onebug

@numberonebug

she/her

healthcare bureaucrat in philly, v adhd, orthodox jew, ect ect, im love my wife

blog

numberonebug.bearblog.dev/

onebug @numberonebug1/21/2024, 5:10 AM

they had a baby naming ceremony at shul this morning and afterwards I was talking to friends about how moving the experience was and how it'd be nice to have kids one day but oh well, and everyone was very quickly just "oh you can just adopt". later I talked to my bf about how lovely it was and how nice it'd be to have kids and he quipped "oh you could always adopt". the subject of parenting came up at work yesterday and I expressed like "yeah it'd be nice but oh well" and someone suggested that I look into adoption

and. ugh. idk. I appreciate the positive outlook

I just wish we could put "just adopt" on the same shelf where we put "have you tried diet and exercise" is all

hey did you know that there's an estimated 2 million families waiting to adopt a child in America

hey did you know that only like 20k children are adopted in this country each year

adoption is an extremely ethically fraught, difficult, expensive, traumatic, and weirdly competitive process with a fucked up history and an industrial complex built around it. it's not something someone can just do. its not a solution to infertility.

there was a moment in American history where there was a massive influx of children needing adoption, as a result of a movement in social work and psychology to pressure anyone having a kid in a way deemed "incorrect" into putting the kid up for adoption (delightfully termed "the baby-scoop" era) but that moment is thankfully over and hopefully will never come back. I just keep getting the impression that people who haven't had to look into this stuff have the assumption that things are still like that and assuming there are scores upon scores of children waiting for adoption. that's just not the case. foster care is a temporary thing to help children while social services (ideally) help parents return to a state where a family can be reunited or a relative can be located to take over when the parents can't. it's not a pipeline to adoption and that's a good thing! its not a solution to infertility

it would just be nice when this stuff comes up to get empathetic understanding or sympathy or a "well there's many ways to build a family" or hell advice would be fine too if it wasn't trite, instead im just brushed off with the same non solution every single time and it's! not great!

#infertility #Vent

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Inumo @Inumo1/21/2024, 5:44 AM

Ngl I knew that adoption was fraught, but I didn't realize that we were (in some sense) in quite such a "post-adoption" era. Soooooo yeah, that is more frustrating now knowing that "just adopt" is not, in fact, a reasonable or even particularly possible solution. Best of luck finding ways to build your own family. <3

onebug @numberonebug1/21/2024, 6:25 AM

yeah it was a surprise to me too! I was pretty cavalier about loosing my fertility through transitioning because I was like "oh I'll just adopt when I get to that point of my life it's fine", so it was a pretty cold shock to get here to only find that,, it's not really a thing anymore,

idk if I would've done anything different had I know, but I still wish I had known, ya know.

but yeah nowadays you have fostering, but that's more of a like few years max kind of deal, it rarely ends in adoption (which is good! depending on the state about ~50-70% of kids who enter foster care are reunited with their family, that's amazing, only ~20% get adopted). it's certainly a way to have kids in my life I guess but it's more of a "ward" situation than a viable way to have my own children. then there's surrogacy which, fuck, it costs like $100k and is ethically and (in PA at least) legally fraught to boot haha. maybe I could end up one day having a close friend offer to be a surrogate for free but seeing as most if not all of my friends are trans,, that feels as likely as a baby falling into my arms one day while im walking to work haha

bluh thanks for listening to me vent! idk I guess I'll just channel this parental energy into being a good cat mom/mom friend, or maybe one of my friends will eventually have a kid and I can be a cool aunt idk. it sucks but that's life whatcha gonna do

effika @effika1/21/2024, 1:59 PM

Yeah, I got told that constantly after I got married ("Just adopt! Come to the foster info class next week!" etc) and it's never an easy topic but in Oklahoma it's ESPECIALLY bad.

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