A recent email I received was pretty typical - I won't quote it here because the person meant well, but the sum up was this - they laud my decision to adopt, argue that I should have done it earlier, and point out that adoption is the solution to the population crisis. People who want children should just adopt, rather than giving birth. In the spirit of my discussion of the new suggestion that the world will hit 10 billion, I thought this was a good subject to take up.
Now as usual, I'm not going to recite my discussion of why I have four biological kids - and I'm not going to argue that four biological kids is unsustainable - of course it is, as are a number of things I've done in my time. If you want to see what I've said about this in the past you can check out ye olde blogge under "population" or read the chapter I wrote in _Depletion and Abundance_ on this subject, for starters. Google my name and "population" and you'll find a lot of material, some of it personal some of it more general. I'm not going to bother making a case for me having four biological children - there isn't one - on the other hand, they are here and I'm not debating it, either.
What is obviously true is that I'm pro-adoption - and not just in principle - we're about to put our family where our mouth is and take foster children with the longer-term goal of adoption. We are hoping to take a larger sibling group, as those are extremely hard to place. The strongest thing driving me in that direction is both experience - my own mothers were foster parents to one large sibling group of four - and also my own mental vision of if, (G-d forbid) my own children were to come into care, if somehow my own support network failed, what would happen to them. I can see it in my mind - people willing to take charismatic five year old Asher, and sweet Isaiah. Maybe, if we were really lucky someone would take bright, wordy Simon - or maybe not, three are hard. No one would want my sweet, cuddly, funny autistic eldest - and while losing his parents would be huge, the loss of his siblings, his friends, his protectors would destroy him. I can see it in my head, I can understand why someone would say no to a severely autistic, non-toilet trained 11 year old, can see how he could be shifted into residential care and away from everything he loves and is familiar with. I can see it - and I know that the one thing I can do is keep some small number of children together.
My husband and I are perhaps unusual in that we have always wanted to adopt - we originally agreed that if there were any fertility difficulties at all, we would not enter into treatment, but immediately pursue adoption. We were fortunate in that both of us had parents who were foster parents at some point in our childhood, and a good deal of extended family and family friends who made families by adoption - it was familiar to us.
In fact, we had the opposite of fertility difficulties - I get pregnant whenever my husband looks at me, including on multiple forms of birth control - so our adoption plans were put off until we finally found a combination of permanent methods that actually worked (note the word "combination" - it is not there by accident ;-).)
That said, however, I don't see adoption as a clear solution to the population problem, for a number of reasons. That doesn't make adoption a bad option, it just means that it is more complicated than that - that we cannot use the argument that "you should just adopt" as a solution to our environmental troubles.
The first reason is that as far as I can tell (and the statistics on this are hard to find) - giving up children for adoption does not in fact reduce the number of overall children that birthmothers have. That is, while adoption does give children homes and lives and futures that they wouldn't have had, it isn't a strategy for population reduction, because people who give up children go on to have more children, or previously have had more children.
The statistics on this are not very clear, and involve collecting data on a lot of categories of birthmothers. In the global south, often very limited demographic data is even available on the birthmothers. In the US, there have been and are still ongoing major demographic shifts in birthmothers - for example, much of the data about whether teenage mothers who choose adoption go on to have more children later on comes from a period where being young and single was a strong handicap. As more young teenage mothers keep their children, the demographics have shifted and now most mothers giving up children for adoption are over 18 and single and far less well studied than adoptive child or teenage mother populations.
"In contrast to earlier findings, it was found that younger women-that is, those under age 21-were more likely to keep than surrender their children."
In addition, she also found the birthmother choosing adoption was more likely to be living away from home and was less likely to receive assistance from family and friends. The young mother who chose parenting was more likely to have parents who were divorced or separated. Grow hypothesized that the women who had lived in a one-parent household were less likely to consider single parenthood in a negative light and more likely to consider parenting their child.
