AUTHOR: M. DATE: 10:28:00 PM ----- BODY:

There have been lots of questions over the past few months about WHY adoption. Our queer friends are busy buying sperm or identifying friendly healthy male friends to donate sperm. Having witnessed this only second-hand, I'm going to go out on a limb and say: it doesn't seem a whole lot easier to do it that way. It can be stressful and expensive and nerve-wracking. But even so, it fits better into the frame of reference of people whose experience in making babies generally consists of willing female + willing male + some form of committment + some sort of conscious let's-have-kids decision. This is also a good way to be a parent, but obviously only one of many options. Still, it makes sense that people would ask us why we're not trying to get pregnant. It's even been suggested to me that since we're good social justice types that we're adopting because we want to do something good for the world, and for once maybe we should just be selfish and do this the way we really want to. This is a tough one to address in any articulate way, so I did what any blogger worth her salt would do... shamelessly borrowed, verbatim, someone else's answer. I couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't even try. Thanks to Shannon for this one.

I think of adoption as a positive thing. It's my way to gleefully live into my values. Maybe someone else gleefully lives into her values by riding a bike everywhere and thus showing love to the planet in a way I don't, by driving my (squirm) SUV (but it's a small one! and I didn't buy it! and I feel guilty every second of every minute of every day for driving it!). I am not a better or worse person than a non-adopting bike rider. It's just that adoption is something I not only can do, it's something I can do with joy and gusto. Someone else maybe can't do it, or can't do it with joy, and so, shouldn't do it. I, on the other hand, suck at bike riding, and I can't stand the cold.

Yeah!

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