'We will adopt your baby' meme sparks debate

One of the first major memes since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade has been sparked by an image of a couple outside the Supreme Court holding a sign reading, We will adopt your baby.

The phrase has been repurposed and put together with a variety of images by people looking to point out the hypocrisy of the adoption message.

It made me angry when a couple said, We ll adopt your baby, but they are not adopting babies, said Alexis Quasarano, 31, from California, who posted a meme with an image from the film Raising Arizona. These people are just posting a picture for clout. In recent years, internet memes have become a popular way for people to express political opinions, offer critiques of opponents, and let out a little anxiety. Adoption meme is one of the first to take hold online, despite the fact that abortion has been a political flashpoint for years.

Jason Hannan, an associate professor of rhetoric and communications at the University of Winnipeg, said he sees the meme as the beginning of what could be a particularly hostile online discourse around abortion.

He said the nastiness is just getting started.

Adoption is an alternative to abortion and has been a message of the anti-abortion movement. More than 407,000 children were in foster care in the United States by the end of fiscal year 2020, according to a November 2021 press release from the Children's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families. Roughly 117,000 children were waiting to be adopted, according to the press release.

Some people have posted adoption memes that they say that it is a way to have some control in a moment that feels completely helpless.

Research into Covid-related memes and pandemic stress has found that memes have some value as an emotional outlet. A study published in October 2021, published in a special issue of Psychology of Popular Media, suggested that memes can serve as a valuable communication tool for disseminating information about stressful issues.

Everything is bad so I posted this meme because it gave me an ounce of serotonin, later in the meme, Quasarano said she hopes that memes will spur people to do more research and help people in need. Images of couples from television and film are used in many memes. The fictional couples are usually insidious characters, who would not make good parents. Then the memers write the ominous phrase, We will adopt your baby. Amanda Mancino-Williams, 40, posted a version of the meme using an image of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Her take on the meme earned more than 104,000 likes.

Mancino-Williams said the photos of these grotesquely smiling sign-holders are completely bizarre. Kate Hunt, a professor in the department of international studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, said the memes get to the point right away. Some studies show that memes and messaging that use pop culture images get higher engagement on platforms like Twitter, and therefore spread quickly, according to Hunt.

It's something that people can immediately say, I m comfortable retweeting this. She said that she was comfortable talking about this in this way.