Women in Hiding Press
  • Home
  • DigitalWIH
  • DigitalBTS
  • DigitalFAH

Adoption = Crisis Pregnancy

1/30/2013

 
By Kathleen Hoy Foley
Adoption and abortion equal crisis pregnancy.  An unwanted conception is a militant invasion into a girl’s body, a woman’s body; biological warfare waged inside her skin.  It is physical and psychological attack.  Every cell plundered.  Every breath conscripted.  Her intimate organs battered, conquered.  Assaulted by her bodily systems.  Her external self disfigured.  Permanently scarred.  Her spirit brutalized by overwhelming shame.  She is cast aside while forced to inhabit a body turned enemy, tethered to a carcass that no longer belongs to her.  The agony of this physical and psychological violence endured by girls and women impregnated against their will is drowned out by the shouts of moral accusers, disregarded by cowards, and contorted to fit inside the sugarcoated fantasies of the naive and ignorant where such girls and women are forever imprisoned.

Many of us entered the world at the expense of a minor child’s acute physical and emotional trauma.  Trauma that left her catastrophically injured with an unwanted pregnancy.  It is the story of my own birth.  Unverifiable.  Long buried beneath calcified silence.  I do not know who the biological male is but all signs point to a rapist.  I am also an adoptee.  The man who married my mother—the father who would abuse all the children in his household—eventually, secretly adopted me.  Then in an unimpeded race to fated doom, I, too, was impregnated by rape as a juvenile.  I escaped the rapist.  But not the angry adoptee who returned years later and destroyed the life I’d built.   

The relentless, ongoing, inescapable punishment of sexual assault was my inheritance, passed down from generation to generation, woman to girl.  It is cyclical insanity on steroids.  Unspoken catastrophe feeding on unspoken catastrophe feeding on unspoken catastrophe.  Not just my story but the epic story of silenced abuse.  Abuse that warps society.  Epidemic abuse that society itself perpetuates.  

The hunting down of women has to stop.  Adoption equals crisis pregnancy—it represents profound female trauma.  A confidential adoption has become a loaded gun pointed at a broken woman.  The pursuit of her—sanctioned, encouraged, and celebrated—is akin to big game hunters stalking a reserve where trophy animals are trapped.  When the hunt for a woman begins, she has no safety, no protection; there is no place for her to hide.  She is completely dependent on the whims of the pursuer.  Laws forbid animal cruelty.  The trapped beast likely will be slaughtered swiftly, painlessly as possible.  There exists no such mercy for a woman who was once entrapped in an unwanted, crisis pregnancy.  Those who hunt her down kill her in stages.  It is emotional homicide—quiet, authorized, leisurely execution.
    
It was gut wrenching, falling-off-a-cliff chilling when I could no longer refute the evidence surrounding my birth.  In a society that sells conception as a romance of candles, flowers, and sweet love there I was, spawned in violence.  I could not bear for it to be true; could not bear to carry the slur of its implication.  The weight of it settled over me in a sinister, roiling gloom and I began the slide downward into its seductive arms.  But stopped myself pretty damn fast.  That was a hell I was not about to create for myself.  Or recreate for my mother. 

Whatever the details of my conception are, they do not belong to me.  The shattering violation of her personal boundaries bound my mother inside a hell inconceivable to most outsiders.  When my time came I, too, cowered silently inside that same hell.  To obligate any woman to an unwanted pregnancy, to force her public, to coerce her into exposing the particulars of a crisis so profoundly intimate is to strip her of all dignity, of all protection, and instill her with terror.  It forces a woman to lie to appease the pursuer—a bully—in an effort to safeguard herself, her life, her family.  Or forces her into deep hiding.  Or keeps her constantly on the lookout, always on the run.
 
A crisis pregnancy represents grave trauma.  It is not a romantic fantasy, or cause for celebration, or a moral failure.  A woman forced to endure an unwanted pregnancy is not anyone’s link to emotional survival, the missing piece to a familial puzzle, or the answer to someone’s misery.
    
Adoption equals crisis pregnancy.  Abortion equals the end of a crisis pregnancy.  Some of us made it here.  Some did not.  Those of us who did have choices to make.  We can choose courage.  We can choose cowardice.  We can choose to build.  We can choose to destroy.  What we do with our opportunities, how we handle what haunts us, reveals who we are.  It is always, always our choice.

Comments are closed.

    Categories

    All
    ADOPTION PRIVACY
    EXCERPT: Woman In Hiding
    INTROSPECTIVE
    POEMS
    SHAMING WOMEN
    TRAUMA
    VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

    Archives

    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    July 2016
    March 2016
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

    RSS Feed


    Women in Hiding Press Books:
    Picture
    Picture

    About the Author

    In the provocative spirit of Matilda Joslyn Gage, Gloria Anzaldua, and Mary Daly, Kathleen Hoy Foley expands and deepens the voice of female experience.

    Raw. Uncompromising. Compassionate. Deliberately antagonistic. Kathleen writes to awaken the courage within the reader.


    TO THE SURVIVOR
    If you are a person who was victimized as a child or as an adult, I am so very sorry you ever had to suffer at the hands of a predator. 

    I am sorry you were abused, sorry no one protected you, sorry you have felt so alone, sorry you have been so afraid then and in the now. I am so sorry for the loss of your innocence. 

    You were and are entitled to you life. And you had a right to inherit your own body. And no matter what you did or what you think you failed to do you are not to blame. Sexual abuse is never a victim's choice. Sexual abuse is something that was done to your body not something you wanted. 

    This is an excerpt from: 

    http://web.archive.org/web/20130101063123/http://true-perspective.org 

    Kathleen and I encourage you to visit this site for perspective on your ordeal. Live happy and whole. Claim you power! 

    You are your own authority.

    Question Everything.  Including social, religious & political authorities

    Learn to listen and respond to your intuition.  It is never wrong.

    Learn to be impolite.  It must be part of your defense system.

    Nothing is unspeakable.

    Stare truth in the eye and speak it.

    You name abuse.  Listen to your body.  It will tell you.  It is never wrong. 

    Stare abuse in the eye and speak it.

    Stare abusers in the eye and name them.

    Use your voice.  Use your words. 

    BE LOUD.  Violence against girls, boys, women and men hides in the silent shadows.

    Know that you are powerful.

    KNOW THAT YOUR VOICE IS POWERFUL.   USE IT.



© Copyright 2014-2020 Women in Hiding Press
Proudly powered by Weebly