Why are they in a hospital bed? (Adoption related)

Yes I am judging hard. Anyone who looks at this and does not for one second try high there could possibly anything peculiar going on with

3 in every 100 children living in a state being adopted.

The multiple commercial enterprises around birth adoption at birth and tracing birth parents. (That's a total capitalist win.)

And even in some cases go as far as to suggest with no investigation etc whatsoever. That the stats in Indiana for this are so high. Shows they are doing good and the UK must be failing babies all over the place.

I've read the stuff and had a think and I think this is very very worrying.

I've not just said oh yeah this must be the truth. And built up a load of random unsupported ideas to back up my view.

Most (maybe all) hospitals in the US aren't allowing pediatric patients to have more than one parent/caregiver present at one time due to covid, so it's a moot point. The usual rules are being bent in all kinds of ways for these two.

Unless you know what the rules are in this particular hospital you are stretching to reach a conclusion there.

FFS @NiceGerbil you’re making it sound like getting pregnant and giving up your baby for adoption is a life choice like surrogacy in the US, it isn’t. The reasons the numbers for babies being put up for adoption in the U.K. are myriad as a PP said because there is access to free healthcare, access to morning after pills and abortions, no stigma around abortions

Women who are matched while pregnant are not paid to give up their babies. Our friends’ lawyer worked on their and the birth mums behalf making sure her needs (physical and emotional) were met without our friends being “taken for a ride” (birth mum’s estranged mother started demanding they buy her a car and put her up in apartment back in her home state after the birth but under California law that’s actually completely illegal).

There are not people walking around trying to convince pregnant women to give up their babies for adoption FGS

But if you fall pregnant by accident, and it is illegal or dangerous or against your religion to get an abortion and you do not want a baby (our friends’ birth mum escaped an abusive marriage, was 35 and living in a homeless shelter) and there are huge medical bills
Mounting up because you do not have insurance and the option of your baby falling into care is a real possibility - in a country where social safety nets do not exist - wouldn’t you prefer to be able to choose a family for your child?

Oh for goodness sake.

The picture is intended to imitate the traditional picture of a tired-but-relieved woman sitting up in a hospital bed with a baby. In those pictures, she is in bed because she has either given birth vaginally (exhausting!) or has just had surgery, and she is a patient.

People are finding this picture instinctively disquieting because when two men have a baby, whether through adoption or surrogacy, we know neither of them has been through labour, so why are they lying on a hospital bed as if they're patients? If it was two women, you'd naturally assume, unless told otherwise, that at least one woman had given birth, and the other was being a loving partner supportive her wife/partner.

As it is, it is setting off the subliminal faking-illness alarm that many people with a bit of life experience have.

Totally agree on the US situation, but I really don’t appreciate people who don’t understand the system over here and think it’s the same. Nicegerbal had some really good points I thought but it’s really not ok that she posts she’s “judging hard” I take offence to posts like that with no clarity is all

MummyJ12 and Simonjt - Your own bias is colouring your judgement though. (As is mine - I used to work with children in care and adopted children so I have reasons for my opinion on this).

Social workers are impartial and look at the needs of the child not the birth family or the prospective adoptive parents- quite rightly as the child should always be at the centre.

America doesn’t put the child at the centre, it puts the prospective parents at the centre which is wrong.

And I agree with NiceGerbil - those stats are absolutely shocking. How can we (as a society) denounce what happened in Ireland but support this ? It’s the same thing but with the carrot instead of the stick !

Totally agree @Simonjt x

I'm judging hard.

The numbers speak for themselves.

Hospital rooms don’t come with sofas, the bed is likely the only place to actually sit.

As others have mentioned, in the US, sofas in hospital rooms are often fairly standard, especially for maternity rooms.

Often (in non-covid times at least) sofas are in rooms so that a family member can stay overnight night with the patient.

It is odd that they are sitting on the bed.

Not many people understand adoption or the adoption process.
In the U.K. the birth parent or parents will have been granted absolutely every single chance and opportunity to prove that they can meet their baby’s or child’s needs before being removed.
It can happen and does that a mother who is on the sixth or seventh child (all of whom are in the care system or have been adopted after all else has failed) gives birth to that child and the baby is taken by the new parent under the Foster to Adopt scheme.
I ask myself, how many chances do people want to give these birth parents who lead chaotic lives and can’t even look after themselves never mind a child or children?
My DD is adopted, it took us 6 years to heal her because she was so traumatised after only 14 months of being with her birth mother.
Birth mother went on to have another child, they didn’t take the baby into care straight away, they gave her every chance AGAIN to prove that she could parent. After a year and the child nearly dying of neglect, the child was taken into the care system again and adopted but again showed signs of the same trauma. Are some people of the opinion that she should be given another chance? Because if anyone is then they do not understand the implications and consequences.
Please don’t judge unless you know the full story, which you never will. So just don’t judge!