There are two categories of birthparent in the US - those who voluntarily place infants for adoption (or who occasionally make voluntary placements of older children), and those who involuntarily lose custody of their children. In the first category, most mothers are young, and 75% of all the children are their first - data suggests but does not completely confirm that most of them will go on to have at least two more children later in life. We do know most of them express desire to parent children later.(see: Rosalind J. Dworkin, et al., "Parenting or Placing: Decision Making by Pregnant Teens," Youth & Society 25, no. 1 (September 1993): 75-92.) There are some studies that suggest this desire may be made more acute, rather than less, by giving up their children.
I have spoken mostly about birth mothers here, because in most cases modern infant adoption involves the mothers only - the fathers have been unsupportive or decline to be involved in the lives of their babies. There is a significant minority of cases in which birthfathers and mothers join together to give up babies for adoption, but this is comparatively rarer, because the impact of birthfathers is so huge - generally speaking, supportive fathering of any kind increases the likelihood dramatically that a woman will keep and parent her child - even if they are not partnered.
The second category of birthparent, both father and mother, in the US, are those that involuntarily lose their children. There is fairly clear evidence that families involved in the foster system tend to be larger than average. A large percentage of these parents are mentally ill, drug or alcohol addicted or disabled, all factors that make the use of birth control effectively less likely. Extreme poverty, homelessness and lack of medical care are other reasons for higher than average reproductive rates. Moreover, mothers who lose their children involuntarily often go on to have more children, in part because they want to parent children, even if they have difficulty.doing so. The average child in foster care does have several siblings.
Adoptions from within the US do not seem to make a difference in the overall US population - they certainly make a difference in the lives of children, but they are not a method of population reduction. We will come back to US vs. International Adoptions a bit further on, but let's take a look at international birthmothers - almost nothing is known about birth fathers in these cases, with the exception of families destroyed by HIV in Africa.
The data on these varies a *lot* by country - there is no single overview study or research on the demographics of international birthmothers that I could find - and this makes sense, because birthmother circumstances vary a great deal. The scenarios and populations are very different - consider the population of Ethiopian adoptees, overwhelmingly orphans from the HIV crisis whose parents were supporting family but are now deceased vs. Eastern European adoptees from low TFR nations where children with disabilities and members of certain ethnic populations with living parents are the main category of children available vs. China where girls are overwhelmingly the largest available population. The differences are so large that it is hard to speak generally.
At the same time, a general picture does emerge.of international birthparents that seems to support the idea that adoption does not reduce overall population. Studies suggest that in contrast to most US adoptions, children placed for adoption often already have siblings and their mothers and fathers are unable to feed or care for them. In some cases they may undergo pressure from the state or private agencies to give up children, in other cases, such as in Africa, social support systems may be simply overwhelmed.
We know that in China, with its one-child policy, international adoption actually facilitates having *more* children than if the parents adhered to the policy - abandonment of a child permits a family to go on and try for another child, usually a son or a non-disabled child. In other countries, it is not clear whether parents who give their children up for adoption go on to have as many children as their peers, but there's no evidence that they do not - and a parent who is unable to support or feed or care for a child is unlikely to have access to good medical care and birth control as well. Again, the data is extremely unclear, but it seems doubtful that adoption makes a significance in the US or global population - what it appears to do is mostly shift childbearing from one family to another - that is, birthmothers go on to have at least as many children as before, sometimes more, and then some children are shifted around into other families.
Moreover, in the case of international adoption, there are compelling reasons to believe that the environmental benefits of international adoption are actually negative (note, I am *not* saying that international adoption should not happen or is immoral, just that it isn't environmentally beneficial - there are other moral arguments that apply here.) International adoption is environmentally consequential - it involves long plane flights, often several, as many nations require multiple visits before you can take a child home. Moreover, as all of us know population is never considered alone - numbers are multiplied by impact. Taking the poorest children in the world, who consume the least (often far too little for them to live very long) to affluent western homes is not a way to reduce overall environmental impact. Again, this is not an argument against removing children from terrible poverty and institutionalization, but it does not make a positive environmental difference - adoption actually increases the environmental impact of these children, and undermines any difference in the I=PAT equation. So adoption as it exists now does not seem to be a solution to any population problem.
