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!