I am always irritated by when someone says, "have you thought about adoption?" "what about adoption?" "have you heard all of your options-like adoption?"

because it is invariably followed by this statement, "because [insert some number here] couples are just dying to adopt *your* child!"

what a load of sh*t! If there are couples out there who are just dying to adopt, why don't they adopt one of the .H.U.N.D.R.E.D.S. O.F. T.H.O.U.S.A.N.D.S of children languishing within the adoption and foster programs?

Oh, that's right...Because they aren't white, healthy, infants (bonus points for the possibility of blonde hair and blue eyes). A child over the age of 2 who is still within the system has more of a chance of getting hit by lightning than they do of being adopted.

So, where are all of these couples who are just dying to adopt when there .A.R.E literally hundreds of thousands of children waiting for "good" homes?

I put 'good' in quotation marks because if a couple is sooooo shallow as to only want a specific kind, color, etc. Of child then I doubt the quality of said home. Clearly, a couple who wants a specific type of child is more concerned with keeping up certain appearances than they are of actually being parents.

A good friend of mine in highschool became pregnant and decided that she would follow her families beliefs and teachings, keep the pregnancy, and give the resulting child up for adoption since both she and the father were scholarship candidates for good colleges next year. She called several adoption agencies but everytime she told them the .R.A.C.E of the father, they stopped taking her calls, ignored her, or told her, "i'm sorry but you're not a viable candidate for our program." in the end, she could find no one who wanted to adopt a half black, half white child and had an abortion at the start of her second trimester.

Adoption is not an alternative to abortion, like some people seem to believe. It is instead an alternative to parenting but if no one wants to parent your ethnic or handicapped child, then what options are you really left with?

It truly is strange to me that people will wait upwards of 7 years to adopt an infant when there are children, who are still very young children, waiting.

Most women aren't blind and we certainly aren't stupid. We all know what this process is actually like and how ugly it truly seems to be. Is it any wonder why many .Women do not view this as a viable option even when they decide to remain pregnant?