Not convinced at all by any of the newborn adoption in such huge numbers just means that women in Indiana are more sensible argument or whatever is being said.

Along with a bizarre suggestion that the UK system must be wrong because obviously more babies should be adopted :/

Nearly 3 in every 100 children in Indiana is adopted. That's bananas.

The stats earlier on numbers. Speak for themselves.

It's a commercial enterprise. And it's telling that half the links when you Google are for agencies for adopting newborns and half are for agencies to help find birth parents.

This is now firmly on my list of terrible things for women and girls in some USA States.

Abortion
Adoption
Surrogacy

More?

The forced birth in USA mantra of 'just give it up for adoption' makes more sense now. It still totally ignores the fact that Pregnancy to term and childbirth are hardly a nothing and nor is handing over a newborn.

There was a recent host of stories in the media about birthday and baby homes. In England. Where unmarried women were coerced/ persuaded/ forced to hand their babies over at birth. The impact on the women was horrific. Decades later still utterly distraught by what was done.

Put a bit of legal talk around it. Commercial shininess. And that mechanism is apparently waay better than any other options. And in fact more babies should be taken this way in the UK. The fact hardly any are taken at birth or given up at birth instead shows the UK is derelict in its duty to protect children...

@Driftingblue Thankyou for your posts, much more eloquent about the system than I have been and @Persipan’S post about different cultural landscape is absolutely spot on

Presumably it's one of their first photos with their babies who have just been born in a hospital?

As for airbrushing irrespective of whether it's surrogacy or adoption, why would she be in the picture, the babies are with their parents.

If a baby goes to their intended parents rather than foster care and birth parents change their mind, the intended parents then have to facilitate contact until such a time that the baby can live fulltime with birth parent/s. If your baby was taken from you because their birth parents changed their mind think about how you would feel having to facilitate that process. Its a balance of the babies and the intended parents welfare.

We do have early permanence/foster to adopt where a baby has around an 80% chance of not returning to the birth family, I only know one person who chose foster to adopt, their daughter was returned to the birth family at 11 months old.

NiceGerbil

“
Can't find any data on the mothers.

Indiana govt says 2k adoptions a year. 6 million people.

3% of children there are adopted?!”

you have to remember that adoption statistics don’t include just newborns - adoption includes kinship adoptions, adoptions from foster care, step-parents adopting, etc.

Objecting to commercial surrogacy is not homophobic.

Why should a baby spend 6 weeks in foster care instead of forming bonds with the people who are committing to a lifetime of parenting?

[quote PrincessNutella]I have mixed feelings. I actually think it is okay to give up a child at birth. But I do think that there should be a reasonable time table before adoption becomes final. I can think of many, many situations where having to keep the child for six weeks would absolutely ruin a woman's life, and would be a very manipulative act on the part of a state--lanother way of telling her she doesn't know her own mind.

Babies do not have to remain in the hospital if the mothers are ready to go home. They are the ones who have just experienced trauma. In the 1990s, it was common practice in many places all over the world to release women and their babies six to eight hours after birth from the hospital! (Look at this Swedish study below) Thank god we have backtracked from that practice. So there is no reason for adoptive parents to stay overnight with healthy children in a hospital--especially during Covid. In fact, a hospital is the worst place for any of them to be! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10893053/[/quote]
They don't have to keep the baby for 6 weeks. The baby goes to foster care and at 6 weeks cafcass will be notified and the process will start. It takes a fair bit longer than 6 weeks to finalise the adoption. They won't even start matching until the 6 weeks have elapsed.

I would absolutely find it equally distasteful if a straight couple hopped into bed to perform this cosplay. A woman is grieving right now. The woman who is in pain and who is bleeding and who spent nine months growing those children in her body. It is unseemly to lie in the battlefield of her pain.

I have mixed feelings. I actually think it is okay to give up a child at birth. But I do think that there should be a reasonable time table before adoption becomes final. I can think of many, many situations where having to keep the child for six weeks would absolutely ruin a woman's life, and would be a very manipulative act on the part of a state--lanother way of telling her she doesn't know her own mind.

Babies do not have to remain in the hospital if the mothers are ready to go home. They are the ones who have just experienced trauma. In the 1990s, it was common practice in many places all over the world to release women and their babies six to eight hours after birth from the hospital! (Look at this Swedish study below) Thank god we have backtracked from that practice. So there is no reason for adoptive parents to stay overnight with healthy children in a hospital--especially during Covid. In fact, a hospital is the worst place for any of them to be! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10893053/

I see

UK--removes highly traumatized child from parents whose lives are out of control and chaotic=great!

US--birth mother knows that her life is out of control and her situation will lead to bad outcomes for child. Decides to give baby up for adoption =unthinkable. Awful.

Gotcha

You are one of those people who say: I really am not homophobic,but....... You are a homophobe,because you are looking for bizare reasons to make this picture look bad.shame on you