So you know, abortion and adoption aren’t actually connected at all. A woman who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy will first go through the mental/emotional/medical process of figuring out whether or not abortion is the right choice for her. If it isn’t, THEN the next choice is whether or not to raise their child or relinquish. The idea that adoptees should be grateful they weren’t aborted shows the political leanings of the person saying that to you; it’s not based in reality. You’re a perfect example of how they are wrong, in that you were born after Roe v. Wade.
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There is one sperm bank in the country that is non-profit and pioneered the “yes donor” program, which is that donors are informed that their sperm is likely to create actual human beings who have the right to know the other half of their identity, genetics, etc. so all identifying info (including, for example, SSN) will be released to the donor-conceived at 18 or any time after if they request it. The men have to actually sign off – “yes” – to show they recognize these rights and that they will act ethically toward any biological offspring who contact them. The sperm bank also provides counseling for both prospective parents and the donor-conceived. AFAIK it’s the only one in the country that recognizes the rights of the donor-conceived: The Sperm Bank of California.
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Thank you, the thing of it is it was way too much fun not to do it… It just became one of those things where I realized that if I did have a purpose on the planet it was to keep my eye open and wait for a good used kid to happen along and then see if he wanted a dad. I picked and culled to be honest. I wanted feisty little kids, the kind that would break stuff raise hell and want to be tucked in at night with a good story to read. People often would see us one of two ways, 1 I was nuts to raise some other mans kids or 2 you guys are having so much fun, good for you. It’s just the reason I’m here, I get to take part in other people’s lives and they get to share my own madness. I’m a far cry from saintly but I’ve got a good sense of how the world should be kinder.
Probably all came about because I was raised by a great family and extended family. I was an only child though and I hated it so I decided to have a herd of kids.
Its great fun talking to you I hope you had great fun being a kid.
Steve.
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Whenever people try to convince me that I should be glad I wasn’t aborted I have to ask, should I be glad my teenage mother was getting drunk and doing drugs with a guy in his 20’s who convinced her they didn’t need worry about birth control?
Using my existence to argue against abortion feels as silly to me as becoming pro teen pregnancy.
My mom should never have gotten pregnant in the first place. If we’re talking about going back in time and doing the right thing I still wouldn’t exist.
I can be glad I exist and still regret that my mom had a pretty difficult and messed up life. I can’t see how I could claim to love her and not wish she hadn’t suffered so much.
I can’t say I’m glad this long string of bad things happened to her just because I was one of results.
I can’t see her decision not to abort as the line that really made a difference if we are talking about counter factuals.
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I always liked this argument:
The grandmother is an alcoholic and the father spends his evenings out drinking in the taverns. His mother has tuberculosis. She has already given birth to four children. The first child is blind, the second child died, the third child is deaf, and the fourth child has tuberculosis. Now the mother is pregnant again.
Given the extreme situation, would you recommend an abortion?
If you said yes, you’ve just killed Beethoven! However, if she does have a fifth child and it’s not Beethoven, should you suggest that she has more children to increase her chances of giving birth to Beethoven? I mean, sooner or later, right?
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Right, the whole “he could’ve been Beethoven!” is countered by “But he could’ve been Hitler.” It’s an appeal to consequences.
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Exactly, sometimes cool people come out of bad situations but bad situations are not better at producing good people.
Bad situations mostly produce suffering. It makes no sense to perpetuate suffering because of a few “fun” stories of triumph over all adversity.
We need to spend way more time avoiding the situations that lead to hard decisions than we do bullying the people who are forced to make them.
Which comes back to adoption too. Whatever the stats say, sometimes kids end up with no home and no one to take care of them. We need to reduce this occurrence but we also need a system of funneling these kids into good situations when it happens. And then as a society we need to support those new families and make the kids feel accepted.
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As far as I’m concerned, Beethoven became successful because he had good connections and opportunities through his father (who was a court musician as well as a drunk). Beethoven’s mother died when he was 16 and three sisters and a brother died in infancy (that’s a lot of death to justify one life…). Beethoven’s father wasn’t able to support the family because of his alcoholism, so Ludwig took over the running of the family. If things hadn’t worked out and he hadn’t been a genius with luck and connections, this would have been a bigger disaster. While I love his music, I would not want to have it on the condition that there had to be that much suffering.
If pro-life people want to use examples like this and don’t put in more effort than others do to ensure that people who have followed their advice and taken the pregnancy to term are provided for and able to give their children a good chance at success in life, there is no way that they can consider themselves pro-life. I am glad to be alive, but like you I don’t see my existence as a universal good at any cost. I think the most pro-life and pro-choice thing you can do is to make sure that people have the freedom to make the choice they actually want and the means to support whatever that is (rather than being forced one way or the other by costs, circumstances, laws, threats etc.).
