For Some Anti-Abortion Activists, It Was Never About Saving Babies. It Was About Selling Them.

To Conservatives, Children are a Commodity

Photo by Tai's Captures on Unsplash

Our country has a sordid history with adoption and the lucrative potential of selling babies for profit.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, orphanages like the Tennessee Children's Home squandered money from the government that was meant for the wellbeing of children. Instead those funds paid for the lavish lifestyles of its directors while the children went hungry, underclothed, and uneducated.

During that time, children were often taken from poor families in large Eastern cities like Philadelphia and New York. Blonde haired, blue-eyed children brought the highest profit and were often sold to wealthy families, while many of the less desirable children were put on trains to smaller Midwestern towns. Instead of going to loving foster families, they were used as farm slave labor. These trains were called orphan trains, but that was a misnomer because at least 25 percent of the children had two living parents. The children’s families of origin might not have had much, but they cared for them. Many of the 200,000 children who were relocated during this time belonged to immigrant parents who couldn’t navigate the complexities of a new language and culture.

They were loved, and they were stolen for financial gain.

Nowadays, we call that child trafficking.

Today’s second anniversary of the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, is a stark reminder that everything old is new again. The people who want to profit off the sale of children are back, saying the quiet part out loud.

Buried on Page 34 of the Supreme Court draft to overturn Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito describes his twisted plan to restrict abortion to ease baby shortages in the adoption market and make adoption more available for couples.

If it feels like women are being bashed over the head and drug backward caveman style for the few hard-fought advancements we’ve made to our quality of life over the past 50 years, that’s because that is what is happening.

Alito, one such caveman, writes: “States have increasingly adopted ‘safe-haven laws’ which generally allow women to drop off babies anonymously, and that a woman who puts her newborn up for adoption today has little reason to fear that the baby will not find a suitable home.”

The statement precedes a footnote from a CDC document claiming, “Nearly 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e. they were in demand for a child), whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent.”

“The domestic supply of infants”

It’s gross and dehumanizing to refer to humans in such austere economic terms, but it does shed light on conservative attitudes toward infants. When an abundance of a commodity is in the market, there’s little market demand, driving the price down. But when an object is in short supply, its price skyrockets.

This is like that. Except with babies.

There isn’t a limited supply of children who need loving homes. This is about babies. Children over age 2 don’t engender the same demand. State and federal governments offer financial assistance to help parents adopt older children out of the foster-care system. Instead, many adoptive parents choose to pay private adoption agencies exorbitant fees — up to $45,000 up front — to baby shop for them.

Project 2025, the terrifying far-right conservative wishlist for the next chapter of America, acknowledges that nearly half a million children are waiting in foster care for families, but it wants to exacerbate that problem by allowing religious foster and adoption agencies to discriminate against families without a mother and father in the home.

“… they cannot in good conscience place children in every household due to their religious belief that a child should have a married mother and father.” (Page 447)

And that’s not all. Alabama, South Dakota, Arizona, and Texas are just some of the states with laws allowing state-funded adoption agencies to reject parents for religious reasons. According to Western Montana’s LGBTQ+ Center, many adoption agencies prioritize straight couples over same-sex couples who are trying to adopt.

It’s true that reproductive rights HAVE made it so fewer babies are born and relinquished into the adoption market, which is why we’re seeing birth control and abortion under attack.

Far-right conservatives are sowing misinformation about the safety of IUDs, emergency contraception, and birth-control pills. Chemical abortion pills that have been used safely for years are considered dangerous by conservatives. When Democrats in the Senate tried to protect access to contraception, Republicans blocked the bill. All of the protections we’ve had over the ability to make decisions about our own bodes are being whittled away.

They are us like any other natural resource they want to plunder — exploiting women’s bodies as if we are a sacred tribal land to drill for oil or a poor neighborhood to gentrify. As if we are just a cog in the womb-to-crib pipeline.

It can’t be overstated: This is the Handmaid’s Tale.

This isn’t about saving babies. It’s about selling them. And deciding who gets to buy them.

Should variables like wealth, religion, sexual orientation and social status determine how families are formed? Should aging conservative men make laws forcing women to sacrifice their bodies to meet the demand of infant adoption? No. But that’s the America we are already living in. It will get so much worse if Project 2025 comes to pass, which is why we have to fight harder than ever to be sure Trump doesn’t become the next president.

Onward, Democracy Defenders!