I am apparently on a roll here. A blog roll, so to speak. I found out about this important piece, "I Am a Birthmother: On Judgment and Choice" on a birth mother's blog: Birthmother; Reprise.

"I Am A Birthmother" is by Poor Statue. Her blog is here.

"I Am a Birthmother: On Judgment and Choice" is really heartbreaking. I was struck when I read it how the issues we face in adoption and birth and infertility and what makes a good mother (see some of my recent posts in my Russian Adoption blog for self-doubt on that front) are all, at the root of it, women's issues. So much of this goes back to feminism 101 for me: respecting choice, instead of telling each other what the right choice is. And because they're women's issues they are then human issues. We all might not be mothers, but we all had a mother whether we knew her or not, whether she was biologically related to us or not.

You know, before I started writing this blog I'd never "met" anyone who'd placed a child for adoption (or at least not anyone I knew had placed). Now I "know," at least virtually, several. I feel like my eyes and my mind have been opened by reading what these women have written. I am very grateful. I struggle with how their experience applies to my son's birth mother's experience. Are there women writing about what it was like to have a child taken from them because of neglect or drug abuse? How do we talk about this kind of birth mother with our children?