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When I finally convinced my spouse that we should adopt, we went to the nearest large city (Murdertown, USA) and walked in to the first agency we found. I said to the harried-looking receptionist “We’d like to talk to someone about adopting a child” and she snapped “we don’t have any healthy white babies!”. At the time I was offended, honestly, but I got over it.
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You might want to consider why that was her reaction. Think about what she has to deal with, day in and day out, with people who show up convinced they deserve to adopt…but only want a healthy white baby.
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I’m a terrible person.
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I’m worse
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It’s just people saying stupid things. I have three daughters – not adopted, they came out of my wife’s body. That doesn’t matter but I fm just saying do because that’s the topic. Anyhow I get asked regularly by people (when they first find out I have 3 girls) if I wanted a son.
Really what they are saying is “if I were in your shoes I think I’d want a son.”
So what they are saying about adoptions is “I am not in your shoes but I think I might feel something less if my kids were adopted,”. It’s not intended to be hurtful, I think, just people thinking out loud without thinking of who they are speaking to
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That’s the point, yes. 
I had a similar “annoyed-but-then-I-got-over-it” moment when I got yelled at for using the phrase “melting pot” in an fostering class.*
People get tired of dealing with other people’s ignorance and misconceptions, and that sometimes leads them to misconceptions of their own. A very forgivable, very human failing really, as long as you know where the person is coming from.
* yes, where I live you have to take classes before you are allowed to adopt and/or foster. For domestic adoption, at least (we didn’t seriously consider foreign adoption).
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We considered domestic adoption and started classes, but didn’t get very far because:
- They didn’t like the fact that we didn’t have a TV - how was the child going to get their cultural exposure without a TV?
- They didn’t like the fact that we were Christians (this was before my apostasy). What if the child was a Muslim?
- Once you adopt, you have to stay in the country for a year without leaving at all, then you have to stay in the area for five years. We have a lot of family in mainland Europe and I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t have to move elsewhere in the country to find work, as the area had high unemployment.
- There’s a lot of involvement by the local government and the birth parents, including regular visits and correspondence - we realise that an adopted child isn’t a blank slate and we would have been happy to maintain as much contact with the parents and extended family as the child wanted, but they need to actually become our child and we need to be able to carry on our lives and do what we feel is best for the family. We asked for evidence of the benefit for the child from this arrangement, but they couldn’t give us any.
In the end we gave up and adopted some dogs from the shelter.
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It’s amazing that anyone can have biological children and yet nobody checks to see if they’re fit.
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[quote=“jsroberts, post:35, topic:76084, full:true”]
They didn’t like the fact that we didn’t have a TV - how was the child going to get their cultural exposure without a TV?[/quote]
Hmmm… don’t know about that one, here - we had just gotten our first TV (seriously!) so it didn’t come up.
Heh, they didn’t like the fact that we weren’t Christians. We were able to persuade the people who were worried about that particular issue that Unitarian Universalism was “close enough” 
to “real” religion that we weren’t liable to actually cook and eat a child.
We don’t have the second of those requirements, just the first one.
We write letters on Christmas and on our daughter’s birthday and pass them on to a social worker who keeps them for the birth parents (should they ever resurface and want to know how things are turning out). But we do that voluntarily - once you TPR in this state, that’s it; the child’s original birth certificate is destroyed and a new back-dated birth certificate is put in its’ place, so that other polities that don’t recognize adoption (like certain middle eastern US allies) can’t legally take your children away from you on a whim.
Hey, at least the dogs got a lucky break, right?
The patchwork of laws that govern adoption in the USA (don’t know about other places, but in the US it’s highly variable by state) can be a real barrier both to children who need parents, and people of good will. I’m lucky enough to live in a state where it’s relatively easy, as long as you have a decent income and food in the fridge. It took about two years before our daughter came home with us, and then we were legally foster parents for nine months, and then the birth certificate was reissued with our names on it.
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In our area it was a pilot scheme that had been going on for 15 years - the idea was to work against the previous trend for adoptive parents not even to tell their children that they were adopted. That was good, but without knowing the family situation the child had come from we weren’t comfortable about regular face to face contact and opening ourselves up to any issues if they knew where we lived etc. Without assurance that this really helped the children adjust (they couldn’t say anything until the pilot project had been going for 25 years), and known problems with the fostering and adoption situation in the city, we couldn’t go any further. We wouldn’t have been able to have children during the five years either, so (added to the waiting period that could have been up to ten years) it would probably have ruled out having any children by birth.
I think it’s very reasonable for the state to take extra precautions with adopted children - there are sometimes issues from their past (such as long periods of instability with birth parents or in the foster system) or particular needs that could affect the child’s development or the relationship with the parents, and the state has a greater responsibility in this case to make sure that children are put in safe homes. Even with the extra efforts from the state and adoptive parents, there’s still abuse and difficulty at times, so it’s important to be as confident as possible about anyone looking to adopt and to provide the necessary support during the transition period. Based on our inquiries, the city wasn’t great at either of these things.
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