Birth mothers react to Juno

I know from reader feedback that Katha Pollitt and I aren’t after all alone in finding Juno disturbing. Thanks, gentle readers. Thanks now also to the Chicago Tribune, which ran a piece last week about reactions to the film by women who gave children up for adoption.

Check out the lead:

When Kateri McCann gave up her baby for adoption, she was a lot like the heroine of the hit movie "Juno": young, starry-eyed, and in love with the idea of doing the best thing for herself and her child while making the dream of parenthood a reality for a deserving couple.
She thought she could outsmart grief, she says, and for about a year and a half she succeeded.
Then came the tears, the nightmares, the spiraling depression.

And this:

McCann [says] that Cody, the "Juno" screenwriter, nails the initial stages of adoption with eerie precision, but misses the big picture almost entirely.
"It seems like [Cody] knew someone in that situation, paid really close attention -- and then lost contact when [the birth mother] became depressed."

I Heart Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt has come through for me again: Just when I’m feeling utterly alone in my convictions, she says just what I’d been feeling in funny, clear-headed terms. Thank you, Katha, for pouring cold water on the Juno love fest.

I’ve now seen the movie, and I can say it’s beautifully made, with, as everyone has been saying, terrific acting, especially by its star. But I came home from watching it queasy and distraught. The movie’s a morass of bad faith. It’s so well done that it anticipates and deflects every criticism. Find its creaking stereotypes of adoptive parents as rich, uptight yuppies, or of high-achieving women as rigid, anal-retentive icebergs, offensive? Sensitive acting by Jennifer Garner as the adoptive mother so humanizes her one-dimensional character that your criticism seems pedantic. Think there’s a certain sexism in that one-dimensionality? Turn the charming adoptive dad into a juvenile creep by the end, the adoptive mother and Juno into allies, and the adoptive mother finally into a single mom. (Sorry if I just gave too much away.) Think Juno’s parents shouldn’t be cooperating in the idea that their daughter is unworthy of her baby? Give the stepmother a funny, heroic scene in which she dresses down the ultrasound tech for sneering at her daughter. Think the central premise that a person can give up her baby and live happily ever after is a lie? The movie gives us one scene in which Juno cries wordlessly after giving birth. So, see, the movie gets it.

It was a weird sensation watching this movie while seven months pregnant, feeling my baby twitch in my belly through scenes in which characters touch Juno’s belly and feel her baby’s kicks. I watched this slight girl go through the arduous and transformative experience of birth just as I had for the first time not so long ago and will again in a few months. I know absolutely, in my belly, if I know anything at all, that no one could go through such an experience, give up her baby, and come away unscarred, perhaps fatally.

Precisely because I’m so near her in experience, I found Juno inscrutable. Why she did such a thing is a question the movie doesn’t answer (although I found the information given at the very beginning of the movie that her own mother had abandoned her plausible and important). It was not so much with her, as a fellow pregnant woman, but with her parents, as a fellow parent, that I identified. I felt enraged by them (yes, I know this is fiction). What kind of people allow their grandchild to be given away? What kind of people collaborate in letting their daughter suffer the loss of a child? The cycle begun with the mother who abandoned Juno continues through the generations.

In a letter to the Nation responding to Pollitt’s column on Juno, a reader who works in inner-city schools defended adoption as “a viable alternative to teen motherhood,” and bemoaned the tendency of the community not to agree. “When I suggested adoption to a guidance counselor, she replied, “We don’t do this in our community.” Good for them. That is, if as I presume, what she meant is that instead family and community step in to help parent teens’ babies, as is a common pattern in the African-American community and indeed around the world. America would do well to look to these communities for an adoption model that does not involve sundering family bonds or erasing birth mothers.

Juno’s ending implies that Juno and her boyfriend will live happily in love ever after. But here’s the true story as I imagine it unfolding: Someday the boy will say or suggest that Juno abandoned their baby and Juno will think the same of herself, and how can a love survive that?

At its heart, this movie, despite its strong, idiosyncratic female lead, all its nuanced acting, and its ostensible focus on teen pregnancy, is a conventional love story. The boy is what matters, not the baby. How Juno feels about the boy, not how she feels about herself, her parents, or her baby, is the only important thing. And that is the ultimate destructive lie at the heart of this film. It is the basic lie of sexism.

Juno's feminism?

I haven’t seen the movie Juno, whose star was just nominated for an Oscar, so take what I have to say here with a grain of salt. But after reading all the chatter about it, I’m depressed. This is what the New York Times calls “a feminist, girl-powered rejoinder to Knocked Up”? If this is feminism today, we are in trouble.

A movie that suggests a person can come through nine months of gestating and then surrendering her child unscathed is peddling a dangerous delusion. Before going to see this movie, I suggest reading The Girls Who Went Away: the Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Babies for Adoption in the Years Before Roe v. Wade or Meredith Hall’s recent memoir, Without a Map. Both books show just how devastating the experience of giving up a child is, one these women don’t seem ever to have recovered from. To be sure, part of the devastation was that these women largely gave up their babies unwillingly and they suffered shaming and ostracism for their pregnancies, something women today don’t face. But lest we think everything has changed, see Allison Crewes’ essay “When I Was Garbage,” in Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender’s collection Breeders. Crewes was a pregnant teenager who not so long ago nearly gave up her baby for adoption in circumstances that bear a lot of resemblance to those faced by women of generations ago; she was told she was unworthy of the baby, that it would be irresponsible to keep it, and everyone around her treated it as a given that she would give the baby up.

It may be true that, in the words of Entertainment Weekly’s online review, “director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody really don't give a hoot what you think about the right to life/right to choose/right to make jokes about teen sex,” but they surely knew what would be considered unthreatening entertainment in this political moment. Giving a baby up for adoption can be funny, while abortion has to be tragedy. This line from EW’s review is telling: “Juno would have been a very different movie had the young woman named for the queen of Roman gods chosen termination and brought her admirable young female clarity to that less gentle, more divisive decision — maybe truer, certainly not so funny.” I’m not sure adoption is so gentle.

See my later posting on Juno (after seeing the movie).

Surrendering Babies

I want to keep shameless self-promotion to a minimum here, but I’ve reviewed a book that deserves much wider notice than it has gotten. The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade is, in my judgment, one of the most important books of the last couple of years, perhaps the decade. Check out my review of it, originally published in the Iowa Review, now available online at the Mothers Movement.