Anti-abortion zealots aren’t going to adopt them, that’s for sure
We know they don’t care about babies once they’re out of the womb. Why would they want to adopt them?
Sixty percent of kids who have lost Medicaid coverage this year came from just nine states, all of which are Republican-led, according to new data from the Biden administration.
And the 10 states refusing the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults have disenrolled more kids than all of the expansion states combined, the administration also reported… Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas
Some of those states (I’m looking at you Texas and Florida) among those states with the most draconian abortion bans in the nation.
This should be embarrassingly hypocritical to these people but they are shameless. After all, these are the same clinic harassers who whine that the man “harassing” them about adoption is being rude.
I highly recommend reading this piece in In These Times about what happens to people who are forced to have more children than they can afford. This is happening in Mississippi:
I first wrote about Lationna after visiting her in March, when she was still on unpaid maternity leave. She told me then that she had always planned to have a second baby someday, once her life was more stable. She’d wanted to be married, better paid, and for the family to live in a house instead of their cramped apartment in West Jackson, Miss. She’d been planning to go to cosmetology school so she could leave her job — which paid barely above minimum wage at $8.50 an hour — and follow her dreams to start her own beauty business.
But instead, in July 2022, she’d learned she was pregnant — just weeks after the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that originated in Lationna’s home state. Mississippi’s abortion ban trigger law went into effect less than two weeks later. She contacted the only abortion clinic that remained in the state but never heard back because it had already closed. She didn’t have the money to travel out of state.
Kingsley was born at the end of January. In the early days, Lationna was struggling to adjust to being a new mom when she hadn’t chosen to be, wrestling with sleepless nights, isolation and postpartum depression. After Lationna went back to work, she and Kendall entered a new phase, enjoying a bit more sleep but trying desperately to figure out how to afford raising a child they hadn’t planned for with scant government help. The typical exhaustion and chaos of parenting two young children has been exacerbated by a lack of control over the timing and their economic precarity. Mississippi does virtually nothing to ease that precarity, and despite some pledges from lawmakers to do more to assist children and families after it banned abortion, little has changed in the year and a half since Lationna was deprived of autonomy over her own body.
Now that 21 states have banned or severely restricted abortion, an untold number of people are following in Lationna’s footsteps: trying to piece together enough money to care for a new child they weren’t ready for and navigating government bureaucracies in states that offer families little to no financial relief. Lationna and Kendall have caught a few lucky breaks, but for each advance they make the tide pulls them further backward, barely treading water as their dreams and ambitions drift further and further away.
These extremists are the destroyers of dreams. It’s heartbreaking.
Happy Hollandaise!