Moreover, international adoption across large bodies of water doesn't seem to be a resource that will extend into the deeper realms of energy depletion - airline travel is particularly vulnerable to shifts in oil supplies, because there is no alternative fuel for air travel. The high cost of international adoption (12-50K in most cases) is not offset by tax credits and is likely to be increasingly infeasible for many people. Over time, it may be likely that adoption is possible only from nations within easy travel distances.
But what about the adoptive parent end of this? Doesn't this at least reduce the number of biological children that they would have? The answer is yes, but only slightly. Infertile and gay and lesbian couples are more than 10 times as likely to adopt as fertile straight couples - even when there were still fertility treatments available to them to try. And were adoption to be made a more widespread, accessible option for many people, it might well be the case that some parents would choose adoption over fertility treatments (or might not have access to as many energy intensive fertility treatments), or that more fertile couples might choose adoption instead of reproduction or for a second child, reducing the overall birthrate in developed nations
There are some problems with this vision as well - most first time parents prefer the proverbial healthy white infant, a population that has been shrinking for decades. Ever since we ended the draconian practice of sending pregnant teenagers off to have their babies taken away from them whether they wanted it or not, the population of newborns, particularly white newborns without medical issues has shrunk - it is already tiny, with waiting lists of many years for most private adoptions and extremely high costs. As single parenthood has become more common, most women who become pregnant choose to keep their children, or have an abortion, rather than go through pregnancy and give up their baby.
The overwhelming preference for very young children is understandable - but the majority of children available for adoption in the US (more than 550,000) are not infants or toddlers but older children with significant special needs - those special needs may include the full range of physical and mental disabilities, documented or undocumented, trauma, attachment disorders, being part of a larger sibling group or being a teenager or older child, past the cute stage and with plenty of baggage. This is not the vision of parenting that a vast majority of people who want children have. Even the infants and toddlers usually have special needs, although many of these are not evident at that age.
More than 85% of international adoptions and 90% of American adoptions involve children under 4. Of the millions of orphaned and abandoned children in the world, the UN reports that the average age is 9. There is already a dearth of younger, healthy, available children - it doesn't mean there aren't any, but the population of babies and very young children is not likely to increase for any good reason.
If adoption is to be seriously considered as a large scale way of reducing the number of biological children, we must be prepared to rethink our vision of "having a family." How many families are comfortable taking on a sexually abused, epileptic 10 year old and her two siblings? A gay teenager? An AIDS orphan with stunted growth and PTSD? More than 20% of adopted children have serious special needs - and those numbers get higher as you get older. Some of the issues are very risky and hard to detect - pictures from an orphanage or a profile of a foster kid from a therapist who observed them for 2 hours total doesn't necessarily tell you whether your child will ever be able to attach to you or whether they will be able to live independently or be permanently dependent.
Now disabilities and serious issues happen to both parents of biological and of non-biological children. My argument is not against taking older children or children with special needs (we plan to do both, again). It is that any dramatic expansion of adoption as a strategy to address population issues will involve a radical reconsideration of how we view parenting, and disability and family in a host of ways. And if there were to be many more adoptive families, we would also need a better support system for the disability and trauma issues that arise - and this is a tough sell in an era of declining social supports and economic instability.
In my own case, I can honestly say that our ability to take older kids with special needs is precisely the product of my earlier parenting experiences with my own children. I know wonderful, amazing people who have entered into parenting knowing and wanting to take kids will profound issues - they are wonderful. In my own case, however, I don't think I could be willing to do what I am willing to do without experience - without knowing I can handle a severely disabled child, because I do it every day with Eli. My own fears and anxieties and vision of what parenting would/could/should would almost certainly have made *me* say "no" to Eli, were he offered to me as a foster placement - perhaps that is cowardice, but what I didn't know about raising an autistic child would have left me afraid to choose it.
