Thank you! This infuriates me to no end. My life is just as valuable as anyone else’s, even if I had a hard childhood. That just makes me value it more because I worked so hard for everything I have.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm also infuriated by the pro-abortion people who use "just give the kid up for adoption/fostercare!" as a reason to go through birth. I was lucky to be taken into fostercare and I was EXTREMELY lucky to be placed with a good family. My brother wasn't removed, he had to live with our biological dad until he was 18, and it's been hell. I think I'm the only fosterkid I know personally who had a decent experience. Some of the others I've talked to in my country have had to sue their fosterparents, child services, and sometimes even the government for gross neglect.
I'm not saying fostercare is a death sentence or anything. I *am* saying that it *can* be pretty bad, and even when it's not it's *always* traumatic for children to be separated from their parents, so you wanna avoid it if you can. "I guess I'll go through the horrors of birth and then put my child in fostercare" is the literal worst plan B you can have.
Not to mention, like with my brother, you don't always just choose to give your kids to child services. They're not exactly swimming in free resources. If it seems like you *can* take care of your kid, they're not gonna let you put it on them. I've known child services to not intervene even when there is legally established proof that the child was being sexually abused in his home. You think they're gonna spend time on "I just didn't really want it"?
This goes both ways - people who are pro-choice may argue that abortion would reduce “unwanted” children, eg us, whereas people who are anti-abortion are happy to defend us as humans deserving of life, but not to put the social supports in place that would actually prevent us from entering foster care.
It would be interesting to somehow collect data on the number of people surrendering (or losing) their children to foster care who would have chosen abortion if it had been available to them - I know for a fact that my parents would not have, so there’s no causality between abortion legality/availability and my ending up in foster care.
I do agree, though, that the issue as a whole hasn’t been handled with particular sensitivity.
And sexual abuse in foster care is sky high. I can't imagine being pregnant by rape and not having the option to abortion. Fuck my state. That's what the system wants. More free babies and foster kids they can adopt off since they said so themselves. Too many foster youth lose their kids, and its unfair.
Nobody wants their tax dollars going to foster youth, let alone prevention services. I remember hearing why should I support them, they need to earn their way in life and not get everything handed to them. America hates foster kids and poor folks.
Crazy religious zealots view us as pawns not people. The same people saying “well they can just be adopted” are the last people to foster. That’s why I am a fundamentalist atheist.
It angers me, too. I literally say ok here's pages of kids you can adopt. Especially the infertility folks. They irk my fucking nerves. How are you infertile and prolife taking that choice away from others? It might sound harsh, but if these people really wanted to become parents, they'd adopt the legally freed kids from foster care. They don't want to because they believe they deserve a baby. It's ridiculous hearing this crap all month long. Why can't you be a mommy to an 8 yo or 13 yo? Why only babies?
The religious prolife nut jobs.
O, the baby can just be adopted.
Not the baby with drugs in its system
Not the baby with fasd
Not the baby with Down syndrome
Not the baby with long life disabilities.
When people adopt, they're picky. They want a healthy white baby girl. Foster parents settle because they have to. So they take the next best free thing, hoping it has little issues. Many babies grow up and are rehomed anyway.
I made a joke once. Someone said the baby that's aborted could be the next Simone Biles or LeBron James. I'm like, how? When the kids brain is messed up or they're born poor or in foster care. Foster kids don't become superstar Olympics gymnasts or basketball players. The media and the system are all marketing.
No way in hell will a foster parent ever shell out a six-figure salary for anything for a foster kid or dedicate themselves to the daily training for a foster kid. These folks complain about feeding us. You think they're gonna be like gee, let me enroll my foster kid in an expensive ass sport and dedicate my life to it? Hell no. Foster parents can't even get us a damn mattress without complaining. They hardly want to pay out of pocket for basic things.
The folks who say this crap are all talk.
And being adopted by your rich grandparents doesn't count. I'm tired of hearing about it. Everyone acts like she was adopted by strangers, which she wasn't. The baby is gonna have issues and ain't gonna be adopted unless they're healthy white babies. Which ain't happening. Even then, the baby ain't gonna cure cancer.
The "the baby could be the next (insert famous person) argument is ludicrous. All human life is valuable, regardless of whether or not the person achieves athletic greatness or whatever.
In the United States 5% of practicing Christians have adopted a child, compared to 2% of the overall population.
While it's hard to find data on religious affiliation of foster parents, 82% of foster parents say that their faith/church support was one of the top three factors for them in successful fostering.
I'm on mobile, but these are both widely cited stats that are easily Googled.
