AdopTalk

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ED NOTE: As we continue to support Stephanie and her family in their rightful pursuit of reclaiming Evelyn...following is a great response to the lunacy of the Grahams. I encourage all of us to use the "opportunity" of both of these events - Baby Evelyn's return and the Grahams family using their personal family tragic loss as a hypocritical and conflicting platform for their agenda. Both of these are excellent opportunities to flood every newspaper in the country with a REALITY CHECK on the necessity to prevent family sanctity!

April 16, 2007

Letter to the Editor
letted@savannahnow.com

Dear Editor,

Re: "Daughter of the Rev. Billy Graham to speak at adoption fundraiser" (April 15), Ruth Graham was quoted as saying, "The tug of your heart is you want to raise that child. But I also know that when you truly love someone, you want what's best for them, even if that doesn't include you." In the next breath Graham calls these infants "unwanted" and claims that the best option for children born to single mothers is for them to be provided to adoptive parents.

I would really like to know, how is it that a child who is truly loved and selflessly surrendered to another family can at the same time be called "unwanted"? This use of language is hurtful to both the natal mother and the child who will one day read many of these comments in the media, comments which frame an unplanned or unsupported pregancy as equivalent to
an unwanted pregnancy or yet more egregious, implying that a child who was adopted, was unwanted.

Robert MacNeil, in Language in Thought and Action writes, "Hayakawa made me understand for the first time what it is in language that makes one statement a report and another a judgment; one objective, another subjective. That is the most elementary lesson of journalism, and of all disciplined writing." Making such generalizations as Graham does by using
the term unwanted is no more than subjective opinion and judgement, as she has not walked in those shoes, not even her daughter's shoes. I wonder, would she call her grandchild who was adopted out, unwanted?

Graham also leaves out the fact that most mothers, including those who are young, unmarried, or resourceless, have physiologically and emotionally bonded with their unborn child throughout the pregnancy, and that separating them at birth or afterward causes unspeakable pain -- the effects of which will ripple throughout their lives.

What makes a pregnancy a crisis? When an expectant mother is abandoned of any and all emotional and provisional support by her family and her surrounding social environment, including her church and her community.

Please note well that special interest groups are working towards shifting funds away from unsupported mothers who greatly desire to keep and raise their children, towards adoption promotion efforts whose goal is to persuade
and convince them, and the general public, that they are less than capable and should "do the right thing" by surrendering their newborn infants to adoption.

In order to accomplish this transfer of children from poor, single, young or otherwise disadvantaged mothers to those individuals or couples of higher socio-economic status, they will use inaccurate or biased language such as "unwanted pregnancy", "crisis pregnancy", and "parentless or unwanted children" to allow singles or couples to feel entitled to the infants born to these mothers.


Mary Rigotti, RN, BScN
Pediatric Nurse
and advocate for mothers and children