and now, a poll

[kindkit]

Following on from my previous post, because now I'm beginning to wonder if what I think is my culture's view of adoption and birth mothers is not actually the case. The poll is as anonymous as I can make it, and anonymous comments are allowed.

Poll #18972

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 27

When a woman places her child up for adoption rather than raising the child herself, how is that predominantly viewed in your culture (not necessarily by you)?

Good! This is an excellent thing to do if she felt unable to raise the child herself.
11 (40.7%)

Neutral, neither good nor bad.
6 (22.2%)

Bad. She should have raised the child.
3 (11.1%)

Adoption is extremely rare or nonexistent in my culture.
2 (7.4%)

Other, which I may choose to elaborate on in the comments.
5 (18.5%)

Comments

[oursin]

Adoption used to be a lot more common in the UK - various instances of well-known women who had had illegitimate babies in the 50s-60s and had to give them up (it was the Done Thing and approved social work practice) being found by the children in question - with the legalisation of abortion, the greater availability of contraception, and the growing destigmatisation of pregnancy out of wedlock, this became much less frequent. Also, much more problematisation of adoption, and its being seen as not so much about the parents as is it right for the child - people who want to adopt within the UK are usually taking on children who come from very damaged backgrounds and have already been in the foster system, rather than, as in the 60s, the newly-born babies of young women anxious to preserve their university careers.

Given what are viewed in the UK as the even more liberal views around unwed motherhood in the Nordic countries,not to mention social welfare support, I would have thought giving a child up for adoption was very rare - I'd want to know the parents' motivation for pressuring their 16-year-old daughter into doing it.

[kindkit]

Hmm, that's interesting. I wonder if what seems to me to be a greater stigmatization of birth mothers in the UK, Australia and NZ, Scandinavia, etc. has more to do with class and race than I'd considered. Now that I think about it, the valorized model of adoption in the US is a teenage, middle-class white girl who wants to stay in school and also give her baby a "better life." It's not a young woman of color, nor one living in any kind of stigmatized poverty, and issues like drugs, abuse, etc. are excluded.

On the show, Dicte exactly fits what in the US is the valorized model--young, white, not an immigrant, relatively middle-class, not a drug user--but gets blamed anyway, and that's what I found so shocking, I guess. Her parents' reason for pressuring her is that they're Jehovah's Witnesses and are ashamed of her sin, but I'd have expected the blame to then fall on the parents, not on her.