I find it hard to judge parents who also can't choose something more difficult - because I think all of us have limits, and finding out how to create a family, rather than a hospital, is a challenge. Most of us, confronted with a child who is not what we expected, whether by birth or adoption, will rise to the occasion. Saying "yes, I can deal with sexual abuse, uncertain HIV status, three kids at a time, post-traumatic stress disorder, reactive attachment disorder, drug involvement, or any other option" before you've been a parent, however, is another thing.
I deeply admire the people I know who do it - and they do. My godmother, now deceased, adopted and raised 6 children, all adopted when older, all with severe special needs. All but one grew up to live independently. We played with her oldest, whose list of behaviors before adoption included fire-starting and other things that I'd have a tough time saying yes to - he's a responsible adult now. I know and admire a lesbian couple who have taken two boys as their first foster placement - a 9 year old with serious emotional issues and a 2 year old with a seizure disorder, or the single Mom who adopted a daughter with serious neurological issues, or my aunt whose daughter came from an orphanage in Vietnam with an epilepsy diagnosis, and who has evolved a range of severe disabilities. I often wonder - could they have said yes knowing everything? Could I have? Will I be able to?
For most people who want a baby, what they want is partly the baby, and partly the sense of hope and possibility, the openness and the rich future. Any child given up for adoption has already experienced at least one major trauma and loss - that may or may not affect them signficantly down the line, but what we know about adoption is that that loss is not invisible. Older children often have experienced many of those losses and traumas - while it is in some measure an illusion that even birth children have infinite possibilities, that is even clearer with adoptive children. And adoptive parents need parents who are prepared to acknowledge and deal with the fact that they may be a signifier and a site of hope for their families, but they have already experienced trauma and loss that are real to them. We know from previous generations of adoptees that pretending the birth family never existed, pretending the loss of first parents didn't hurt is a bad idea - but not everyone who wants a child is fully prepared to shift their expectations.
Even those who take the toughest kids must, in the end, pick and choose - in her wonderful, honest book _Another Place at the Table_ my friend Kathy Harrison, foster parent to hundreds, adoptive parent of 8, talks about the children she couldn't take or keep - the medically fragile infant that was just too much for her, the children whose intense needs just didn't fit into her family or allow everyone to be safe.
In the equally wonderful recent _No Biking in the House Without a Helmet_, Melissa Fay Greene meditates on wanting to be a family, not a hospital or an institution - on trying to find a child capable of attachment in a 10 minute video taken in an orphanage, on her fears that adopting two older, HIV orphaned siblings from Ethiopia (their 8th and 9th children) have pushed them past the point of being a family and into "institutional." Ultimately her family reconstitutes itself - but not without difficulty. Do read both books.
Maybe I could have done it - maybe I could have said yes to a child, knowing they might not live independently, knowing my life would have been about doctors appointments and surgeries and therapists and behavioral crises. Heck, I gave birth and got a son with some of those issues. But the "yes" that begins from is hard for me to imagine - for me, the kind of adoption I can do now would not have been what I could have done had we been infertile - so I can grasp and identify with the shifts that are buried underneath the idea that "people who want children should just adopt."
Saying "you should just adopt" as something other than a dismissive way of discussing people's desire for children would mean shifting our culture in a whole host of major ways, making the traumatized 11 year old African-American boy someone's early mental image of "look, here's a child" - it is very different than the baby in a blanket that leaps to most minds. It would be good if it were possible - if we could begin shifting cultural attitudes towards what a family is, towards disability and the results of trauma so much that families do think "hey, I want to adopt orphaned pre-teen Ethiopian goat herders" (ok, that was part of my reaction to Greene's book - three of her sons were former goat and cattle herders from rural Ethiopia, and the very funny stories she tells of the skill sets they brought to suburban Georgia are well worth a read - and although it does me no credit, I did immediately think "hey, cool, you can adopt kids who already know how to herd goats!?!? I recognize, however, that isn't a normal reaction ;-)) But that's a bigger shift than just saying "oh, you should adopt."
