The Obscenity of Hunting Elder Women
Traumatized by Crisis Pregnancies
Adoption = Crisis Pregnancy
By Kathleen Hoy
Foley
Hunting down an aging woman on the basis of a concealed,
catastrophic pregnancy; demanding intimate access to her body; perverting her
with motherly and grandmotherly fantasies; and abusing her with the whip of permanent
maternal obligation is obscene, parallels pornography, and sits in the realm of
the sadistic. Pornography dehumanizes a
woman, reduces her to sexual body parts for the use and pleasure of
others. She becomes a commodity, a
service to be exploited by those demanding gratification from fantasy. A woman hunted on the grounds of her biology is
a targeted object subordinated to appease the emotional satisfaction of an obsessed
audience, and is as degraded and exposed as a woman stripped, thrown on her
back, and spread-eagled while the camera focuses on the penetration of her
genitalia. Only there can be no
presumption of consent regarding a hunted woman and no legal or social recourse
available to her in a climate of dehumanization by public agreement.
Shaming an elder woman with birthing fantasies violates her
humanity, exploits her sexual organs, and imposes on her willing consent, eager
compliance, enthusiasm, and gratefulness for an unwanted conception while
dismissing the reality of long-term reproductive trauma to her body and spirit. It is perversion to degrade a woman as an object
and provider of prurient sex. It is
perversion to degrade an elder woman as an object and servant expected to
oblige maternal fantasies.
Hunting down old women is barbaric. That hunt always begins at the site of the
sexual trauma she endured—her vagina.
Tailing the statement, “I’m adopted,” is the inevitable question, the challenge,
“Are you going to find your real mother?” As in pornography, the hunted woman—the
question mark—is dehumanized. Reduced to
an object. Portrayed as a source of
passion. Summoned to provide a
climax. When in reality the hunted woman
suffered the grossest sexual exploitation possible: impregnation against her
will. Intensifying that catastrophic
injury, the hunted woman is depicted as a lost thing to be found, forced
into the self-abuse of blame and the self-abuse of obedience as her participation
in a sadistic “reunion” of her body and its manifest trauma is imposed on her
by society. She is reduced to an
imaginary and biological commodity while consigned to a shadowed existence in a
hostile, mother-forever-at-all-cost cultural environment from which she cannot
escape.
The persistent myth of a young girl gripped in the throes of
a desperately wanted pregnancy but helpless in the face of hardship that forcibly
ripped love from her arms and thrust it into the cold world of the adoption
process is comparable to the mythological woman consumed with lust, passion,
and gratification when being tortured by rape portrayed up there on the
pornographer’s screen. It is time to
recognize that the notion of the loving, lost mother is a
myth that lives only in fantasy.
Unwanted pregnancies are a reality, not deliberate. Abortion is deliberate. Placement in the confidential adoption system
is deliberate. It signifies trauma. It represents rescue. Emancipation.
The details of a catastrophic sexual and biological ordeal are
private. Rescue from a reproductive nightmare
are individually specific and intensely personal.
But for the hunted woman—whether she is hunted by the State,
an agency, detectives, or an individual—the assumption of entitlement predominates. Those who hunt her assume entitlement to her
person, her physical location, to her private, familial, and medical history,
to all extensions of her life. This
presumed entitlement is an obscene dismissal of human rights, a grotesque violation
of an elder woman’s intimate boundaries, and grants emotional and bodily
privileges to the hunters—predators that inflict fresh wounds on the old woman by
the perpetuation of the sexual trauma she endured.
There will come a time when the obscenity of this practice
of routing out aging and elder women from the dark, sexual, birthing injuries
of their pasts and punishing them until they submit their bodies and spirits to
appease individual and societal demands will become obvious. As it did for animals, the truths of cruelty eventually
filter into social consciousness and people of decency and compassion take
action. But today those who would hunt
down a woman once victimized by an unwanted pregnancy are supported by social
and religious indoctrination and revelry that insist on a woman’s maternal
obedience and obligation to a biological catastrophe that once befell her.
Who speaks for a hunted woman except those that hunt
her? Who, except her pursuers, decides
the fate of a hunted woman, the fate of her family, the fate of her status in
her home and community? The assumption
of sexual trauma, the assumption of juvenile sexual assault must prevail in all
discussions of a confidential adoption.
Whether that discussion is with the person placed in the adoption system,
in the larger social arena, in political forums, or tossed about by gossip mongers,
it must begin and end with sexual trauma and the knowledge that the hunt for a
woman in hiding is obscene, pornographic, and sadistic and inflicts further sexual
abuse upon that old woman.
