I second your comments, Emily, on the Marquette method as a whole and Whole Mission in particular for help learning it! I worked with one of their instructors for a year after the birth of our fifth baby, and she was incredibly helpful! She reviewed my charts with me several times, was very responsive via email, and helped me have so much peace of mind in a difficult time.
Emily, I loved the section of your Substack on keeping faith in Christ even if disappointed in clergy. So beautiful nuanced and captures my own feelings so well in same.
I was disturbed though Emily with the earlier section of the piece on adoption and surragacy. I know the birth mum of my 2 adopted children did not ‘ make a plan for adoption or lovingly choose the family for their child’. Both children were removed from their 17 year old Mam by social workers, put into foster care for 2 years while we were chosen as the adoptive parents by the social workers . It was ethical but birth Mam had very little choice in any of it.
As for Surragacy… your words would deeply hurt three families I know who engaged in surragacy. One family’s surrogate was the Dad’s sister. She is far from discarded Emily and lives next door to her brother!
In the other two cases, the surragates were Ukrainian and the Irish families rescued them and some of their their extended family from the war and secured housing for them here in Ireland. Again not discarded in any way…
I agree with every other point you make about surrogacy but I think the ongoing dynamics between birth parents, adoptive parents and surrogates are a lot more complex and nuanced than your piece suggests.
Just my thoughts Emily abd wanted to share my thoughts with you.
You are right that so should have clarified I was talking about private infant adoption. Since no money is exchanged in fostering to adopt, it is not subject to the same comparison. As for your friends, I am glad they are providing some care for the women or have a relationship with them, but they still used those women for their bodies and exploited them for their own ends and treated their children like objects and violated their rights from the start of their life. Their actions were gravely wrong. And I should also add, that we can feel enormous sympathy and empathy for someone’s heartbreak over not being able to conceive a child. We can understand that their grief, combined with a lack of formation, can compromise their reason and lead them to make choices that seem to offer them hope. We can rejoice in the life of the child who exists. But none of that makes what the parents did right. It remains a grave injustice and a grave violation of human dignity, even if their own guilt is mitigated somewhat by other
Thanks for replying Emily. In Ireland we’ve almost never had private infant adoption. We either had the mother and baby homes (which I’m sure you’ll have read about) from where babies were exported for adoption or private arrangements made between clergy and the religious orders running the homes to find adoptive families for the babies. If that didn’t happen, Irish families were so huge, someone took in the baby and raised them as their own. Over the past 20/30 years Irish families largely adopted from China/Vietman etc until that avenue tightened up. In Uk thousand of children available for adoption but they are not ‘cute babies’ and often wait for years before ‘ageing out’ of the system.
As for surragcy, so agree with these points - I just think that the feelings and actions of the parents towards the surragates may not be as cruel as the article implies.
Emily, I appreciated especially the section on how we are only shown (I’m paraphrasing)how much we have hurt others very slowly, so that we can bear it, and what a grace that is.
Thanks also for the shout out for NaPro doctors, my daughter is one of them.
On another note, thanks for writing great Endow studies, and also for the recent podcast on modesty, a lot of good food for thought in that.
Thanks for sharing the article on Jolene! I absolutely loathe the re-write… this article captures all of the “why’s”.
I second your comments, Emily, on the Marquette method as a whole and Whole Mission in particular for help learning it! I worked with one of their instructors for a year after the birth of our fifth baby, and she was incredibly helpful! She reviewed my charts with me several times, was very responsive via email, and helped me have so much peace of mind in a difficult time.
Emily, I loved the section of your Substack on keeping faith in Christ even if disappointed in clergy. So beautiful nuanced and captures my own feelings so well in same.
I was disturbed though Emily with the earlier section of the piece on adoption and surragacy. I know the birth mum of my 2 adopted children did not ‘ make a plan for adoption or lovingly choose the family for their child’. Both children were removed from their 17 year old Mam by social workers, put into foster care for 2 years while we were chosen as the adoptive parents by the social workers . It was ethical but birth Mam had very little choice in any of it.
As for Surragacy… your words would deeply hurt three families I know who engaged in surragacy. One family’s surrogate was the Dad’s sister. She is far from discarded Emily and lives next door to her brother!
In the other two cases, the surragates were Ukrainian and the Irish families rescued them and some of their their extended family from the war and secured housing for them here in Ireland. Again not discarded in any way…
I agree with every other point you make about surrogacy but I think the ongoing dynamics between birth parents, adoptive parents and surrogates are a lot more complex and nuanced than your piece suggests.
Just my thoughts Emily abd wanted to share my thoughts with you.
Bríd
You are right that so should have clarified I was talking about private infant adoption. Since no money is exchanged in fostering to adopt, it is not subject to the same comparison. As for your friends, I am glad they are providing some care for the women or have a relationship with them, but they still used those women for their bodies and exploited them for their own ends and treated their children like objects and violated their rights from the start of their life. Their actions were gravely wrong. And I should also add, that we can feel enormous sympathy and empathy for someone’s heartbreak over not being able to conceive a child. We can understand that their grief, combined with a lack of formation, can compromise their reason and lead them to make choices that seem to offer them hope. We can rejoice in the life of the child who exists. But none of that makes what the parents did right. It remains a grave injustice and a grave violation of human dignity, even if their own guilt is mitigated somewhat by other
Thanks for replying Emily. In Ireland we’ve almost never had private infant adoption. We either had the mother and baby homes (which I’m sure you’ll have read about) from where babies were exported for adoption or private arrangements made between clergy and the religious orders running the homes to find adoptive families for the babies. If that didn’t happen, Irish families were so huge, someone took in the baby and raised them as their own. Over the past 20/30 years Irish families largely adopted from China/Vietman etc until that avenue tightened up. In Uk thousand of children available for adoption but they are not ‘cute babies’ and often wait for years before ‘ageing out’ of the system.
As for surragcy, so agree with these points - I just think that the feelings and actions of the parents towards the surragates may not be as cruel as the article implies.
Emily, I appreciated especially the section on how we are only shown (I’m paraphrasing)how much we have hurt others very slowly, so that we can bear it, and what a grace that is.
Thanks also for the shout out for NaPro doctors, my daughter is one of them.
On another note, thanks for writing great Endow studies, and also for the recent podcast on modesty, a lot of good food for thought in that.