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Arts:Fashion & Beauty
Madelynn Ballenger discovered she was pregnant for the second time at 20 years old. Already a single mother to a young son, she didn’t know whether she could take on a second child physically or financially.
“It was really, really scary,” Ballenger said. “I didn’t have a job. I wasn’t in a good position to be expecting another child.”
It was September 2021, the month Texas’ ban on abortions after six weeks took effect, and Ballenger was five weeks pregnant. That left her little time to decide whether to keep the baby or terminate the pregnancy — if she could even find an available appointment to get an abortion.
“I was already so stressed out, and I was just like, how am I supposed to make this decision in such a short amount of time?” Ballenger said. “How am I supposed to know what’s good for me, what’s good for my whole situation, in just a few days? No woman should be forced to make that kind of decision in less than two weeks. That’s just not humane.”
She opted to carry the baby to term. Then, 48 hours after she gave birth to a healthy boy, Ballenger made the agonizing decision to place him in adoptive care.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “It’s the most difficult thing I’ll ever do.”
For years, anti-abortion activists argued that overturning Roe v. Wade would lead more women with unwanted pregnancies to turn to adoption. “Adoption! Not abortion!” was a common message featured on posters and chanted through megaphones at anti-abortion rallies. But more than a year after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, its impact on the adoption landscape is proving to be multifaceted and complicated to measure.
Some adoption agencies are seeing significant upticks in the number of infants placed in adoptive care, while others say it’s still too early to tell what role Dobbs is playing.
Kristen Hamilton, the director of communications at the nonprofit National Council for Adoption, one of the nation’s largest networks of adoption professionals, said the group has seen “a lot of variances” among adoption agencies in states with strict abortion laws.
“In some cases, they are seeing an uptick in the number of babies that are being placed for adoption, while in other cases, things have remained relatively similar to what they were before the Dobbs decision,” Hamilton said.
Mark Melson, the president and CEO of the Texas-based Gladney Center for Adoption, which facilitates adoptions nationwide, said the center has seen a 30% increase in infant domestic adoptions in the past year. Inquiries from pregnant women who call to learn about their adoption options, meanwhile, are up 55%, he said.
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