Humor Me While I Rant

I went to a very conservative Christian college, where the student body busied itself, during it's rare non-studying hours, with charitable deeds.  Amongst those many charities, were a few adoption fundraising groups.  And these young women, who would wed as soon as they graduated if not before, would be taught all about the expense of adoption and the children waiting for adoption and the families struggling to pay to adopt them.  Then they'd be given their buckets and sent off to fundraise.

Fast forward a year or two when, newly graduated and married, these couples start discussing building a family. They have somehow, within only a few years, been blessed with not only the purchase of a house but still having an excess of money.  They consider having their own children and frankly would probably have no trouble at it, but instead decide it would be cruel to bring another child into the world when there are so many who need homes.  They immediately go off and spend copious amounts of money to purchase adopt a newborn from a hard up mother.

Sounds like a great story of social responsibility, no?

But of course, those adoption fundraising groups did a world of hurt by criss-crossing their figures.  There really are a lot of older children waiting to be adopted.  There are also a lot of couples waiting for years at a time to spend rediculous amounts to adopt an infant, and the longer you wait the more you pay.  You see, most unwanted infants simply aren't born anymore.  But because of this misled info, people who could be giving birth to their own healthy infants are removing the few that are in the pool from people who can't have children of their own and wouldn't struggle to provide for a child on a day-to-day basis, but do struggle greatly to come up with the $20,000-$100,000 that comes with infant adoption.

If you have the money and want to do good people, give it to a couple who really needs it or adopt an older child.  That's the socially responsible thing to do.