October 30, 2008
International adoption has been booming of late, and it turns out to be a complex, ever-changing landscape fraught with cultural differences, legal and ethical dilemmas, and emotional trials. So naturally, the best way to understand this phenomenon is through the...
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1:22 PM
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June 27, 2008
Alec Soth is a photographer of the studied mundane, a Minnesotan inspired by folks like Robert Frank or William Eggleston, whose images create a sense of overlooked place. When he and his wife went to Bogota, Colombia to pick...
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8:31 AM
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May 22, 2008
W Magazine has a long, glowing profile of Growing Generations, a pioneering surrogacy consultancy and fertility center that is one of the first organizations founded to help gay and lesbian folks become parents. With offices in Los Angeles, Boston, and...
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1:11 PM
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November 9, 2007
A team of researchers including Harvard psychologists Jesse Snedeker and Joy Geren published the results of their study of international adoptees, whose English-acquisition technique, they figured, might yield some interesting insights on how kids learn a language. It seems they...
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9:01 AM
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October 28, 2007
The DT browser tab clearance is on now: NYT Magazine: Looking for Their Children’s Birth Mothers Maggie Jones takes a personal look at the complicated emotional and cultural landscape of open international adoption. Though she and her husband decided to...
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6:06 PM
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July 26, 2007
Yes, it's that time of year, when someone at the BBC decides they'd like to summer in Bulgaria, so they arrange for a story about babysmuggling. This time, the BBC conducted a month-long sting operation that resulted in three...
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10:28 PM
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June 10, 2007
I've had the NY Times article on the increase in adoptions from Ethiopia all week. Apparently, the process is so much easier, and the country has an existing infrastructure of internationally supported orphanages [or transitional homes, as the article calls...
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7:32 PM
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March 20, 2007
Oops. I made the mistake of inviting the kid over to watch this Chris Ware animation, which was released as a preview to the new This American Life TV show that starts Thursday on Showtime. I figured, cartoons, cute...
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3:19 PM
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Comments (3)
February 28, 2007
For some reason, an excited article about new technology for abandoning babies pops up in the major news media every 13-15 months. It's like clockwork. If only birth control or social services protections for the young illegal immigrants from Eastern...
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9:52 AM
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February 13, 2007
During Hannukah, DT reader Marjorie became an aunt when her brother and his partner adopted a baby girl. [Namewatch Alert: Shirley, family name]. She wrote about the naming ceremony, known as Simchat Bat, that Shirley's dads and family crafted for...
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12:14 AM
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January 24, 2007
Some news links that almost warrant their own posts. If you need a theme here, how about meddling? If you want to keep believing that it's not her parents, no way, Marla Olmstead has been a genius painter since she...
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Posted by greg at
10:55 PM
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Comments (2)
January 22, 2007
A trial just got underway in France for 56 people--including 41 buyer/families--charged in a baby smuggling ring. For around $10,000, French Roma/gypsy families who couldn't qualify for adoption because of their itinerant lifestyle, would buy a baby from Bulgarian Roma...
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10:22 AM
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December 19, 2006
The Chinese government is tightening application requirements for foreign adoptions, according to the NY Times. For applications submitted after May 1, 2007, China's Center For Adoption Affairs will not permit foreigners to adopt if they: are single, are on anti-depressants,...
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6:44 PM
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December 15, 2006
If this quote is abrupt enough to get you to watch Diane Sawyer just to see if that's really how Angelina Jolie talks, the USA Today's editors will bring home the prize Turkey in the Poulterer's window, not the little...
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12:17 PM
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November 20, 2006
Not sure if it's a trend or just an interesting reconfiguration of the family, combined with a largely undefined notion of gay fatherhood, but The New York Times Magazine has a looong article about how some lesbian couples are kids...
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Posted by greg at
4:26 PM
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November 2, 2006
There was a story a few months back about the US's confusing and misleading patchwork of laws covering a biological father's rights when the mother puts a kid up for adoption. And since Canada like totally copies us every time,...
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Posted by greg at
11:11 AM
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October 23, 2006
The father of Madonna's newly adopted son said yesterday he didn't realize that the arrangement meant the boy would no longer be part of his family. "If we were told that she wants to take the baby as her own...
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9:07 AM
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October 16, 2006
Uh-oh, the impossibly biased liberal media in Pelosi-land, that liberal hippie hotbed of San Francisco, is at it again, trying to brainwash everyone with their views of families and parenting. What're they up to this time? ABC News anchor and...
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1:34 PM
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Comments (2)
August 17, 2006
Mr. Drummond teaching gang signs to Willis & Arnold Whaddya know, here we are, 20 years after Diff'rent Strokes, and our culture still has trouble navigating transracial adoption. [Those Drummond kids ended up with pretty long rap sheets, though,...
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Posted by greg at
9:13 AM
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Comments (1)
June 28, 2006
Reporter Sara Kiesler takes a look at how references to adoption are and aren't relevant to stories in the media. And given that a third of the US population has adoption experience "within their immediate families," she has some suggestions...
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Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
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April 14, 2006
Adopted a four-year-old girl from Mongolia Ewan MacGregor and his wife, Eve Mavrakis just did. Some interesting birth order issues in the years to come it should make, since two daughters, 4 and 1 they also have. One More For...
