You may find it helpful to come up with a list of questions for prospective adoptive parents. Some of these questions could possibly be answered in their adoption profile; other questions may have to be directly asked.

Below is a list of possible questions you may want to ask potential adoptive parents.

Why do the prospective adoptive parents wish to adopt? What kind of adoption are the prospective adoptive parents looking for? (open, semi open, etc) What if any compromises are the prospective adoptive parents willing to make? How do the prospective... more

If you’ve educated yourself about adoption and parenting, explored parenting resources, and now have ultimately decided that adoption is the best choice for your situation, you now may begin to search for a family for your baby. Over the next few days, we will explore some of the issues involved in selecting an adoptive family for your child.

Choosing a family... more

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone recognized me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

"Can you describe this?’"

And I answered: "Yes, I can.

Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face."

- Anna Akhmatova in the preface to her poem, Requiem

Akhmatova’s preface expresses the survivor’s sense of duty to tell the world,... more

If you are in an unplanned pregnancy and considering adoption, finances and money problems could be one of the largest reasons for considering adoption, but keep in mind that finances can change.

Research, educate, and seek out resources that could assist you in keeping your baby and parenting him or her. Even if you ultimately decide that adoption is the best option for your baby, at least you did your research and can know that you thoroughly checked out all your options.

I’m going to do my best to highlight some of the resources that... more

As I’ve mentioned before, making an informed decision is important and in order to make an informed decision you must educate yourself about parenting and adoption. I’ve already talked about how to educate yourself about adoption, so today we will talk about how to educate yourself about parenting.

1. Seek out other mothers like you. If you will... more

Okay, so you’ve clearly stated the decision to be made, developed objectives, classified your musts and wants, and weighed the relative importance of each. You’ve also listed your alternatives (making sure you’ve uncovered them all!) and you’ve compared them against the musts and wants. You’ve also identified potential risks, so that you’re going into this with eyes wide open.

Now you’re ready to start deciding. Notice I said “start” deciding, not firmly decide. You cannot fully decide to let your baby go until her or she has arrived. You must experience your own motherhood in order to freely give it up. You have to know what you are going to lose before you can be informed enough... more

When all of your objectives and alternatives are laid out before you, it’s time to assess the risks. If you’ve ever read any of my posts, you know that I spend 90% of my time talking about the risks involved in adoption. The reason I give so much time and attention to this area is because very few adoption professionals are completely open and honest about the pitfalls of surrendering. If I harp on the risks, it’s because there continue to be women who were never told about them. They made their "decision" based on bad information, and were held to it with... more

The next step is to evaluate the alternatives. It’s important to note here that while there are only three choices at the big-picture level (abortion, adoption, parenting) there are many varieties of both adoption and parenting, and so there are many possibilities. Taking adoption as an example, you can seek closed adoption, open adoption, semi-open adoption, kinship adoption, and many shades in between. (And often, what you choose is not what you will actually get.)

Here are the steps to evaluate the alternatives.

1. Generate your... more

Recently the members of my department took a class in decision-making, where we learned to use an effective system for arriving at an answer. It’s called the Kepner Tregoe method. Although it may seem cold to apply a business framework to an emotional life decision, a system that works is a system that works. There are four parts to this decision-making approach: clarify your purpose, evaluate the alternatives, assess the risks, and make the decision. I’ll go through those four and explain how they could be applied to the decision of what to do about an unplanned... more

Sometimes people think it’s no longer unpopular to be a single mom today—and compared to the stigma single moms experienced in previous generations, things are in fact better. With nearly one in four births involving an unmarried woman, single motherhood is certainly very common these days. But is single motherhood truly accepted, or just grudgingly tolerated? A recent story from MSNBC reports that more than 65 percent of Americans say single women having children is bad for society. Nearly 70 percent of... more