here.
36:35 I'm talking about adoption.
36:36 It's changing and irrevocable and we shouldn't take it lightly.
36:38 And again, I would agree with those things.
36:39 And so with the people that have been adopted, I'm sure they're glad that it's irrevocable.
36:43 They're glad that it changed their life in a positive way.
36:46 They're glad that someone went through the situation of actually trying to figure out
36:48 whether they should do this and that they didn't take the situation lightly, that they
36:51 really were prayerful or at least thoughtful in terms of wanting to do this.
36:55 But abortions way worse, way worse.
36:59 And again, in this section, she's implying that Amy Coney Barrett said or meant things
37:03 that she did not say or did not mean like, oh, she's trying to button this up as a political
37:08 narrative.
37:09 What evidence do you have to suggest that?
37:11 Do you have anything in the real answer is no, she has absolutely nothing.
37:15 She's standing on nothing.
37:17 But guys, as we wrap up here, I want to talk about three reasons why this article is so
37:21 important.
37:22 Okay.
37:23 So the first one is this.
37:24 It reveals that the pro abortion side is the pro death side, which this shouldn't be terribly
37:28 surprising to any of you.
37:30 You shouldn't be surprised by that because they are advocating for death and have done
37:35 so for decades and decades and decades, even prior to Roe v. Wade.
37:38 Now we're just living in the blood soaked world of 60 plus babies that have been aborted
37:43 since Roe v. Wade since early seventies, right?
37:46 But if you didn't know it up till now, again, this woman is advocating that abortion murder
37:52 would have been better than adoption.
37:53 Right?
37:54 So that's the first reason.
37:55 The second reason why this article is so important is because it's incredible to see how
37:59 selfish Elizabeth Spears is.
38:02 Now, this is important here.
38:04 Again, in this article, she describes her own adoption scenario as idyllic.
38:09 Again, she's also advocating for abortion over adoption.
38:14 Okay.
38:15 That's the thing that undergirds everything.
38:18 So even though her personal adoption scenario was idyllic, she doesn't seemingly want anyone
38:23 else to experience that positivity again, because she's like, Oh, you know, my biological
38:28 siblings and biological mother, like they have the bad feels, right?
38:32 They get all up in their feelings when they think about the fact that I wasn't part of
38:35 their life this entire time, which I'm sure is not a fun thing.
38:39 It was something that Maria chose, but it's not a fun thing.
38:41 But she says for her own life that she knew she was loved every single day that she's
38:47 glad that it worked out this way and that she's been able to reconnect with Maria and her
38:51 siblings and all that.
38:52 But she doesn't want you to potentially have that.
38:55 And I guess I'm talking to the use and the womb and the use that will be in the womb
38:58 at some point.
38:59 She doesn't want you to have the same experience she did because she wants women.
39:03 She wants all these women to have the right to health care.
39:06 And part of the health care, you know, menu of options is potentially having somebody
39:10 remove your living human being inside your body, right?
39:15 How incredibly selfish.
39:16 And I remember when I first heard people talking about this, one of the first people
39:20 that came to mind was Colin Kaepernick.
39:23 Because again, this is the guy that thinks all white people are racist oppressors across
39:28 the board.
39:29 And yet Colin Kaepernick was adopted by a loving white couple and that couple set him up for
39:37 his entire life of success.
39:39 Okay.
39:40 Colin Kaepernick is worth tens of millions of dollars and may eventually be worth hundreds
39:45 of millions of dollars, right?
39:48 But would he have been if he hadn't been adopted by these racist white oppressors that he calls
39:54 mom and dad, right?
39:57 Because had they not gotten him into a good school, he may have not started playing football.
40:01 If he didn't start playing football, he probably doesn't go to university in Nevada.
40:03 If he doesn't go to Nevada, he doesn't get drafted.
40:05 If he doesn't get drafted, he doesn't go to the 49ers.
40:07 He doesn't take the 49ers in Super Bowl.
40:08 He doesn't get this big contract.
40:10 He doesn't do any of the things.
