Unwanted Babies: Adoption or Abortion?

Posted on November 3, 2019 by Father Joe

I cannot remember ever NOT being pro-life. Maybe that is why the reasoning of abortion advocates seems so very foreign and peculiar to me? Or maybe it is a matter of my Christian formation and ability to reason what is right and wrong? Immediately after ordination, I spoke with a pregnant woman who was contemplating abortion. As far as I could figure, her selfishness had blinded her to the truth. She argued: “I could never adopt my baby out to strangers. I could not do that to him! If I can’t raise him, no one will have him!” The twisted reasoning hurt my brain. It made no sense. How was the killing of a baby better than adopting him out to a good family who would love and care for him?

She made up all sorts of nightmare scenarios. “What if they abused him? What if they were mean to him?” Eventually she aborted, not once but seven times. Today she mourns that she has neither a husband nor a family. Doctors tell her that she will never conceive again. She weeps and there is no consoling her. She came too late to the truth about her actions. She had murdered her children.

Posted here is a clip of the song, SANDMAN’S COMING. The song comes from the musical, FAUST, by Randy Newman. Linda Ronstadt plays the part of a distraught mother who despairs and kills her child. The Sandman is death. The musical piece speaks to choices and consequences. Ideally a woman, along with the child’s father, should raise a child. But sometimes, especially when a young immature girl gets pregnant, the best solution is probably adoption. Abortion is never an answer. Once conceived, that child is a human person with an eternal destiny. That child has an inherent God-given right to life that is greater than any sense of shame. The child is not a commodity or thing. I know one woman who gave up her children because her new boyfriend said that he did not want another man’s brats in his home.

I have known mothers who were drug addicts. Their children were born already addicted and would go through terrible withdrawal. I recall a girl at school when I was young who gave birth in the bathroom and left her baby there. We have all heard stories about infants left in dumpsters. How could people do such things? We medicate against fertility as if it is a disease. Millions of babies are aborted as if they are simply tumors. After all this, we can still ask how mothers can so fail their babies? We have enabled the situation where mothers (and fathers) run away from their responsibilities.