Adoption Means Conceiving A Child In The Heart

Read a cool article in the NY Times today about American families who'd adopted girls from China. It focused mostly on the experiences of these girls, growing up in such a unique environment.

It got me thinking...I've always known that if I didn't get married, I'd adopt from a baby girl from China.

But today, I thought that, even if I married, maybe I'd still want to adopt a child from there, anyways.

I have pretty strong views about adoption --- mainly because I did a feature on the issue when I was in j-school and one of my teachers wound up adopting from China. I've actually talked to people who've adopted internationally and I know this is something I'm very open to.

When I was working at the hospital, one of the social workers and his partner adopted two kids and I remember at his baby shower, I gave him this card that said adoption was when a child grows in a person's heart instead of the stomach. He got all teary-eyed and I remember how much awe and respect I had for the guy.

I remember when the famine in North Korea was featured on the front page of newspapers and I cut out the article 'cause on the front page, there were all these babies --- these gorgeous children slowly starving to death. And it made me feel sick. I still have that newspaper clipping and I still cry whenever I see it.

I've been told more than once that adoption is a bad idea. Well-meaning friends who tell me it's better to get married and have kids of my own. But you know what? As much as I would love having kids of my own and knowing I'd nurtured another being inside of me for nine months, I know I'm capable of loving a child even if she wasn't my own flesh and blood.

What sort of pissed me off was reading another article on the NY Times, just a few days ago, about women who were single by choice --- women in their late thirties and forties who'd given up on trying to find Mr. Right and who were now heading to sperm banks instead. I think about those kids in orphanages and then I think about these women wasting time and money and risking uncertainty over having kids through sperm donors and it just makes me angry.

Yeah. Okay. Adoption's not for everyone. And this is something I choose to rant about a couple of times every year, but I try hard to keep them to myself...especially since I now know more than a few couples who want children but can't have them and aren't open to adoption.