Why not have the kid and put it up for adoption? Is that really so difficult an option to think of?
Let’s talk about why some women might not want to go through 9+ months of pregnancy and then put the baby up for adoption.
Let’s start with pregnancy. Pregnancy isn’t easy. You spend the first 3 months being sick, you get 3 pleasant months (if you’re lucky) in the middle, then you spend the last 3 months waddling around on feet the size of footballs with an aching back, a leaky bladder, severe heartburn, and sleep deprivation because you can’t get comfortable and have to get up to pee every 30 minutes anyhow.
Plus, you have to take off work frequently for doctor’s appointments and need some way to pay for all your prenatal visits and ultrasounds. Just an ultrasound at my doctor’s office was $300. The total for 9 months of prenatal care was over $5,000. You can barely feed your kids, but you’re going to be able to scrape together the money to pay for medical care while you’re pregnant? You have a job where you have zero sick leave, and you think your employer is going to be okay with you being out a few hours once a month for the first 6 months, then every 2 weeks for months 7 and 8, and then every single week for the last month? Really?
And this is assuming you have a healthy pregnancy.
You could end up with gestational diabetes, a serious condition which requires you to completely change your diet and eating habits—something that, depending on your income and where you live may not even really be possible. You could end up with high blood pressure, which can result in death…especially if you don’t have a doctor. You could have a condition like placenta previa that puts you at high risk for internal bleeding, meaning you could hemorrhage to death when you go into labor. You could have pre-term labor and end up on bed rest for weeks or even months. Pregnancy can kill you. And if you’re poor and you don’t have a job or you have a low-paying job with no insurance and no time off anyhow, you probably can’t get to a doctor, which means the chances your pregnancy will kill you go up even higher. You know what would be awesome for the kids you already have? If you die.
Let’s move on to labor and delivery. I’ll just make this a short story and say: it’s excruciatingly painful, it’s unbelievably expensive, sometimes you get cut open and have to spend several days in the hospital and then several weeks at home trying to recover, and at the end, you experience a rush of hormones that in most cases make you immediately attached to your baby. Then someone else comes in and takes that baby from you.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had kids before, but if someone had come into my hospital room and tried to take my baby away from me? Even if I’d agreed to it beforehand? I would literally have torn them to pieces. It’s why so many adoptions that individuals arrange with women while they’re pregnant fall through. It’s hard to give up your baby. And often the women who do feel intense regret, anxiety, and depression for years and years and years after they give their babies up.
If I could spare myself all of that—a body forever changed and the certainty of permanent emotional scars—by having an abortion, when I knew I couldn’t afford to go through a pregnancy, might not survive it, might not be able to support the kids I already have in the process, and would almost certainly not actually be able to go through the adoption process at the end?
Giving a baby up for adoption is not like dropping off a sweater you don’t wear anymore at Goodwill. It really is that difficult of an option for many, many women to think of, financially, physically and emotionally.