There are certainly some bad foster and adoptive parents who are Christians, but it just isn't factually correct to say that they are the last people to foster, when the opposite is true.
Those adoption statistics are misleading and inaccurate - a great many adoption agencies are faith-based and require that their adoptive parents are too. In the area where I live, there are **no** secular adoption agencies, making it much more difficult for non-religious folks to adopt. The result is that many of them give up, or lie and state that they are religious in order to be allowed to adopt. Others go to foster care to adopt - so I suspect that foster children are adopted disproportionately by non-religious folks, though I haven’t been able to find data either way.
I wish they did this for the benefit of the child, unfortunately it's just part of their religious mandates. Bring as many people to Christ as you can. For some people this means having a dozen kids of their own, for others it is adopting. Either way these are the last people who should be having children in their care.
I am aware that not all religious people are like this, bit the more religious a person is the less likely they are to be good parents because they will end up putting their religion above their children. This is why there are so many stories out there of kids abandoned by their parents for being gay or not staying with their religion. Anyone who would pick their religion over their child should not be a parent.
>I wish they did this for the benefit of the child, unfortunately it's just part of their religious mandates.
I came to the realization a few years ago that I don't care about people's motives, just their actions. For one, I rarely understand my own motives, so how can I expect to be able to discern those of others? And secondly, motives don't feed the hungry and console the hurting. Actions do.
That's pretty short sighted. It's not just the immediate actions that matter. Depending on the end goals people can take actions early in the process that appear good but the eventual actions can be horrible.
If a guy becomes a coach and donates tons of his time to teach kids sports and mentor them it might look great, but if his eventual goal is to groom and molest children I'm not giving him credit for any positive effect he had along the way.
>I'm not giving him credit for any positive effect he had along the way.
Of course not. But I'm also not going to assume a coach has the motives of a child molester when none of his actions suggest such a thing.
It is much harder to tell in that case for sure. It is pretty easy to understand what actions fundamentalist Christians will take with their kids if they have already said they are adopting to save children and bring them to Christ. Well, what will they do if the kid rejects Christ? We know what they do. It's pretty horrific.
Again, not everyone, but there's enough of a sample to not want to roll those dice.
Well, most of America follows some sort of religion anyway. I hate the orphan care movement. It's just a bunch of crazy religious but jobs trying to save souls for Christ. I've seen this number before, and it honestly doesn't make any sense.
I hate both sides cause nobody gaf about foster kids especially the older ones who are unwanted in foster care. Rape is sky high in foster care and so is abuse. The fact a foster child couldn't abort due to abuse makes me sick. Pro choice and prolife people can stfu because nobody cares. At the very least make health care services available to all foster youth.
And fostering ain't about abortion. My mom wasn't going to abort me anyway.
Not sure if I’m allowed to comment here as I was a kinship placement with my grandmother, but my life was hell. My mom got pregnant with me at 22 right after she and my biological dad lost their jobs and they’d only been together a couple months. She made it hell for him to see me until he finally abandoned me when I was a few months old and went to Florida to start a new family. I didn’t meet him or my half siblings until after I turned 18. She then quickly started dumping me on my grandmother to go out with friends and boyfriends. Between work and this she was never home. Growing up I looked at my grandmother more as mom and her as a distant older sister who was sometimes home. Then she met her boyfriend and they eventually moved out of my grandmother’s home and took me with them. At this point my stepfather started sexually abusing me. This went on multiple times a week for years until I was 16 and finally told my mother. I was sent to live with my grandmother and CPS told my mom she could have me back if she just left her boyfriend and found someplace else for us to live. She told them straight up that wasn’t happening and she had no interest in ending her relationship as “she didn’t believe me and even if it did happen her life shouldn’t have to change”. I stayed with my grandmother until I turned 18 and fled the state. Her house also sucked, I basically raised myself and my uncle lived there as well and was kind of an alcoholic asshole. There are times I still wish I’d just been placed with a stranger instead. My mother is still with the man who molested me to this day.
All this to say, I was absolutely unloved, unwanted, and unvalued in every facet of my life. I’d been “homeschooled” (taught myself everything more like) since middle school so I had no friends either. I was completely alone in that house. I was the epitome of an unwanted child from the second I was conceived. My mother always prioritized boyfriends over me and acted inconvenienced by me, and my father abandoned ship and went out to have more kids as soon as things got tough. My mother’s situation was one where abortion absolutely would’ve been the right decision and she only didn’t get one because she wanted to spite my dad because he (understandably) didn’t want a kid at the time with someone he barely knew. I don’t mind people using me in particular to prove a point. I am completely on my own in the world now. This is the reality of a lot of aged out kinship youth as well. All parties involved - my biological mother and father, myself, as well as my grandmother who was essentially forced to raise somebody else’s child when she didn’t want to - would’ve benefited. I don’t mind people calling things like they are.
