I can see the intention. Many adoption agencies aim to get the babies away from their first/birth mothers as quickly as possible because they don't want the women to reconsider at all - the book The Girls Who Went Away has a lot of stories of women whose babies were taken from them within hours of giving birth, even when they wanted to spend more time. A lot of adoption agencies also hassle women to sign papers right away rather than taking time to think about it - the social worker from the agency often views it as her job to get the woman to just sign the papers as quickly as possible rather than be a support. So I think the law was moreso passed to try to give women more time to decide whether or not they want to keep their children, and try to lessen the pressure from agencies to sign within a few hours of giving birth.
However, I agree - that's got to be nightmarish for women who feel like placing for adoption is the best choice but are overcome by the emotional connection to the child while nursing. Not to mention the physical issues, like you mentioned, with milk coming in and having to deal with waiting for it to dry up after you've placed the child for adoption. Ugh.
Yes, in DOMESTIC adoption. International adoption mostly works very differently, even when it's not working correctly. The whole 'swoop down and remove the baby to place it directly into the arms of the adoptive parents" meme does not happen in International adoption (outside of a few very extra skeezy non-Hague baby-buying cases, which everyone works very hard to outlaw, shut down and punish. But even with cases where there is out and out purchasing of children, that kind of direct transfer doesn't happen, as a rule. The child goes into a fostering/orphanage situation for months and months prior to adoption being finalized in-country, and then goes through a sometimes-lengthy Embassy process to be cleared to travel to the U.S.)
Especially considering that the article is about South Korea, where the norms and laws about how adoptions happen are very different, I'd be wary of projecting a U.S. Centric point of view onto a very different culture and situation.
However, I agree - that's got to be nightmarish for women who feel like placing for adoption is the best choice but are overcome by the emotional connection to the child while nursing. Not to mention the physical issues, like you mentioned, with milk coming in and having to deal with waiting for it to dry up after you've placed the child for adoption. Ugh.
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Especially considering that the article is about South Korea, where the norms and laws about how adoptions happen are very different, I'd be wary of projecting a U.S. Centric point of view onto a very different culture and situation.
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