The whole Jolie-Pitt twin girls got me to thinking: These people are obviously able to have children, yet they adopt. The list of celebrities who have done so includes Michael Landon, Jill Ireland & David McCallum, Jill Ireland & Charles Bronson, Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes, and the mama of them all, Mama Mia Farrow (with Andre Previn & Woody Allen).
Should this practice be allowed? Aren’t these people taking children away from the really infertile who are desperate to adopt and cannot find a child?
As I understand it, there’s a shortage of qualified adoptive parents, not children. And the world really doesn’t need more people. And, there’s good medical reasons why a fertile couple might consider having a child a bad idea; everything from potential nasty genetic diseases to some of the more dangerous side effects that hit some women who have children.
So no; there’s no reason why they shouldn’t adopt.
Exactly. If there were a shortage of kids who needed good homes, maybe you couild make a case that they deserve to go to parents who can’t have kids. But since there’s more supply then demand, there’s no reason to arbitrarily keep a child from parents who may love him very much.
Last time I checked supply well outweighed demand with regard to adoption. I don’t see many people who want to adopt being denied the ability to do so due to lack of children needing adoption, but I am clear there are lots of children who need to be adopted who aren’t and languish in care instead.
ETA: Beaten to it by two others already, my fault for having so many threads open rather than reading them one at a time.
That’s odd. Every anti-abortion book I have ever read insists there are far more peoiple wanting to adopt than there are children waiting to be adopted. The main problem according to them is that the adoption red tape is so hideous.
There is a shortage of white newborn babies within the US, because hardly any white teenage moms give up their babies any more, and there’s a high demand for them. There are plenty of older children and disabled children of all races, AFAIK, but you have to wrestle with the foster care system which can be nightmarish.
Most of the people I know who have adopted within the US have adopted non-white babies–black or Asian or Hispanic or Pacific Islander etc… There are more non-white babies, but still, not as many moms giving them up voluntarily.
So a lot of people go the international route, and the supply of adoptable babies from other countries varies–sometimes a country will decide to stop letting Americans adopt. AFAIK this is what most of the celebrities do–they go off to Africa or Malaysia or someplace and are able to push something through quicker than usual. The ordinary masses have to be very patient and spend a lot of money, but there’s not as much worry about the mom changing her mind.
Quite often in an international adoption you’ll get older children, not infants, and they may have serious attachment or deprivation issues. Let me see, I mostly know people who have adopted from Romania, Russia, China, and Korea.
In any adoption there is a ton of red tape, but some are slightly easier than others. You will always have to wait–you can’t just go out and adopt a kid willy-nilly.
BTW, did I miss some gossip? Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes adopted a baby? When? (Or are you saying that Suri is a secret substitute baby?)
Also, I’d like to say that I don’t think we should judge the demand for white babies to necessarily be entirely the result of plain old racism. It’s more complex than that, I think. A lot of white people worry about adopting non-white children for reasons like: can I properly teach my child to honor his heritage if I don’t share it at all? How will he deal with racism if I can’t teach him right? Will he resent being adopted inter-racially? (I’ve seen some pretty viciously resentful adoptees.)
I think those concerns might be diminishing with many people, since it’s becoming more and more common as far as I can tell. But adopting a child of another race is kind of fraught with issues and it’s no good pretending it isn’t.
Of course, they should be allowed to adopt. The goal of adoption should be to make sure that children grow up in loving families, not to make sure that infertile couples get babies. Infertility can be heartbreaking, but no one has a right to a baby.
And as Der Trihs points out, there are many reasons–medical, environmental, ethical–why fertile couples would choose not to have biological children.
Why is it any of your business if people who are fertile want to adopt? If they think they have a good reason and someone agrees to give them her kid, then why do you think you should be able to ban it? They don’t need to justify themselves to you.
The idea that something should be banned just because you don’t like it is a prevalent idea in our society and it drives me nuts. If people voluntarily agree to make some sort of transaction and it doesn’t involve you, then butt the hell out.
There are too many people. A process that provides a good option to reproducing, while at the same time providing good homes to children who don’t have one, is win-win.
How do you determine with certainty that any two individuals will be able to conceive in the future and that the woman will be able to carry a baby to term?
It makes no sense to prevent fertile people from adopting children.
We don’t have adoption to provide children for parents. We have adoption to provide parents for children. When chosing which parents should be allowed to adopt the standard is what is best for the children, not the parents.
“Allowed” is a bizarre word in this context. It’s not like there is some central adoption agency that handles everything.
The government plays two very different roles in adoptions: on one hand, the approve adoptions that people arrange privately–this can be between individuals or through private agencies. This includes people adopting children from within their own family (not uncommon). Trying to say that these sort of adoptions shouldn’t be allowed if the couple is fertile is ridiculous and would be horribly intrusive: if I can’t raise my child for whatever reason and feel that someone else would be the best possible parent for that child, it ought not be the government’s concern if that person is fertile (or gay, or married, or wealthy, or theistic).
On the other hand, the government also runs it’s own adoption agencies to place children that the state has removed from the custody of their parents. Here, the government is playing a very different role: it’s not about respecting people’s rights, it’s about making the best choices for the children in its care. Here, the governement can and should evaluate what is in the child’s best interest and it’s ok to prefer one parent/ one set of parents over another. But fertility still isn’t an issue there.
I’m an adoptive Mom. After three years of infertility treatments, we adopted our son. Our daughter was born (surprise), six months after he arrived home.
I have two friends who adopted their second child as a result of secondary infertility. Their first child is bio, in one case they were unsuccessful in concieving the second, in the other case a second pregnancy would have carried significant risk to my friend (she almost died delivering the first).
Having bio children is an indication of fertility at a point in time. It is not proof that there is no infertility.
There are a shortage of healthy, white, domestic infants available for adoption. There are children all over the world in need of families.
Representative of the infertile couple party checking in. For the most part, it doesn’t really bother me if a fertile couple or individual (you do know that single people can adopt also, right?) chooses to adopt. In the classes that I was required to take in order to adopt, over half the class already had children of their own. Some wanted another baby, some wanted older children. From what I saw, there were many more children to be adopted than parents to adopt them. I would rather have these children adopted than to have them bounce around in foster care. babygirl, and I both want kids, but I don’t want to deny any qualified parent(s) who could provide a good, loving home.
Celebrity adoptions are a whole 'nother matter for me.
Yeah. I’m adopted, white and blue-eyed. Most of these celebs are adopting children from third-world countries. Whether or not this is some kind of celebrity fad, or whether it’s actually a good thing for a rich American to bring a third-world country child up in this environment is another matter.
My parents had to endure a remarkable amount of red tape to adopt my brother and I, and this was in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s.
And they were not able to conceive, either. If that even matters, really.