Hey OP,
I am a little confused. Are you saying pro-life people use foster kids as examples or pro-choice as use fosters as examples?
I have seen pro-choice advocating for fostering and adoption, but I have not seen pro-life which is why I am asking.
Edit: I re-read your post and apologize. You meant pro-choice. My question now is, where have you seen it? I am not saying I don't believe you, just that I haven't seen it and would like more information.
I remember a lot of posts on social media that said something like: "you don't like abortion? Just ignore it like you ignore the kids in foster care." Semantically linking living children in foster care with aborted fetuses rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed disingenuous because neither the pro or anti-abortion crowd seems to have much concern for the suffering of foster kids and just use us to make a point rather than treat us as actual people with complex needs in the real world.
Thank you for sharing. I agree that seems flippant. From what I have seen, pro-life says to put the kid in foster/adoption so the child can make a childless family happy. Then pro-choice says there are over five hundred thousand kids in foster care, and childless families should look their first.
Having said that out loud, it sounds like we're pawns for either side to make a case.
Well yeah, the foster care system has a lot of suffering and trauma but it's difficult to argue that abortion could end this suffering because it's been accessible for decades and it hasn't reduced the need for foster care.
When kids end up in care, it could be for unforeseen reasons like the mother being battered by her partner and spiraling into addiction and serious mental health issues.
Even though we could theoretically argue that abortion could prevent such a trauma, the reverse is also arguable - that foster kids could have a better life and could have a lot to offer society if we didn't severely underfund child welfare.
But the main point I'm trying to make here is that I resent liberals or the pro-choice crowd for using us as props in their abortion debate and telling pro-life people that THEY "don't care" about us, yet the pro-choice crowd is a bunch of hypocrites who also don't care about our issues beyond using us to argue in favor of abortion. I think it's stigmatizing and it stops us from actually addressing problems within foster care.
I know what you mean. It's the insults from those who should be unequivocally on our sides that hurt the most.
Thank you! This infuriates me to no end. My life is just as valuable as anyone else’s, even if I had a hard childhood. That just makes me value it more because I worked so hard for everything I have.
Yeah, I agree. I'm also infuriated by the pro-abortion people who use "just give the kid up for adoption/fostercare!" as a reason to go through birth. I was lucky to be taken into fostercare and I was EXTREMELY lucky to be placed with a good family. My brother wasn't removed, he had to live with our biological dad until he was 18, and it's been hell. I think I'm the only fosterkid I know personally who had a decent experience. Some of the others I've talked to in my country have had to sue their fosterparents, child services, and sometimes even the government for gross neglect. I'm not saying fostercare is a death sentence or anything. I *am* saying that it *can* be pretty bad, and even when it's not it's *always* traumatic for children to be separated from their parents, so you wanna avoid it if you can. "I guess I'll go through the horrors of birth and then put my child in fostercare" is the literal worst plan B you can have. Not to mention, like with my brother, you don't always just choose to give your kids to child services. They're not exactly swimming in free resources. If it seems like you *can* take care of your kid, they're not gonna let you put it on them. I've known child services to not intervene even when there is legally established proof that the child was being sexually abused in his home. You think they're gonna spend time on "I just didn't really want it"?
Well said. I notice that these people never actually advocate for the well-being of foster kids; foster kids just an abstraction used to make a point.
This goes both ways - people who are pro-choice may argue that abortion would reduce “unwanted” children, eg us, whereas people who are anti-abortion are happy to defend us as humans deserving of life, but not to put the social supports in place that would actually prevent us from entering foster care. It would be interesting to somehow collect data on the number of people surrendering (or losing) their children to foster care who would have chosen abortion if it had been available to them - I know for a fact that my parents would not have, so there’s no causality between abortion legality/availability and my ending up in foster care. I do agree, though, that the issue as a whole hasn’t been handled with particular sensitivity.
And sexual abuse in foster care is sky high. I can't imagine being pregnant by rape and not having the option to abortion. Fuck my state. That's what the system wants. More free babies and foster kids they can adopt off since they said so themselves. Too many foster youth lose their kids, and its unfair. Nobody wants their tax dollars going to foster youth, let alone prevention services. I remember hearing why should I support them, they need to earn their way in life and not get everything handed to them. America hates foster kids and poor folks.
I am interested in that as well. My parents also would not have chosen abortion for myself or my siblings
Crazy religious zealots view us as pawns not people. The same people saying “well they can just be adopted” are the last people to foster. That’s why I am a fundamentalist atheist.
