I have been reading a book by one of the folks I saw present at the adoption conference and I am loving it. It says all kinds of stuff I think. For those of you following along at home, it's Making Babies, Making Families by Mary Lyndon Shanley.
She is basically very pro-openness in adoption and very anti-anonymity in adoption and gamete "donation." She is also very anti-free-market policy in the exchange of human gametes (and surrogate gestation, too, I think).
One nice thing she does, rhetorically, is asks "what does policy/practice X tell us about what we think matters regarding families?" She also asks again and again whether children's or society's interests are served well by various policies/practices. And in her adoption section, she comes down very solidly in favor of putting most of the power about adoption placement decisions in the hands of mothers (by which I mean women who give birth to the children in question) rather than social workers, courts, professional organizations, etc. She would also give unmarried biological mothers more rights (though not 100%) than unmarried biological fathers in making adoption decisions and I think she's correct to do so.
I think that our personal, individual adoptions are ethical as far as that goes, but the longer and the more I think about these kinds of issues the less likely I think it is that I would be a parent if the world were the place I'd like it to be. Maybe. But quite possibly not. And certainly not to the children that are mine now.
And that's an interesting thing to ponder.
