Ah, the desire for a two-parent family – the reason behind many a surrender.

Before I lived through my own unplanned pregnancy and surrender, I was pretty convinced of the need for two-parent families. At that point in my life, I wasn't the political conservative I had once been, but I still had the idea that single mothers were "bad" for society. I also thought that any child who was being raised by just one parent was probably doomed to failure. Especially boys. I had the notion that while girls could somehow muddle through without a participating dad, boys could not. (This, despite the many fine males I knew who were raised by single mothers.)

So, giving my son a full-time dad was a large part of the reason I began looking into adoption in the first place. I had no intention of marrying my son’s father, and I couldn’t envision our sharing parenting duties in separate households. How would that work, exactly? Especially with him being out of the country (in the Peace Corps) for the first two years of our child's life. I couldn’t see it.

But, as you’ve probably guessed, my political views have changed over the last few years, and these days I am much more down with the idea of parenting solo. In fact, in most cases, I would prefer to see a child being raised by just one parent to losing his or her biological family entirely—as long as the solo parent is capable and “together.”

That’s because I now understand that adoption is a major loss, just as being raised by a single parent is also a type of loss. And merely swapping one kind of loss for another doesn’t achieve much in the end. You need to have additional concrete reasons for surrender for such a plan to make sense.

Still, the ideal of a Mom-and-Dad combo is very powerful to women in unplanned pregnancies. Anyone who loves their baby naturally wants to provide the best, and two is better than one...right? It’s as we think parents are interchangeable, and the math suggests that two strangers are always better than one biological parent.

Then there’s the notion of stability. People like to link the phrase “two-parent families” with the word “stable.” Well, a two-parent family often is more stable than a parent struggling alone…but this isn’t always the case. There are plenty of nutty families that, while “intact,” are also truly dysfunctional.

The last thing to keep in mind is that adoptive parents get divorced at the same rate as biological parents, so surrender is no guarantee that your child will be raised by a “complete” family. I know so many birthmoms who let their child go solely in order to gain a two-parent family, and then that family breaks up—a crushing blow. And now the child has undergone two traumas: loss of the first family, and breakup of the adoptive family.

In a perfect world, all families would be two-parent families. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and sometimes, a one-parent household may be preferable to dissolving the family entirely.