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Some of you who lurk in the PLG may have noticed this thread there as well. Since Adoption is a choice, and being pro choice and all, I think that it would be good if we worked just as hard to make Adoption a worthy choice for mothers to be who want to have their baby, but who at the same time know they cannot support the child as they would like.

To quote from my post in the PLG:



Since adoption is not a well working choice at the moment I think it would be worth while to at least try to fix a choice that Pro life Can agree with as we don't always need to fight with them to get things done.

I ask you consider the last point in my quoted post and respond to it.

Thanks very much!

PS: I encourage PL lurkers to post their veiws as well. We arn't as divided on this issue, and as such we should put our resources together to work on it!

More government homes on orphanages. They can be run like bording schools (but perhaps with slacker rules). This allows for very direct government interference to make sure that the kids are being well-cared for. Another benefit is that it gives kids a "permanent home" they can look to, with other children they can expect to be around for a long time. Another advantage is that it can alleviate the desparation for temporary foster homes, allowing the government to make standards for foster parents much higher (to weed out, to an extend, those who abuse the system and the kids they are given).

Honestly, I don't even hear about orphanages in the US and I think it's crazy. I think that, while they have been handled very badly in the past, they can be an extremely great asset in making sure that orphaned and abandoned children are well cared for.

I don't think that there is any other way to "fix" the problem in the adoption system. You can't force people to adopt other people's children. And I think that putting in restrictions so that prospective parents can't know what age/sex/color/health their adoptive child will have would do more harm than good (encouraging black market baby trades and discouraging people from choosing adoption).

I also don't support restrictions on adopting from foreign countries. I find it incredibly xenocentric to say "take care of our own, first!" Often, orphans in other countries such as China or Easter Europe have a much harder life than those in the US. I don't think that we should just say "screw them, they don't have US citizenship."

So well some of us agree there is a problem in denying good homes the right to adopt, so how do we fix this?

I only know two couples who adopted. One wanted a mixed race baby since the wife is white and the husband is black. They got their first (still an infant) within a few months, and got him a baby brother after a couple years. The other couple adopted three Ukrainian children.

One of my friends was adopted and his parents waited years to get him, but they wanted a newborn, white child born to Christian parents.

I don't know about the kinds of problems you're describing, and not having thought of them before, I'm not sure I'm in a position to recommend any changes. I can certainly mull it over, though.

sad thats extremely not fair, my aunt didn't care what kind of child she got, and would have been a good mother and yet...

GAH Yes a psych test is a good idea.

Having heard a great deal of the orphanages in Russia (my husband's mother used to collect food and knit clothes for the kids so they'd bring them over every so often), that's not such a bad idea. Bad as the US foster care system may be, at least they aren't slowly dying of tuberculosis and starvation.