Adoption can be a brave choice
“I am pro-choice,” Crystal told me, “but I just couldn’t not be pregnant.”
Two years ago, our story went viral after my husband, Albuquerque police officer Ryan Holets, met Crystal and offered to adopt her baby. She had been struggling with heroin addiction. But few recognize what a hero she is.
Crystal and her partner, Tom, decided to entrust us with their precious baby girl. We were able to support baby Hope in the hospital as she went through drug withdrawals. She gained siblings in our four older children who love her dearly. In spite of her challenging beginnings, our daughter is a beautiful, inquisitive child with one of the tenderest hearts I know.
While many people loved our story, millions are also afraid of adoption. Countless women facing unplanned pregnancies consider abortion to be their only alternative to parenting. Society stigmatizes birth mothers, and “giving up a child” in adoption is often scorned. Many women fear the thought of their baby belonging to someone else. Others have been drinking or using drugs before discovering their pregnancies. They may assume their babies will be “unwanted” due to the number of children already in foster care.
These fears and prejudices are often confirmed by family members or counselors at abortion clinics. When parenthood is not an option, preventing the child’s birth is considered the only alternative. A large number of women experience outside pressure to abort . ... Every year, between 800,000 and 1 million pre-born children lose their lives to abortion because fear ruled the thoughts of those who conceived them.
The reality is that infants placed for adoption do not enter foster care. Any internet search reveals hundreds of families waiting to adopt. Many of these adoptive parents will love any infant, regardless of race or exposure to harmful substances. Birth parents have the freedom to choose who their child is placed with and can even meet the family if they so desire.
Baby Hope was born one month premature; she should have still been a fetus when we met her. A late-term abortion clinic here in Albuquerque could have legally aborted her hours earlier. I understood what that procedure entailed and knew what children look like after termination.
As I gazed into my daughter’s eyes for the first time, I saw a beautiful girl who could feel, cry, be comforted and begin learning. She was a little person then, just as she was three weeks before when my husband first encountered her birth mom. Hope mattered. She deserved a chance. My heart breaks for children like her who experience a very different fate.
As our daughter grows and learns of her adoption, we will share how her birth mom is a hero. Crystal had significant reason to give up and end her pregnancy: homelessness, addiction and the fact that her pregnancy was unplanned. Because she did not abort, she endured months of judgment for being pregnant and on drugs. Still, she held onto the hope that her child could have a future.
Not only did Hope get a chance, but so did her birth mom. Rather than continuing down a path of demise from active addiction, Crystal later went to rehab and is now almost two years sober. She devotes herself to helping others recover from drug addiction. Sometimes a brighter future begins with making one positive choice.
When a woman decides parenthood is not an option, placing her baby with a loving adoptive family is not abandonment. It was clear Crystal cared for her unborn child when she chose adoption. Abortion could have been easier. It would have concealed the shame of being pregnant and addicted to drugs. But she gave her baby the best chance she thought possible. That is a beautiful choice, based on love.