From: Barbara Lamar (shabrika@juno.com)
Date: Sat Sep 16 2000 - 13:12:46 MDT
On Sat, 16 Sep 2000 13:10:12 -0400 ankara <ankara@norlink.net> writes:
> Where did you get the absolutely dumb idea that 'anyone can give up
> a baby'
> ...you think babies are sme generic commodity?? Like, anyone can be
> stripped clean of heritage, ancestry, tribe, relatedness, family,
> identity...... to be made into a fake someone never born.
Certainly the ideal situation is for a baby to be with her own
parents--or better yet with a group of related people, so that she has
more than one culturally defined mother & father. And its true that
the people I've known who were raised by adoptive parents all have had a
strong desire to find their biological parents. But in less than ideal
situations, such as where the mother and father are deade or are not
mature enough or mentally stable enough to raise a child, adoptive
parents seem to be a better choice than foster homes, institutions, or
death (although in some cases, as I argued yesterday, death might be the
most rational choice).
I once found a tiny abandonned kitten by the side of a city street. At
the time, I had a dog, Ursa Minor, who had always wanted to have puppies
(at least I guessed as much based on her maternal actions) but was a
sterile (she was 1/2 German Shepherd and 1/2 coyote--apparently sometimes
the cross doesn't result in fertile offspring). I took the kitten home
and gave him to Ursa, who licked him and cuddled him as though he were
her own baby. The kitten began nursing, and within a couple of days,
Ursa was producing milk. She raised the kitten, nursing him much longer
than mother cats usually allow. The cat Marion seemed to be a normal and
happy cat and stayed with me for years, until my own child was born, at
which time he left in a huff and moved in with the next-door neighbor.
(I'm not sure how relevant this is to adoption of human babies, but it
does show that animals can be pretty flexible about whom they accept as a
parent)
Barbara
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