One of the consequences of our societal shift is that there will be more children in the US and adjoining nations available for adoption - greater poverty, greater stress, more natural disasters are likely to open up candidates for adoption. Greater poverty and stress may also reduce the number of families able to take on more children - or it may increase them as high-cost, energy intensive fertility treatments become the territory only of the very rich. It is hard to say - but what is notable is this - adoption is important for a whole host of reasons, but not as a way of stabilizing world population. It is not an answer to the population problem. It may be the answer for a lot of children. It may be a gift for more and more people. It may be that many families could become hopeful and excited about sharing their lives with children who yes, have had traumas and are older and aren't the baby in the blanket, but can be the site of many joys and hopes - but the changes needed for that to happen for most people are huge, and they cannot be resolved by the optimistic "you should just adopt."
Sharon
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As you say, shuffling unwanted children around is not a solution. But this is a problem that already has a tried and true solution, one developed to help reduce pet overpopulation: stop allowing unwanted babies to be born in the first place. Make a baby a positive choice, not an unintended consequence of lack of forethought, impulsive behavior, neglect, social pressure, rape or spousal pressure and abuse.
Short of forcing people to undergo permanent sterilization contraception (which I don't think any of us here would condone as ethical), what we need but don't have is safe, effective and universal contraception, with it's correspondingly safe, effective and universally available antidote. Equally available to poor goat herders or overprivileged trophy wives, it would empower each woman to decide when to bear children, how to space them and how many to have. In an ideal world, the same product would work for men, so BOTH parents must choose to have children.
Even if such a product was available today, it would never see the light of day. Political and religious systems structured around the superiority of the male and the control of all females, including those in the United States, would scream that it was anti-life and against "God's plan."
"I did immediately think "hey, cool, you can adopt kids who already know how to herd goats!?!? I recognize, however, that isn't a normal reaction"
I thought the same thing reading this!
I have always wanted to adopt an older child or sibling group, but I don't think my parenting experience so far has given me the confidence you have, Sharon, to feel like I could adopt kids with *major* issues. Now that I have a child I have to consider how any new additions to the family would affect him. I couldn't take on very violent kids for example, or severely disabled kids who might end up being a burden to my son later in life, that just doesn't seem fair, at least not until he's old enough to participate in the decision (he's 2). I am trying to stay open to the possibility though, as I'm moving to Central America where adoption may be accessible.
Sorry, but to me "adoption is the answer to the population problem" carries exactly the same weight, and the same indication of the speaker's intelligence, as "quinoa is the answer to world hunger!"
Um, what?? :-)
and, as the mother of two adopted children, I can tell you that adoption isn't necessarily easy. My kids are half-sibs, and we have a very open adoption with their birth mother. They have never wondered why she "gave them away" but there are always other adoption issues. School genealogy assignments with unsympathetic teachers is only a minor one.
People who say "you can always adopt" have never adopted a child.
I stumbled upon this and read through it because I didn't realize people actually think adoption is a solution to population control. I agree with most of the reasons you discuss and just want to add to it a little bit.
I personally have said for years that I do not want to give birth to any children because the world is overpopulated as it is, and I have always wanted to adopt because I am an adoptee myself. I am still young though (24), so my desire to give birth to my own flesh and blood may outweigh my desire to not contribute any more to the overpopulation issue.
I am pretty strongly against most of the fertility drugs/treatments available today, especially when I see desperate women in their early 40s not ready to accept their age who already have children, but still insist on having another. I think that the overuse of fertility drugs needs to be addressed.