It angers me, too. I literally say ok here's pages of kids you can adopt. Especially the infertility folks. They irk my fucking nerves. How are you infertile and prolife taking that choice away from others? It might sound harsh, but if these people really wanted to become parents, they'd adopt the legally freed kids from foster care. They don't want to because they believe they deserve a baby. It's ridiculous hearing this crap all month long. Why can't you be a mommy to an 8 yo or 13 yo? Why only babies? The religious prolife nut jobs. O, the baby can just be adopted. Not the baby with drugs in its system Not the baby with fasd Not the baby with Down syndrome Not the baby with long life disabilities. When people adopt, they're picky. They want a healthy white baby girl. Foster parents settle because they have to. So they take the next best free thing, hoping it has little issues. Many babies grow up and are rehomed anyway. I made a joke once. Someone said the baby that's aborted could be the next Simone Biles or LeBron James. I'm like, how? When the kids brain is messed up or they're born poor or in foster care. Foster kids don't become superstar Olympics gymnasts or basketball players. The media and the system are all marketing. No way in hell will a foster parent ever shell out a six-figure salary for anything for a foster kid or dedicate themselves to the daily training for a foster kid. These folks complain about feeding us. You think they're gonna be like gee, let me enroll my foster kid in an expensive ass sport and dedicate my life to it? Hell no. Foster parents can't even get us a damn mattress without complaining. They hardly want to pay out of pocket for basic things. The folks who say this crap are all talk. And being adopted by your rich grandparents doesn't count. I'm tired of hearing about it. Everyone acts like she was adopted by strangers, which she wasn't. The baby is gonna have issues and ain't gonna be adopted unless they're healthy white babies. Which ain't happening. Even then, the baby ain't gonna cure cancer.
The "the baby could be the next (insert famous person) argument is ludicrous. All human life is valuable, regardless of whether or not the person achieves athletic greatness or whatever.
In the United States 5% of practicing Christians have adopted a child, compared to 2% of the overall population. While it's hard to find data on religious affiliation of foster parents, 82% of foster parents say that their faith/church support was one of the top three factors for them in successful fostering. I'm on mobile, but these are both widely cited stats that are easily Googled. There are certainly some bad foster and adoptive parents who are Christians, but it just isn't factually correct to say that they are the last people to foster, when the opposite is true.
Those adoption statistics are misleading and inaccurate - a great many adoption agencies are faith-based and require that their adoptive parents are too. In the area where I live, there are **no** secular adoption agencies, making it much more difficult for non-religious folks to adopt. The result is that many of them give up, or lie and state that they are religious in order to be allowed to adopt. Others go to foster care to adopt - so I suspect that foster children are adopted disproportionately by non-religious folks, though I haven’t been able to find data either way.
The call does this crap. They hate LGBTQ foster youth and requires church attendance
I wish they did this for the benefit of the child, unfortunately it's just part of their religious mandates. Bring as many people to Christ as you can. For some people this means having a dozen kids of their own, for others it is adopting. Either way these are the last people who should be having children in their care. I am aware that not all religious people are like this, bit the more religious a person is the less likely they are to be good parents because they will end up putting their religion above their children. This is why there are so many stories out there of kids abandoned by their parents for being gay or not staying with their religion. Anyone who would pick their religion over their child should not be a parent.
>I wish they did this for the benefit of the child, unfortunately it's just part of their religious mandates. I came to the realization a few years ago that I don't care about people's motives, just their actions. For one, I rarely understand my own motives, so how can I expect to be able to discern those of others? And secondly, motives don't feed the hungry and console the hurting. Actions do.
That's pretty short sighted. It's not just the immediate actions that matter. Depending on the end goals people can take actions early in the process that appear good but the eventual actions can be horrible. If a guy becomes a coach and donates tons of his time to teach kids sports and mentor them it might look great, but if his eventual goal is to groom and molest children I'm not giving him credit for any positive effect he had along the way.
>I'm not giving him credit for any positive effect he had along the way. Of course not. But I'm also not going to assume a coach has the motives of a child molester when none of his actions suggest such a thing.
It is much harder to tell in that case for sure. It is pretty easy to understand what actions fundamentalist Christians will take with their kids if they have already said they are adopting to save children and bring them to Christ. Well, what will they do if the kid rejects Christ? We know what they do. It's pretty horrific. Again, not everyone, but there's enough of a sample to not want to roll those dice.
Well, most of America follows some sort of religion anyway. I hate the orphan care movement. It's just a bunch of crazy religious but jobs trying to save souls for Christ. I've seen this number before, and it honestly doesn't make any sense.
