Adoption should be an empowering option for young women in crisis, knowing that the people around them - family, friends, church - will respect their choice.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Adoption has been a part of my life and a part of my family, so it was how I wanted to start. It felt natural and right to me.
I've never been keen on open adoption. It doesn't seem to solve the main problem with adoption, which is that somebody feels she was abandoned by someone else.
There are young people having babies every day that cannot possibly take care of them, and, as people who believe that every life is beautiful, we need to make them aware of another choice - to give that beautiful life up for adoption.
Open adoption, when it works, is fabulous. But when it goes wrong, it's so traumatizing for everybody.
The process of open adoption is not discussed in the way it should be. Everyone I know who has adopted domestically has at least one tragic story. It was important to me to be able to describe those situations.
The journey into adoption started for my parents, as it does with so many families: my mother and father desperately wanted to have kids, but they couldn't.
Adopting means opening your home, and heart, to a life you've never known. But there is nothing as richly rewarding as being an adoptive parent.
Birth mothers choose life, and a family, for their child. But this choice is rarely celebrated. Women routinely face family, friends and even health-care providers who think that adoption equals abandonment, according to researchers and conversations with birth mothers.
A full accounting of adoption as an option would not underestimate its emotional challenges - the grief and loss for birth mothers, the uncertainties for adoptive parents operating under a patchwork of state laws.
I say to everybody, 'Adoption is not for the faint of heart.'