Melissa Falen wrote in a Wednesday op-ed for The Baltimore Sun that she wishes her biological mother, who gave her up for adoption, had had the opportunity to abort her instead.
WHAT SHE SAID
Falen, an associate professor of education at Notre Dame of Maryland University, acknowledged in the essay that she was raised by “good and loving parents” in suburbs of Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.
- But Falen said she hid that she was adopted for fear of being “stigmatized” and “grew up with no siblings” or knowledge of her heritage.
- As an adult, she was unable to locate her mom or older brother, and her father died before they could meet.
- Records show her dad refused to marry her mom, and both of the couple’s children were given up for adoption in 1950s Maryland, where abortion was mostly illegal.
Writing ahead of the anticipated undoing of national abortion rights by the Supreme Court, Falen lamented that her mother had not had a choice to terminate her and her brother in the womb.
- “I can only imagine what it must have been like to have been an unmarried woman who had two ‘illegitimate’ (what they called us then) babies in the 1950s. The stigma and shame must have been tremendous,'” she wrote.
- “I will never know how her life might have been different if she had not had me or my brother, or if she wanted to keep us. I am blessed to have been raised by good and loving parents. Still, I wish the woman who bore me had been able to make decisions about her own body, whatever those decisions might have been.”
SAME ENERGY
Similar arguments have recently been featured in the opinion pages of The Washington Post and on signs at pro-abortion protests in U.S. cities.