my lit'l bundle o joy is the result of an ear infection treated with antibiotics. Apparently we weren't as careful this time as we were other times...what started as a pain in the ear migrated to a pain in the ass :)

I'm disinclined to believe that baby came out of your ass. :p

He's too young yet to be the other kind of pain in the ass. That only comes when they reach their teens.

welcome to the Cellar, Iggy. :)
The daughter and her hubby, of a friend of mine just did the adoption thing in Kazakhstan. Babies have to be 6 months old and an expensive, drawn out process. But they're happy.

She has to get several other women's husbands fixed too.

I don't understand why people are allowed to adopt outside the US. But that will just take me down a long road of isolationist thinking.

*sigh* Today's going to be a bad day. I can tell....

I'm not absolutely sure about one kid but I think two out of three alter servers last night were adopted from overseas.

I don't have a proble with people having the right to do so, but it's stupid. People really need to learn how to look at problems that are closer to home before they worry about other people's problems.

They already are. Mine's the only one who's not. I don't think I want him to get fixed. I couldn't even tell you why-- it's just some kind of mental block or something. I'd rather be the one rendered infertile.
Think positive. Nearly half the women <i>don't. </i> :p

I don't have a proble with people having the right to do so, but it's stupid. People really need to learn how to look at problems that are closer to home before they worry about other people's problems.

Have you considered that perhaps it's not as much about solving the other countries' problems as it is being able to adopt a baby within a year or so (unlike domestic adoptions where you can languish on waiting lists for a decade?) In addition, while foregin adoption is expensive, domestic adoption is more expensive, and has a good deal of heart-wrenching legal options for the birth parents after the fact.

Unless, of course, one is willing to take any of the thousands of pre-adolescent to adolescent children with behavioral and developmental problems. There are tons of those up for adoption in America. But I don't believe it is wrong for people to say, "I am incapable of taking care of a child like that," and instead adopt one who has no such (known) problems who just happens to be from another country.

In this case they aren't trying to solve other peoples problems, just their own....and it's closer to Belgium than here. :)

Reading back to the begining of this thread, I REALLY wish I had replied several pages ago. There were parts of several posts that I wanted to respond to and I just put this off way too long. I cannot begin to think of a fetus like anything as insignifigant as a potato. A potato (or any other things a fetus has been compared to) will NEVER grow, in a few months, into a baby human being. No matter how few weeks along you are, in time, it WILL grow into a person. The vast majority of the many, many abortions performed daily are NOT a result of a rape or a mother's life in danger. They are mostly just inconvient to the pregnant person at that time, and the pregnant person refuses to change their priorities, or think of the best thing for anyone but themselves.
When I was 19, in between relationships, managing a restuarant, working LOTS of hours, I had a brief fling. Working 70 hrs a week and not having sex for the past few months, I had become careless with my pills. By the time I realized I was pregnant, my "fling" was already in a serious relationship and planning marriage with a great lady. Not wanting to cause problems, and not feeling anything like a "parent", I went to my OB-GYN, he confirmed that I was indeed pregnant, and my reaction was "I am not going to have a baby!" He calmly asked if I would like for him to make a recommendation, I said yes, and within two weeks, I was no longer pregnant.
In the last twenty-five years since then, I cannot describe the feelings I have had at times about the abortion. The majority of people close to me do not even know. I wish so much that somebody back then (out of the four health care professionals that I ended up dealing with before the actual abortion) had said something - anything - such as "Has anyone discussed your other options with you?, "Do you feel that you need any counseling concerning this?", or even "Do you realize that in a few months this will be a baby!?"
Of course, I knew - or certainly should have known that there was a baby inside me, but I honestly never let myself think that specifically. I just blocked everything out except the fact that I didn't have a problem, or anything to decide or be concerned with because some people were making sure of that. Thinking back now, nineteen years old is young, you think you know it all then of course. My point is that I have a lot of concern for a lot of these girls and women who are getting all these abortions, and what they may go through later. That is one thing that I'm sure is over-looked WAY too much.
When I was 27, I had my son, at 30, I had my daughter, then I had my tubes tied. My son is a healthly 18 year old, we're very close. My daughter was diagnosed with neuroblastoma (a childhood cancer) when she was 16 months old. After two surgeries, chemo, radiation, and a two-month bone marrow transplant, she died at the age of 2 1/2 years old. (Her name is Sheena Marie Gootee - her name is posted on several child loss websites). Don't mis-understand - I never, ever thought, or think, that Sheena's death was God's way of punishing me for the abortion, but still, I do have on-going guilt and regret, even all these years later. I just don't think this aspect of abortion should be over looked. And I think it has gotten too common for women to use it as a form of birth control. I got physically sick once when I had seen a pregnant lady every day for six months, her belly growing (that would be THE BABY), then three days later I saw her not pregnant. A couple of months later, she was pregnant again. Turns out, she had dumped her boyfriend for another guy, and decided that she'd rather have the new guy's baby. So she went to Houston, Texas where she could get a late term abortion (you know those where they cut them apart, limb by limb and extract the pieces). I was mortified, and boyfriend #1 went into shock, a deep depression, and was drunk the last hundred times I saw him. I normally just stay out of abortion discussions, but I felt like writing this tonight.
If you know anyone that you're concerned about who's having problems or depression, and a past abortion could possibly be a factor, please don't over-look that possibility for their sake.
Thanks so much for letting me get this out!

BH - Thank you so much for sharing your story. One meaningful story means a lot more (to me at least) than a bunch of hypothetical situations.

I guess part of my response is flavored by being on a college campus. It's really tiresome to here from all of these yuppies about how bad it is in other countries and how they are saving a child.

I agree that adoption is a problem in America, but I guess it's partially because there are so many children that are the result of unwant or removal from homes of less that sterling health or mental state.

The beauracy doesn't help either.

y'know, what's really important is
 

What's really important is that it matters to that kid.

I'm reminded of the story about the fella standing on the beach after a big storm. The beach is covered with starfish, and with the sun rising and the tide falling, slow certain death awaits the starfish. So this fella is bending over, picking up a starfish, and chucking it back into the sea, again and again and again. There's another guy, he watches for a while, he sees that there's no way these starfish are going to be saved, and he walks up to the fella and asks:

"Why are you doing this? I doesn't matter what you do, thousands of these starfish are going to die."

The first guy pauses to listen, then returns to his task. He picks up another starfish and wings it back into the sea. He decides to answer the question and says:

"Because it mattered to that one."

Adopting a child from overseas, or a child that is, for some reason, a less desirable candidate for adoption, is in almost every circumstance, a Good Thing. Or adopting any child. There are exceptions, sometimes horrid, evil exceptions, (no link), but they're far, far rarer that the other end of the spectrum where a family is enlarged by one (or more),


That's just wrong thinking. Your opinion, sure, whatever. There's a big difference between talk on a college campus about "fixing the problems of those poor people" and action in the form of welcoming a child into one's family. Big difference. Talk's cheap (especially around here), but acting, doing this, I can't imagine the motivation for such a big lifelong, lifechanging event is about "fixing the problems of those poor people".

I see motivations like love for children, family dominating the decision making process. I am not an adoptee, or and adopter, so I can't say from first hand experience. But if I were to adopt, I mean, if we were to adopt a child, it would be because of our love for kids and each other and our family.

The truth of the statement that you can't save the world, or even a part closer to you than a part farther away is **not** sufficient reason to try to save a part you can.