Is disability ever a valid reason to put a child up for adoption?
Choosing to have a child is no small decision. Before anyone becomes a parent they should consider the responsibilities with the utmost seriousness, and be prepared for things to not quite go as planned.
The CDC has found that about 1 in every 33 babies born in the United States each year will be born with some sort of birth defect. These are at times situations that a family will not realize is the case until after the birth.
These realities were highlighted in a recent online post in which a woman discovers that her parents gave up a baby because the child was deaf.
Is disability ever a valid reason to put a child up for adoption?
A Reddit post published on June 23rd, reported on by Maria Azzurra Volpe from Newsweek, has gone viral with 11,300 upvotes and almost 800 comments.
The author begins her post by explaining that she is the oldest of three siblings. With that said, after taking a DNA test she and her siblings learned that they had a sister. When they confronted their parents about this result, their parents ‘didn't deny that it was true’.
Shockingly, the author learned that her little sister was born in 1998, and her parents found out during a routine check that their baby was deaf. Rather than doing what most parents would consider logical, they just 'went home without her' and left the baby at the clinic because of her disability.
The author explains that their younger sister had reached out to them via message, and told them that she had been abandoned by her birth parents as a baby because she was deaf. This was not at all what the author and her siblings were expecting to hear.
Child abandonment does happen in the US.
While it can feel impossible to imagine this sort of situation, studies have shown that about 7,000 children are abandoned in the US every year, and that number is even higher when taking into account the children who have been abused and neglected.
The author states that her parents were very good to her and her siblings growing up, but they are incredibly conflicted about their emotions with this situation.
They can't help but imagine how their sister must feel, being that she was abandoned because of a disability that she couldn't control, and the author's parents just decided to give her up without a second thought.
What do you think? Are the author and her siblings justified and feeling absolutely horrified that their parents abandoned a child simply because they had a hearing impairment? Or does the author have no room to judge her parents, considering she doesn't know what their decision-making at the time was?
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