I do not think that adoption is always the best option for a couple wanting children, because, like you said, "not everyone who wants a child is fully prepared to shift their expectations." Even when a stable, supportive family adopts a perfectly healthy young baby, that initial loss experienced by the adoptee, (and in some situations, also the loss of fertility on the part of the adoptive mother) inevitably factors into who that adoptee is. You can't expect every couple, fertile or infertile, to be willing to deal with this, especially considering the limited post-adoption support (although that is changing). As frustrated as I am to see people go to extremes to get pregnant, I don't necessarily see that type of person as a good candidate to adopt, and wouldn't want to have yet another generation of adoptees damaged by a system that isn't really benefitting them (like with the case of the girls who went away in the '50s-80s that you mention, which still happens in other countries).
My concern is that people who say, "I don't need to have my own kids; I'll just adopt," are basically just turning over all the risks of childbearing to someone else. There are also the issues that come with being a birth child/birth mother/birth father too. I've noticed that politicians especially like to throw adoption out there as the answer to just about anything, and I don't agree. Adoption comes with real risks, for birth parents, kids, and adoptive parents alike. When it comes to foreign adoption, you've also got to allow for how adoption might encourage dysfunctional practices in the kids' home country to continue. It's all pretty sticky.
what population/environmental problem? We have none.
Ever hear the phrase "Be ye fruitful and multiply"?
As far as the enviroment thing goes, the only problem we have is left wing econazis pushing crap down our throat that will bankrupt the nation and turn us all into environazi slaves.
Too bad people are hoarding real light bulbs. Maybe Obama will send his seal teams after us evil wicked white people and confiscate those awful light bulbs. Have fun trying. We still have a tendency to defend ourselves against tyranny.
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06.00 sıralarında D-100 karayolu Avcılar istikametine 34 BJ 6722 plakalı otomobiliyle seyir halinde olan Levent Ãnal (24), henüz belirlenemeyen bir nedenle otomobilin kontrolünü kaybetti. Hızla savrulan otomobil, bariyerleri parçalayarak Avcılar â Edirnekapı seferini yapan metrobüsle kafa kafaya çarpıÅtı. Kaza sonucu hurdaya dönen otomobilinde sıkıÅan Ãnal feci Åekilde hayatını kaybetti. Ãnalâın cenazesi olay yerine gelen itfaiye ve saÄlık ekiplerinin yaklaÅık bir saat süren çalıÅmaları sonucu hurdaya dönen otomobilden çıkartılabildi. Metrobüs sürücüsü Yavuz Aygünruklar oluÅtu ise kazayı hafif yaralı olarak atlattı. Aygün âOldukça hızlıydı. Zaten herÅey bir anda oluverdiâ Åeklinde konuÅtu. Metrobüsâün durakta bekleyen yolcuları almak için hızını oldukça düÅürmesi ise bir faciayı önledi. Metrobüs içerisinde ve durakta bekleyen yolcular Åans eseri kazayı yara almadan atlattı.
Adoption as a solution to the population/environmental crisis...yes, in a small sort of way. The main solutions, the ones Nature will impose on us, are not pretty or socially acceptable.
I understand the sentiment behind âadoption as solution to environmental crisisâ, but it is completely wrong.
The only âsolutionâ to the environmental crisis is to stop the unsustainable damage to the environment and to switch the entire human race to a completely sustainable lifestyle. Everything that doesn't do that is not a solution.
Not reproducing does not stop unsustainable damage to the environment and does not switch the entire human race to a sustainable lifestyle.
Those who raise the issue of adoption as if it does address the issue are committing a logical fallacy. In my experience they are raising the tu quoque fallacy or the appeal to hypocrisy, the inference being that overpopulation is what is driving the environmental crisis and so those who procreate cannot be pro-environment.
This is false because the problem is environmental impact per person times the number of people. It is not the case that people living in rural undeveloped regions always have low environmental impact. People living in cities can have lower environmental impact than people living in rural areas.
