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A Note To A Prospective Adopter



Let's take a moment to examine your motives. Why do you want to adopt a child? 

A) If it's because you're infertile, I have a whole post just for you. Re: I Am Not A Treatment For Your Infertility. You go read that.

B) "We feel as though god has called on us to open our home and adopt a child."

Bullshit. God never called on anyone to pay tens of thousands of dollars for someone else's child. I recall god saying, "Go forth, be fruitful and multiply." Nowhere, in any of the hundreds of religious texts I've read in my life, have I ever seen god quoted as saying, "Go forth, be shady and coerce strangers into selling you their babies." The word adoption isn't even mentioned in most of them that I recall. Never have I  read, "And lo, Abraham and Sara did adopt a baby." In fact, when Sara couldn't produce a child, Abraham slept with her handmaiden and knocked her up. When Sara later got pregnant, she didn't adopt the handmaiden's child to jump start her family... she cast the woman and child out. Bitch, you go raise your child, I've got mine. 

If god is calling on you to open your home to a disadvantaged child, do it. Establish permanent guardianship of a child already in the system. Don't adopt them and erase their pasts. Don't go hunting for some pregnant woman and talk her into giving you her baby. The good guy badges you want to pin to your chest aren't worth the health and well being of that child. Why damage another child, when you can rescue one? You don't need a baby. In fact, it's incredibly selfish insist upon a newborn and ignore all the poor children who have been neglected, abused, and mistreated all their I lives. You want a good guy badge? A valid one? Help a child that needs help, instead of creating a new need for help in another newborn baby.

C) "We want to adopt a child to jump start our family."

I've never heard anything that is quite this brand of selfish anywhere else in my life. Only someone swimming in the rosy illusion the institution of adoption projects could possibly think this is in any way valid, or even human. 

So, let me get this straight. You can, and are planning to, have children of your own. Yet for some reason you want to find an expectant mother and take her baby first? What, exactly, makes you think this is a wonderful plan?

What is missing from you that having your own child isn't good enough for you? Why do you need the added validation and inevitable (sickening) back-patting that comes along with adopting a child? Why do you feel the need to steal someone else's baby before you have your own?

You know you'll differentiate between your adopted child and your biological children. You get to spend the rest of your life telling all your friends and anyone else that will listen how you "adopted our first child, then went on to have children of our own." I've heard you say that stuff. Don't you have any idea the damage and trauma you cause? No, you don't. And you don't care, because you need be the Angel of mercy that took pity on some poor baby and took them in out of the kindness of your heart. There is no kindness in your heart. There is only a selfish need for validation and congratulations.

Well congratulations. You are selfish, needy, and pathetic. Produce your own kids or remain childless, because you don't deserve to raise an adopted child.

D) "We are choosing to adopt instead of having our own children."

Why? Is your genetic material somehow deficient? You don't like your husband's nose? "That honker? On a kid? I don't think so."

Is your body somehow deficient? Don't want those unsightly stretch marks? Don't want to lose your willowy figure and all related to it? Don't think you can take the pain? Then you aren't cut out to be a mother anyway.

If you can produce your own child, and you want children, then produce. Don't go hunting for some irresponsible teenager and talk her into thinking she's being an angel and giving you a gift by allowing you purchase her child. That makes you just as bad as any other garden variety criminal; you just bought a person. 

And frankly that irresponsible little snippet could do with a hard lesson in reality. You lay down, you spread them... you pay the price. Accept the consequences of your decision and take care of your child. If you mistreat it, we'll take it then, and throw you in prison.

E) "I have no man, but I want a child, so I'm going to adopt."

So you want to take in a child, erase their pasts, delete their families, and scar them forever because you're lonely? How self centered can you possibly be?

Don't subject a child to your pathetic need for unconditional love. Go to a bar and get drunk like the rest of us did. You'll have your own child soon enough.

I think we need a system like what I've heard about England; the only children in the adoption system are those who have been removed from the home. Kids who actually need angels to rescue them.

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