I spend my life, or at least it sometimes feels like that, online tooling around the internet. I dig through a lot of–oh, how shall I put this politely–“not so good stuff”, to find the jewels. Here is what sparkled in the last week or so.
- I Believe -Music video for the infertile struggling to conceive. Great music and wonderful pictures of families formed through infertility treatment. Lyrics:
Here we go, incomplete but not alone
Both of us together down this long and winding road
(and you say) I want to build a perfect circle, make something beautiful to call our own
And I believe that there’s a change around the corner
And in a world that’s out of order we still have time I believe in the love that’s all around us
And as the arms of life surround us it all seems fine I believe…
Let the seeds we’ve sown live on forever once they’ve grown.
And inside our happy home they will see.
There’s a lot of things that we will do, sacrifice anything for you.
Promise anything, knowing you? will be.
(Chorus) I believe it’s coming our way, that change is coming some day. It’s just a matter of time… - Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute has just published a new report, “Openness in Adoption: From Secrecy and Stigma to Knowledge and Connections”. This survey of agency practices relating to domestic infant adoption placements found:
- “Closed” infant adoptions have shrunk to a tiny minority (about 5 percent), with 40 percent “mediated” and 55 percent “open.” In addition, 95 percent of agencies now offer open adoptions.
- In the overwhelming majority of infant adoptions, adoptive parents and expectant parents considering adoption meet, and the expectant parents pick the new family for their baby.
- Adoptive parents, like most participants in open adoptions, report positive experiences; more openness is also associated with greater satisfaction with the adoption process.
- Women who have placed their infants for adoption – and then have ongoing contact with their children – report less grief, regret and worry, as well as more peace of mind.
- The primary beneficiaries of openness are the adopted persons – as children and later in life – because of access to birth relatives, as well as to their own family and medical histories.
- I recently ran across this wonderful essay about infertility from the guy’s perspective–The Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Paul Ford. It is both poignant and funny and ultimately uplifting. He and his wife are now the parents of girl/boy twins.
When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce. I tell them that there is a lot of paperwork. That they take your picture and look at your license. Then they walk you back to the room. You are handed a list of instructions and some stickers and a plastic cup. The cup has a forest-green lid.
In the room is a VCR. I like to write down the names of the videos so I can share them with my wife and friends: Ass Angels #4, Original Black Queens of Porn (Afro-Centrix #113), and Chock Full of Asians. The latter features a woman with enlarged breasts so swollen they look luminous, like the sense apparatus of a recently discovered deep-sea fish.
No one sets a clock, but there is a sense of time passing. You get to work and try not to think about things.
The things not to think about are: the money you are spending. How they can’t find the problem—my sperm is better now, once I quit hot baths and Diet Coke, and my wife’s plumbing looks normal on the hysterosalpingogram. Don’t think about the other dudes jacking it five feet away. Just try to keep the chair from squeaking. Try to hit the cup.
When it is complete you screw on the forest-green lid, write your name and your wife’s name on the label, put it all in a biohazard bag, and ring the buzzer. Along comes a woman, another nurse. She takes the bag and holds it up to the light. If you read the paperwork there is a request that you don’t make any jokes during this moment.”
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