Friday, March 24, 2006

Catholic Charities adoption brouhaha

I was just over at Higher Plane. Omis has put up a well though-out post on the Catholic Charities adoption thing. My comment was going to be too long, so I decided to post it here.

I agree with the decision Catholic Charities has made because I do believe that kids need to be with a mother and a father. Cardinal Arinze has gone so far as to say that intentionally depriving a child of a mother or a father does violence to that child. This goes doubly true for those children who have special needs. So, should Catholic Charities also start permitting single parent adoptions less often? Probably, to be fair to the child. Catholic Charities' first goal should be placing children with the best families, not just the best ones that happen to be available. This means Catholic Charities and our priests will have to go beating the bushes in parishes appealing to the people in the pews to pray on adopting a child from the foster care system. And I live in NJ, where foster care is pretty screwed up.

Just for the record, my husband and I have seriously considered adopting an older or hard to place child. We were discouraged from doing that right now by friends who have done it because we have small children and some of these kids come with some pretty intense emotional baggage. But really, there are some empty nesters or families with teens who I'm sure would consider it if they were asked to--the idea has probably never occurred to them.

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