I’ll never forget the first time I visited a website full of "Dear Birthmother" ads from hopeful adoptive parents. The year was 1998, and I was about four months pregnant. I sat at the computer in my office after hours, feeling surprised and shocked as I clicked through the pages.

I literally could not believe the amount of people struggling with infertility. (Infertility isn't the only reason people adopt, but it's the most common.) Letter after letter seemed to jump off the screen and plead for the baby I was carrying. I felt pain for these people, and wanted to help them all. Their lives looked picture-perfect, except for the child they were missing. And they all seemed so "deserving," while I was definitely not.

Looking at these profiles, I started to fall into the mental trap of thinking I could make lemonade out of lemons if I could just take my "mistake" and make someone's dreams come true. Clearly I would be a hero if I helped just one of these couples achieve their deepest wish. (After all, that’s what the social workers and their adoption brochures were all saying, that the only "responsible" and "loving" thing to do would be to give up my baby.) And wouldn’t it feel great to be back in everyone's good graces, beloved by all, instead of feeling like a screw-up who became pregnant by mistake?

Maybe the social workers were right. If I picked one of these families to help, maybe then I wouldn’t feel so ashamed.

I began to think maybe adoption was a true "win-win" situation, without any grief or losses (and no one was anxious to remind me of those things). I became overly optimistic about how relinquishing my child would solve everything for everyone.

All the while, the word that kept running through my mind was "deserving." I'm not sure why I thought the right to parent was based on some sort of objective standard, but I did believe that back then.

I don’t believe it now.

Now I think it’s fruitless to try to discern who is a “deserving” parent. If we always took babies from those we didn’t think should be parents, and put them in what we considered “deserving” homes, we’d be engaging in social engineering on a pretty large scale. Babies would be zipping all over the place according to who happened to be doing the judging of families.

My opinion today is that long as you don’t abuse, neglect or otherwise harm your child, you deserve the opportunity to parent.

I wish I had thought that way when I was pregnant.

There are good reasons and bad reasons to choose adoption, and feeling unworthy or undeserving is usually a very bad reason. Why? Because as soon as you recover your self-esteem, your reason for relinquishing has disappeared--but your signature on those legal papers is forever.