Apartment buildings scale vertically so there is lower land use. There is less building surface area, so heat loss is less. There are efficiencies of scale in sewage treatment, water delivery, heating and cooling and in mitigation of the environmental effects of those things. Mass transit has a lower carbon footprint than do cars.
Individuals have a great deal of control over their environmental impact. Having and raising children who will actively work toward producing a sustainable lifestyle for the entire human race is working toward the solution.
Great bit of research!
And in the cold, hard calculus of Nature, this means that adoption is definitely not a solution to the population crisis for the very simple reason that it INCREASES survival of the world's children. It usually makes their lives better, so it stands to reason that some will survive who would otherwise have their lives tragically cut short (by hunger, by illness, by violence, whatever). It also tends to increase the wealth in which they are raised (not in every case, but enough to make a statistical difference), and studies have shown that the old logic of "poor people outbreed rich people" is wrong -- poor people have more children, but rich people have more great-great-grandchildren, which ends up being more important in the long run. So children who are adopted will usually (not always) have increased survival and reproductive potential by virtue of adoption.
Adoption is a wonderful thing. I've known several people who have done it, and I have the great good joy to be godmother to an adopted child. Kudos to you for wanting to adopt older sibling groups! These have the most challenges in getting adopted, and it is such a blessing that you are willing to keep them together. More people should consider adoption, because it is a great thing, and there is a need. But they should do it for the sake of the actual children, and not for population control. If one's parenting decisions were centered entirely around population control, there would really be only one logical choice -- have no children at all, adopted or otherwise.
Captain Patriot: "Too bad people are hoarding real light bulbs. Maybe Obama will send his seal teams after us evil wicked white people and confiscate those awful light bulbs. Have fun trying." People hoarding incandescents are silly, quite honestly. They will mostly hurt themselves by doing so, because those bulbs cost quite a bit more to operate, enough to easily offset the price tag of the bulb itself. I've switched my house over almost entirely to CFLs (with some seldom-used incandescents waiting until they burn out) and this was done not to save the environment but to save me money. It does also help the environment indirectly, by reducing my electrical consumption, but I made the decision on a purely financial basis. I bought my Prius partly on the same basis (and have been vindicated by rising gas prices), but also on the geek factor of an electrified vehicle without compromising on range. (Yeah, I'm a little weird. I like electric stuff just because it's electric. It's related to why I want to learn the theremin.)
Not my own original thought credit goes to someone else who shall remain nameless (but will hoepfully know who she is upon reading this)- "oh, you should just adopt" is not only not necessarily a good approach from an environmental stance, but also bloody annoying -
"If only people would stop speaking about reproduction-related decisions as if they were everyone else's business, the world would be a happier place."
@ cali
Hording the real light bulbs has nothing to do with cost. it's about persoanl preference and the freedom to be an individual and make individual choices based on persoanla preferences. Money has little to do with it.
People who use CFLs hurt themsleves. The lights are dimmer and people tend to have more headaches and eye strain, not to mention the deadly mercury content. Oh well. I guess mercury poisoning is a method of population control. Too bad free men choose otherwise. Have fun with your fascist control freak ideals.
Save the enviroment? From what? Global warming is a scam. If I had the power I would prosecute every world leader who even mentions it and have them thrown into a dungeon 250 feet under the most desoate desert in the world for producing mass fraud and money laundering (wealth redistribution). They would never see the light of day again. The global warming kooks are viscious evil criminals and should be prosecuted as such. They are far more dangerous than any man who has ever been leader in the history of mankind. They are too dangerous not to be scared of. They are freaks of nature by trade. Spouting off lies and deceptions in the name of the environment. Has climategate taught you nothing? These criminals suck.
Every time someone mentions global climate change I just want to slpa the hell out of them for being a puppet on satan's strings. Climate change policies are all about wealth redistribution, not environment and the EPA can kindly kiss my pale white hairy ass. As far as I am concerned they should all be fired, deported, and defunded. There is no room in america for socialist econazis.
