Replies

Easy. There are thousands of American children "aging out" of the foster care system every year, never having been adopted, most having been bounced around frequently between foster homes, often experiencing serious abuse in one or more of those foster homes. Why aren't they adopted? Some because they have serious mental or physical handicaps, but most simply because they are "too old" and/or the wrong color. While their misery is rarely on the level of what exploited 3rd world kids suffer, they are still a lot more important than any blastocyst. And every time someone adopts an infant or toddler, they are going to pour resources into its upbringing. Those resources ought to be directed to already living, suffering children. When you cause a blastocyst to be turned into a child by persuading its mother not to have an abortion, you are consigning an already living, suffering child to never be adopted. And it is certainly easier to guilt-trip a pregnant woman into having a baby she doesn't want, than to adopt and raise a 10 or 12 or 14 year old child with a background of abuse and neglect (perhaps one who arrives not knowing a word of your language). But is it more ethical to do so? No, at least not according to my belief system.

Yet that presumes a balancing act...more of one equals less of the other. There isn't justification for presupposing that such a balancing act is indeed an accurate description of the current situation in America.

Put another way, those who would adopt hard-to-place kids, and those who would adopt healthy saved-from-abortion babies may well be two distinct groups, with no real likelihood of them ever being anything but two distinct groups.

So if aborting healthy babies doesn't increase the number of adoptions of hard-to-place children anyway, how does the unwanted children scenario then justify the aborting of wanted babies?

We were foster parents to six children, ages from 6 months to 17 years...All of the foster parents I know are really loving people, good families...where do you get the statistics to say something like this:

"often experiencing serious abuse in one or more of those foster homes."

What kind of abuse are you talking about? What state has these cases occuring? Who did any research? I can tell you right now that the foster parents I know have paid out of their own pockets for all the many expenses that the state allowance doesn't cover, that they have walked the floors and sat up nights with their children, whom many of us loved as our own...we've made Christmas, and Easter, and Thanksgiving, Fourth of July and a closet full of clothes, and a room of their own, and a peaceful, plentiful dinner table, night after night, sent them off to school with a prayer and a blessing, hugged and kissed them, and when they went back to their "real" parents, cried and prayed that they would be okay...

You know NOTHING about foster parents. NOTHING.

We were a couple who were meant to be parents of a large family...due to health problems I had in my pregnancies, we couldn't have as many children as we had love for...so we were foster parents...we would have adopted the children, but their parents felt they could take care of them just fine...all of them, when they were sent back home, went back into foster care within a year...that was heartbreaking, devastating, especially when we knew where they were coming from...finally, we couldn't take the heartbreak and loss anymore...

I know lots of foster parents, and former foster parents, just like us. You have to put up with a lot in any state's system just to be one...your bank accounts, your family history, your work history--everything is investigated...a criminal background check is done, home visits take place, announced and unannounced...the funds the state allows for the children's care are woefully short...you have to WANT to help children to be a foster parent.

Your throwaway remark was uninformed. You have no idea what you are talking about.