Calling Evil Good and Good Evil: LDS Policy on Unwed Pregnancies

The opinion piece below was written for publication in the Salt Lake Tribune concurrent with the LDS Church's October General Conference. The Trib couldn't fit it in, so it is published here. My vote in the sustaining was communicated to both the First Presidency and my local ward Bishop separately.

This weekend, members of the LDS Church will gather in their great and spacious building on North Temple for their semi-annual General Conference. During one of the sessions, members will be asked to raise their hands in sustaining votes for church leaders. I will not be in attendance, so I will use this article as a means of casting my vote in the negative for all of the Church’s General Authorities who promote and support the church’s policy of “encouraging” all unwed mothers to relinquish their babies for adoption. This encouragement comes in the form of extreme pressure from church leaders and devout family and friends.

This policy, which the church stops short of saying is revealed doctrine, finds no support in any cannon of scripture, it is contrary to every other doctrine on the family or children promulgated by the church, it stands in direct opposition to examples set by Jesus in the stories of the New Testament. It treats one form of widow differently than others for the lack of a paper filed in a courthouse. It is, in my opinion, one of the most un-Christian policies I’ve seen promoted by any religion.

Church publications support this policy generally by publishing cutesy anecdotal stories, but usually don’t support their claims that adoption is the best option with any sort of research data. The last time they did (Ensign Feb 2002), the data cited not only didn’t support the church’s policy, it didn’t even address the claims the church said it supported. The research data available is at best inconclusive, with many studies showing that infant adoption is potentially harmful to the mother and the child, and possibly even to society in general through elevated frequency of anti-social behavior patterns in adult adoptees.

On the contrary, this policy encourages the voluntary spiritual and emotional amputation of the bond between mother and child, and then uses temple ceremonies to seal that amputation for all eternity, a curse that the church calls a blessing to both mother and child. Meanwhile, the church’s LDS Family Services collects tens of thousands in “fees” for the sale of these babies. The policy serves mammon, not God.

The church’s policy has influenced Utah’s legislation to make Utah a haven for mothers seeking to defy the rights of fathers, as was recently seen in the O’Dea case and others, and creates an environment conducive to trafficking in adoptable infants as the Tribune reported on the Focus on Children case last January.

Infertile LDS parents seeking to adopt overlook the hundreds of thousands of older orphans that are daily aging out of the system without families, while they seek to purchase infants made available through pressure brought on unwed mothers by the church in its self-righteous judgment about premarital sex. Meanwhile there are 35 sets of prospective parents seeking to adopt for every infant relinquished, a tremendous incentive for organizations like LDS Family Services to generate profits by promoting relinquishment.

The men who promulgated this policy did not do so from revelation, but out of their own error, bred by a false righteousness, a shortsighted view of consequences, and a lack of homework. This policy is a policy of men, not God. For church leaders to use the power of their position, implying that the policy is of God, is blasphemy. For these errors, if errors they are, to remain uncorrected is to convert error into lie. This is false doctrine promulgated by false prophets.