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10:18 PM
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Comments (1)
March 22, 2006
When they're considered at all, it turns out fathers are little more than speed bumps to be driven over and ignored on the way to a smooth and uncontestable adoption. That's more or less my takeaway from the NY Times'...
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4:51 PM
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Comments (8)
January 3, 2006
Fending off stiff competition from Czech babydumping startups, the Italians appear to have regained their longheld place as the technology leader in the baby dropping off industry. See, for centuries, until around 1888, Italian nun-run orphanages like the Ognissanti Church...
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5:44 PM
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Gay, orphans, adoption, Britain. Quick, what comes to mind? Besides the Broadway musical version of Oliver Twist. In what's been called the most significant revamping of UK adoption regulations in 30 years, The Adoption and Children Act 2002 went into...
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1:28 PM
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January 2, 2006
For parents seeking to adopt a child from a foreign orphanage, the question of undiagnosed medical conditions that might pop up later or that might cause developmental or behavioral challenges down the line haunts the whole process. Some pediatricians are...
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Posted by greg at
11:36 PM
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Comments (2)
December 19, 2005
The adoption business is like no other. Can you imagine a company that charged you tens of thousands of dollars for its services and then inflicted constant delays on you, all the while withholding the reasons for those delays? You...
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3:28 PM
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October 5, 2005
Hey, I can admit when I'm wrong. The Infant Dumpster was a bad idea, and I shouldn't have called for its return. Did I say bad? How about suboptimal. Optimal would be a clean room, with a hotline for the...
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Posted by greg at
9:12 AM
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Comments (5)
September 10, 2005
When writer and sex advice columnist Dan Savage and his boyfriend decided on open adoption, they figured it would help answer the questions that adopted children always seem to have later in life about why they were put up for...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
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Comments (1)
August 19, 2005
If an angel has appeared to you and told you that children are somehow better off in the foster care system than they are with gay parents, please come forward now with such important information. Otherwise, based on the facts,...
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4:55 PM
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June 8, 2005
The Times has a warm, fuzzy review of documentary filmmaker Murray Nossel's latest work, Paternal Instinct, which follows a gay couple of ten years in NYC and the Maine woman who helps them have a child through surrogate adoption. Nossel...
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9:07 AM
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May 27, 2005
For a variety of logistical, political, psychological, and emotional reasons, a significant percentage of women who provide surrogate pregnancy services are working with gay couples, and they're preferring it. Apparently, gay couples are more sympathetic, they'll watch the surrogate's kids,...
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Posted by greg at
12:24 AM
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May 5, 2005
It's a story that kinda kicks the cinderblocks out from under the rusty ol' car that is "gays ain't natcherl." Tango Makes Three is the true story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins who've been in a committed, monogamous...
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Posted by greg at
8:51 PM
November 23, 2004
His wife's in on it, and anyway, the kid's only 3-months old. Before I read the story, I had these horrible visions of a musical remake of The Lover flash in front of me. Johnny Hallyday to Adopt Vietnamese Girl...
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Posted by greg at
10:37 AM
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November 3, 2004
We've come a long way from the days when adults would have to confront their sobbing parents with, "Is it true? Am I adopted?" If you're wondering when the book industry would catch up to the myriad possible answers to...
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8:15 PM
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August 15, 2004
So you just bought a brownstone, and you and your partner are starting to think about filling it with kids. How do you go about researching this major life decision? Take a cruise! That's what Peter Marchese did last month,...
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8:54 AM
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July 22, 2004
Although you wouldn't know it from reading some websites [*cough, cough*], parenting is much more than buying gear and strollers. It's also decorating. And if you're adopting a kid from a foreign country, it means sprinkling token kitsch objects from...
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Posted by greg at
7:10 PM
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Comments (2)
July 17, 2004
Whoa. Meanwhile, on the other end of the technological spectrum from the Xplory and the Bugaboo: strollers and prams made out of bamboo, which are still widely used, it seems, in 2nd tier-and-below Chinese cities. The thumbnail at left is...
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Posted by greg at
12:28 AM
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Comments (1)
June 12, 2004
As California goes, so goes the rest of the country. Right now, the California court system's advanced case law makes the state the "epicenter of the 'surrogacy industry,'" according to the NY Times. The issues being grappled with in family...
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Posted by greg at
6:46 PM
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May 23, 2004
Wired has an interesting overview of the web's impact on adoption. After a couple of cautionary scam and unethical broker stories, the story plugs Dept. of HHS's National Adoption Directory and AdoptUSKids.org, which helps place older kids by "marketing" them...
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Posted by greg at
10:52 PM
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April 22, 2004
It's hard to listen to NPR anchor Scott Simon's at-once misty-and clear-eyed story of picking up his adopted daughter in China without thinking of the far different, gutwrenching experiences of the guys at fullerbranter.com (formerly homokiddosfo). Set aside for a...
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Posted by greg at
10:02 AM
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March 13, 2004
Just caught the end of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, where Scott Simon excitedly blurted out, "We're going to China to pick up our daughter. I-- am the father of Alice Sylvie Simon!" Related: FCC: Families with Children From China, a...
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Posted by greg at
1:22 PM
