Podcast Interview with Maria Vitale about pro-life issues

This was a great interview.  I really appreciated Maria's mentioning that many pro-lifers hold their view out of respect for women, not out of some mean-spirited desire to withhold choice.  I look at my own little daughter and hope she inherits a world in which life--the most fundamental and precious of all human rights--is fully respected and celebrated. 

Shannon @ Rocks In My Dryer
www.rocksinmydryer.net ( http://www.rocksinmydryer.net/ )
BlogHer Contributing Editor, Mommy and Family

Written transcripts are simply static pages, they don't load through the home page or the topic pages - so the conversation would be hidden if it happened on that page. (All of our transcript pages are this way.)

The conversation should definitely happen right here, thanks for diving in. :-)

~Denise
BlogHer Community Manager

Flamingo House Happenings ( http://www.flamingohouse.net/ )

Any particular reason why comments aren't open on the transcript?

I'll just put it here. Direct me elsewhere if it should go elsewhere!

I have a problem with the casual nature in which BOTH parties are addressing adoption. First and foremost, adoption is a parenting decision, not a life-and-death decision. The first decision to be made is to abort or continue the pregnancy. The second decision to be made is to parent or place. 

Everyone keeps speaking like adoption is something easily accepted by the public and easily done by the birth family. They're also neglecting to look into the increasing number of highly unethical agencies, unethical attorneys and unethical people involved with today's adoptions. (Unethical people can refer both to adoptive families willing to make promises just to procure a baby and the scammers out there willing to take advantage of parents. Not playing favorites. Unethical people cover all sides of the triad.)

 Furthermore, this same group of people refuses to acknowledge that adoptees are continuously being treated as second-class citizens by the government which refuses to give them their original birth certificate. They're hiding behind an unsubstantiated claim that if records are open, more women will abort than place. They're refusing to acknowledge that most birth mothers placing in present day are actively seeking open adoptions and signing papers releasing their information to their child before that child is even born. They're stuck in the archaic mindset of secrecy and confusing it with privacy.

Handing out more adoption referrals at clinics won't solve any problems. It will just create an entirely set of new problems until someone looks into the unethical nature of today's adoptions and actually DOES something about it.

Jenna, aka FireMom of Stop, Drop & Blog ( http://stopdropandblog.com/ )

Also writing about personal adoption issues at The Chronicles of Munchkin Land ( http://thechroniclesofmunchkinland.com/ ) and how birth parents are dealing with today's issues at the Birth Parent Blog ( http://birthparents.adoptionblogs.com ).