Adoption

Adoption is a great good for childless couples, for those saved from abortion, and as a model of our relation to God as adopted sons and daughters (St. Paul).

Adoption is a hardship for everyone who is involved in it: the child; the natural parents; the adopting parents; other siblings. We wish that every story of adoption would end, "And they all lived happily ever after," but this is only rarely the case, and even then only after enduring many difficulties. Anger and resentments abound, and everyone tends to compare their feelings with how they imagine those to be found in a "natural family." It is all too easy, even natural, for those who are suffering these hardships to point fingers at others: the natural father, the natural mother, the adoption agencies, the culture of the Church or of society, the adopted child, the adopting parents, and siblings, whether also adopted or the natural children of the adopting parents.

Disquieting: adoption by same-sex couples; the problem of "three parents"--inserting a nucleus into an egg and having the child gestated by a surrogate mother on behalf of two men.

Links

• Margaret Rice, "The Other Woman."