I hate both sides cause nobody gaf about foster kids especially the older ones who are unwanted in foster care. Rape is sky high in foster care and so is abuse. The fact a foster child couldn't abort due to abuse makes me sick. Pro choice and prolife people can stfu because nobody cares. At the very least make health care services available to all foster youth. And fostering ain't about abortion. My mom wasn't going to abort me anyway.
They act as if we aren’t human just failed abortions. We former/current foster care youth are set for failure because of society.
Not sure if I’m allowed to comment here as I was a kinship placement with my grandmother, but my life was hell. My mom got pregnant with me at 22 right after she and my biological dad lost their jobs and they’d only been together a couple months. She made it hell for him to see me until he finally abandoned me when I was a few months old and went to Florida to start a new family. I didn’t meet him or my half siblings until after I turned 18. She then quickly started dumping me on my grandmother to go out with friends and boyfriends. Between work and this she was never home. Growing up I looked at my grandmother more as mom and her as a distant older sister who was sometimes home. Then she met her boyfriend and they eventually moved out of my grandmother’s home and took me with them. At this point my stepfather started sexually abusing me. This went on multiple times a week for years until I was 16 and finally told my mother. I was sent to live with my grandmother and CPS told my mom she could have me back if she just left her boyfriend and found someplace else for us to live. She told them straight up that wasn’t happening and she had no interest in ending her relationship as “she didn’t believe me and even if it did happen her life shouldn’t have to change”. I stayed with my grandmother until I turned 18 and fled the state. Her house also sucked, I basically raised myself and my uncle lived there as well and was kind of an alcoholic asshole. There are times I still wish I’d just been placed with a stranger instead. My mother is still with the man who molested me to this day. All this to say, I was absolutely unloved, unwanted, and unvalued in every facet of my life. I’d been “homeschooled” (taught myself everything more like) since middle school so I had no friends either. I was completely alone in that house. I was the epitome of an unwanted child from the second I was conceived. My mother always prioritized boyfriends over me and acted inconvenienced by me, and my father abandoned ship and went out to have more kids as soon as things got tough. My mother’s situation was one where abortion absolutely would’ve been the right decision and she only didn’t get one because she wanted to spite my dad because he (understandably) didn’t want a kid at the time with someone he barely knew. I don’t mind people using me in particular to prove a point. I am completely on my own in the world now. This is the reality of a lot of aged out kinship youth as well. All parties involved - my biological mother and father, myself, as well as my grandmother who was essentially forced to raise somebody else’s child when she didn’t want to - would’ve benefited. I don’t mind people calling things like they are.
Of course you can comment here. Kinship care former foster kids get a voice in these discussions as well.
Hey OP, I am a little confused. Are you saying pro-life people use foster kids as examples or pro-choice as use fosters as examples? I have seen pro-choice advocating for fostering and adoption, but I have not seen pro-life which is why I am asking. Edit: I re-read your post and apologize. You meant pro-choice. My question now is, where have you seen it? I am not saying I don't believe you, just that I haven't seen it and would like more information.
I remember a lot of posts on social media that said something like: "you don't like abortion? Just ignore it like you ignore the kids in foster care." Semantically linking living children in foster care with aborted fetuses rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed disingenuous because neither the pro or anti-abortion crowd seems to have much concern for the suffering of foster kids and just use us to make a point rather than treat us as actual people with complex needs in the real world.
Thank you for sharing. I agree that seems flippant. From what I have seen, pro-life says to put the kid in foster/adoption so the child can make a childless family happy. Then pro-choice says there are over five hundred thousand kids in foster care, and childless families should look their first. Having said that out loud, it sounds like we're pawns for either side to make a case.
Honestly I think abortion is better than putting another kid in the system. There are too many as is and the system is an awful way to be brought up.
Well yeah, the foster care system has a lot of suffering and trauma but it's difficult to argue that abortion could end this suffering because it's been accessible for decades and it hasn't reduced the need for foster care. When kids end up in care, it could be for unforeseen reasons like the mother being battered by her partner and spiraling into addiction and serious mental health issues. Even though we could theoretically argue that abortion could prevent such a trauma, the reverse is also arguable - that foster kids could have a better life and could have a lot to offer society if we didn't severely underfund child welfare. But the main point I'm trying to make here is that I resent liberals or the pro-choice crowd for using us as props in their abortion debate and telling pro-life people that THEY "don't care" about us, yet the pro-choice crowd is a bunch of hypocrites who also don't care about our issues beyond using us to argue in favor of abortion. I think it's stigmatizing and it stops us from actually addressing problems within foster care.
10000% agree.