This Week In WTF: SE Cupp’s Adoption Commentary As Emotional Blackmail

I was watching The Cycle on MSNBC today. I don’t usually do that because their habit of using a 5 way split screen makes me want to kick the tv. The final segment of the show is always commentary by one of the hosts – all of whom look like runners up in Americas Next Top Pundit. Today it was the token conservative SE Cupp. She was waxing philosophical on adoption as a logical pro-life position, an idea that’s admittedly new to her, but one she’s now happily framing as a compassionate alternative to abortion or raising an unwanted child.

She was trying to make headway into being a broad minded conservative who likes gay right by saying this:

We also have to embrace gay adoption. If fight are not rights of the unborn [sic] is the foundation of conservative values, we must fight for all willing parents who want a child to be able to give them homes.

Unfortunately before she even got there, she said something so insensitive and emotionally manipulative that I have vowed never to tune in to any show she’s on ever again:

Too many children are unborn, the result of a difficult decision but one that ultimately robs another willing family of the chance to be the good parents.

Let me translate that from I Heart Adoptive Families language into Forced Birth Agenda language: “Hey pregnant lady, I think you suck at making decisions because you got pregnant when you don’t want to be and I don’t give a shit about the rest of your life circumstances so I’m going to do everything in my power to coerce you into carrying this pregnancy to term, including foisting on you the idea that your first responsibility is not to yourself or your family but to some faceless fantasy family to whom you owe a baby. So stay pregnant.”

Ms. Cupp is willfully ignoring EVERYTHING ABOUT PREGNANCY. She’s not acknowledging the toll pregnancy takes on a body. She’s not acknowledging the loss of wages when pregnant women miss work due to pregnancy – or get fired for it. She’s not acknowledging the incomplete infrastructure for prenatal care for low income women. She isn’t  offering a place to live to a woman who gets kicked out of her family home for a pregnancy. She isn’t providing counseling to help her through the physical and emotional stresses of carrying to term a baby she’ll surrender.  She doesn’t note recent  research that shows that the predominant emotion following a abortion is relief and she doesn’t ask herself why that is. She doesn’t consider that many pregnant women are already mothers, are living below the poverty line, and that one of the main reasons for abortion is concern for others in her life or that women seeking abortion already having problems with a partner and a pregnancy would complicate that.

She doesn’t mention the approximately 104,000 children in the US foster care system awaiting adoption right now. Children who would be happy to have any of the loving families SE is so sympathetic to.

SE Cupp and her compatriots still don’t want to prevent crisis pregnancies and they won’t support poor mothers. They still don’t like expanding medical coverage for family planning or offering comprehensive sex ed. They won’t raise the minimum wage, broaden food support, invest in public transportation and affordable housing, or pass laws that protect women from being fired for pregnancy. But they will continue on a Batan death march of forced birth – this time by telling a woman that she and her choices don’t matter as much as the adoption agenda of morally correct conservatives. As a twist on that old gambit, she offers up gay couples as pawns in the game of emotional blackmail anti-choicers play with women. “Teh Gayz Wants Yer Bebeh!” as forced birth rallying cry.

Adoption is a noble enterprise and a choice pregnant women already have.  But it is far too complicated and personal a decision to be left up to SE Cupp. Better to leave the choice to individual women who know themselves better than any tv pundit with a new obsession with adoption ever could.