My friend Leigh Snead writes about the blessing — for the fourth time now — that adoption has been in her life in “After Dobbs: A Thanksgiving for the Brave Love of Adoption”:

As I hold my youngest baby in my arms this November, which is National Adoption Month, I am grateful for the choices his birth mother made that led him to become a part of our family. I’m thankful for the radical hospitality she showed by carrying him for nine months and doing all she could to keep him healthy and safe. I’m thankful for the hours she spent poring over the profiles of waiting families and discerning which one she wanted her son to join. And I’m especially thankful she chose us.
I’m also thankful that she knew this was a choice she could make — a good choice — and an exercise of her own agency. I’m thankful for those around her who supported her and her choice to place her baby with us. I’m thankful for the emails and text messages we exchanged that eventually became phone calls that led her to change her hospital plan so that we could all meet in person and spend time together. And I’m so thankful she spent time with our baby. I’m thankful for the brave love shown by all my sons’ birth mothers and for all those women who choose life for their children. Being asked to be the mother of another woman’s child is the greatest gift I have ever received.

There’s an organization called Brave Love that is dedicated to the courageous choice birth mothers make for life and generosity. This Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, give thanks for birth mothers. If you know one, do something kind for her. Let’s all get more educated about adoption and be supportive to adoptive families, if we are not adoptive parents ourselves. There’s a painful separation, but there is also tremendous love.