I guess I am over stepping my bounds. I suppose you will report me directly to the furor. His email address is flag@whitehouse.gov Oh well. Freedom was nice while it lasted. McCarthy was right. Someone should invent a time machine and vaporize karl marx and that racist blimpface darwin. Those two morons caused more problems than most men in history. Oh, and let us not forget the faggoty terrorist che. Time machines would be handy if we could keep people like che shoveling shit for a living and leave running important things to people who know how to do it right. As a matter of fact environazis would not exist if I had a time machine. Corn would stay on the dinner plate instead of damaging car engines (ethanol - only stupid people buy it). CFLs would not exist either.
I have considered the possibility of adopting a couple of older children who have problems with mental illness, when my boys are relatively self-sufficient - assuming I can afford to do so. My oldest son has gone through multiple emotional traumas, on top of a baseline affective mood disorder. While we have our problems, we are moving forward - him, his three year old brother and me, as an only parent. It is hard not to occasionally consider how many children are out there who have gone through traumas similar to Cay's, who don't have a loving parent to care for them.
I have never thought about this in the context of environmentalism. I wouldn't even consider it, if I didn't have Caleb with his problems and David - with who knows what issues (given his parents, neurological problems are rather likely - and he has me being momma and papa). Hell, if I didn't have my boys, I would very likely still be subsisting in a substance abuse addled stupor, or dead. But because I do have my boys, I can't help but consider how much love and growing depths of patience I have to offer - and how I am learning to care for and work with a child who has serious emotional stability issues.
But I have some time to consider it. I am not going to begin seriously considering it before my boys are a lot older and I am through school and well into my career. I will have time to consider whether I want to adopt or do foster care - or whether I might want to actually have a life of my own for a while. It is hard to consider the latter very seriously though. I am already getting used to only having time to myself, after my children are in bed - or on the rare evenings when my mom helps out by taking the boys. It is hard to imagine what I might do with actual independence from parental responsibilities - not that I don't have a lot of ideas mind, it is just that those ideas have taken on the quality of "what I want to do when I grow up," rather than being all that serious considerations.
I just have a hard time really thinking about adoption in terms of environmental/population solutions - though when I was younger and childless, it made total sense. But that is all it is - a commonsensical notion, not founded in reality.
Thanks for such a thoughtful and insightful post. I am infertile (one child via IVF) and adoption is so complex that the phrase 'why don't you just adopt' becomes a high insult to anyone who has seriously considered adoption.
We would love to adopt, but the hoops are too many* and the cost too high**.
*i.e. we would currently not pass a home study due to a lack of bedrooms in our tiny house. There are other issues too, but we would have to move before worrying about the other issues.
**Ivf is cheaper than adoption with more tax benefits. All kinds of wrong there.
M
M
To be fair, adoption through foster care is free - sometimes they pay you an adoption subsidy. All costs are covered or reimbursed.
That doesn't make it a cool thing to say to someone, though - just pointing out that not all adoptions cost the same.
Sharon
Thank you, Sharon, for also pointing out that many adoptive children have such high special needs that they *can* be really destructive if people are not ready for them.
Especially in the public system, and especially with children who have been removed from their birthparents' care, this is a huge issue.
My former husband and I adopted (and he left the day after the adoption papers were signed--this is also not unusual), and because FASD and Attachment Disorder are often (in the case of FASD) or always invisible, it's impossible to know what you're in for.
The adoption of our child--whom I single-parented for seven years--broke down five years ago. I remain in her life and am part of her "care team," but she bounced through 5 foster homes before she found someone who could take on the challenges she offers a caregiver. She needs full-time, professionally trained care. That's nothing a single mom can do! (Particularly when the tendency of "the system" is to look for the problem with the child in the actions of the parent, even when there's nothing there to find).
Adoption is not an "answer" to anything. It's a commitment and a gift, just as giving life to any child is (or should be).