40:11 We would not know Colin Kaepernick's name.
40:13 He could be dead or in prison or just, you know, working some menial job or some doing something
40:17 somewhere and none of us know who this person is.
40:20 But one of the main reasons why we know who this person is, annoyingly so, is because
40:26 his, these horribly, terribly racist, oppressive white people decided to adopt him and to love
40:33 him, right?
40:35 And now he wants to tear down the system that he so directly benefited from.
40:40 And so does Elizabeth, Elizabeth Spears.
40:42 She wants you to think of adoption and think negative, not positive.
40:46 And the last reason why this article is important is the pro abortion side has gotten so desperate
40:51 and this is delicious.
40:53 They've gotten so desperate that they're trying to demonize adoption.
40:57 If you were to talk and you know, if you talk to Americans and you pull Americans, you can't
41:01 get most Americans to agree with anything.
41:04 But if you were to pull most Americans and ask them, is adoption a net positive?
41:08 You know, when a baby is, you know, unable to be cared for by their biological family,
41:13 isn't the fact that they can be adopted into another family, a positive thing.
41:17 Almost everybody in America would say yes.
41:19 Almost everybody in the world would say yes.
41:20 That's a net positive, but in order to affect change, the pro abortion side is trying to
41:25 attack adoption.
41:27 I mean, why else?
41:28 Cause this article wasn't originally written on the New York Times.
41:31 Like I had to go log into the New York Times and kind of get the entire article and do that
41:34 whole thing.
41:35 But it wasn't originally posted there.
41:36 Why did they pick up this person as a guest, opinion editor, right, the, the, or opinion
41:40 piece writer, the New York Times is a wildly pro abortion, incredibly pro abortion.
41:46 But why would they pick this one up?
41:48 Because I'm sure people have written something, you know, that had been in similar veins.
41:51 But why would they pull up something that is so negative towards adoption?
41:55 They're getting desperate.
41:57 I think they understand that they have the zealots that are on their side that will never
42:00 be swayed.
42:01 They don't care what's in the womb.
42:02 They know it's a living person.
42:03 They just want you to be able to kill it.
42:05 That's just their position.
42:06 But from where they stand, they're trying to find ways to erode the pro life foundation,
42:11 which is one of the reasons why we talk about this so often.
42:14 And I want you guys to be prepared.
42:15 That's why we do podcast where we prepare you to deal with these arguments because their
42:19 arguments are bankrupt.
42:21 They're based in nothing.
42:22 They're firmly planting their feet in mid air and they're just hoping that you don't notice.
42:26 And guys, we noticed and we're coming for our guys for let you go.
42:30 We are going to do a quick resilience boost out on daunted life.
42:32 Our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that for just spiritual
42:36 mental and physical resilience.
42:37 So the only thing I've got for you today is I've got the New York Times article and it's
42:41 called I was adopted.
42:42 I know the trauma it can inflict now.
42:44 I will let you know if you don't already have a membership or whatever with New York times,
42:48 you can set up a free thing.
42:50 So you got to give me your email and you can just opt out of the emails, but that's how
42:52 you're going to be able to read that article.
42:54 All right, guys.
42:55 Thanks so much for listening to this podcast.
42:56 We do appreciate it.
42:57 Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive review.
43:00 If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, you shoot me an
43:03 email to info@undonton.life.
43:05 That's I N F O at undonton.life.
43:08 Follow us on Instagram and tick tock and like us on Facebook.
43:10 You can also check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more
43:13 content like this coming your way, just go to www.undonton.life.
43:17 And we want to also thank the band, August Prince Red, for allowing us to use our music
43:20 for our content.
43:21 The music on this podcast is our song, cutting the ties, which is off their 10th anniversary
43:25 re-recording of their album, Leveler.
43:27 The links are in the description.
43:29 I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.
43:31 Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
43:38 Keep seeking the Lion of Judah.
43:59 [music]
Key quotes
2
Kyle Thompson
The pro-abortion side is the pro-death side.
Kyle Thompson
Adoption is not always an unalloyed good.
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