Have you ever met an unwanted baby? Sure you have. You just didn’t know it because that person had grown up already. The scars of having been an unwanted baby are not really obvious on the surface. They could be your bartender, your grocery store clerk, or the guy who took you deep sea fishing. That sexy one-night-stand you never saw again, or that athlete that ran past you on the trail. Most unwanted babies look perfectly normal as they go about their daily lives all grown up.
Most of them.
Unwanted babies seek therapy as adults. Many are miserable, lonely, angry, and fearful. Most are convinced that these emotions will never change. Even if they are smart, attractive, have lucky breaks, make decent choices, somewhere there is still a conviction that they are unwanted.
They often have harmful coping behaviors, like heavy drug use, risky hobbies, sex with strangers, overworking themselves, or even cutting themselves. Some categorize themselves as disposable members of society and behave accordingly, breaking laws without a care for anyone else’s suffering. Some demand more of themselves than is humanly possible in some frenzied way to make up for perceived lack. Some work desperately to try and find love, becoming clingy girlfriends or stalkery boyfriends.
Most unwanted babies know, in some way, that their conception was not intended and spelled disaster for their mother. Many also know why they were not aborted (usually pressure from religious families, or societal expectations). So how does this dynamic affect a child’s growth?
The way a mother responds to the infant from day one sets up a foundation of safety. A tiny baby has two options to get its needs met: Cry or don’t cry. That’s all. A baby from a healthy home will cry and then get attention, a cause-and-affect lesson that says crying is useful, that asking for help is beneficial. An unwanted baby cries and gets ignored, cries louder and harder, and still gets ignored, and eventually learns that crying is not a useful thing to do. Nobody is coming. These children eventually shut down and internalize their pain. The message that crying doesn’t help starts them down a path of self-blame and poor self worth even before they can talk.
There are also the unpredictable mothers who will attend to their crying baby when another adult is around to witness them, but will ignore that cry the rest of the time. This turns babies into gamblers; will I get something or nothing from crying? Worse yet are the children who are hit or shaken by parents that didn’t want them and are overwhelmed with frustration, parents who don’t know what healthy looks like. This teaches the kid that crying—asking for help, or even being in a position to need help—is terribly dangerous. This lesson gets encoded into the child’s nervous system, and those responses continue for the rest of their life.
This is what happens to babies that are not truly wanted by the mothers who bore them.
As the child gets more sophisticated, the message becomes amplified: You are not wanted here. Nobody cares about your feelings, you are worthless, nobody wants you to succeed. Your parents prefer their coping habits to your well being. Just take your role as a doormat, a cog in the wheel, another number, someone’s victim. No one needs to respect you.
As Bob Dylan said “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
These are the people we need to fear in society. These are people who just snap one day and find themselves with access to guns. These are people who struggle with addiction and all the woes it brings. These are people who fail to understand or empathize with others because, well…nobody ever empathized with them so in an attempt to strike a balance in this unequal world, they act the way they are treated. This is what it means to force a woman to have a child. More poorly parented people like that, running around in society. Bad parenting is the number one cause of childhood traumas.
The bottom line is this: You can force a woman to carry a baby to term, and you can even force that woman to make sure that child is fed and clothed. Anyone could do that.
However, nobody can force a woman to love, cherish, or even respect a child she never wanted in the first place.