[calikismet]

I watched the story with my DH, and we had one overwhelming and recurring thought: what about the baby she was indeed carrying?? This woman was a mother.. maybe not to the 2-year-old she claimed, but to the one she was going to have. That poor, poor, poor child to have such a con-artist and fraud for a mother.. someone who would use that baby as a pawn in some game gone awry.

In some sense, I think the PAPs got off pretty easy, financially. We live in California, and the PAPs can pay a lot of the PBmom's expenses -- rent, food, medical care. It is not rare, at least from what I have heard to see payments in the thousands. At least this couple was only scammed for a few hundred. Granted, the emotional payment is the hard one, but it could have been a lot worse, financially.

Regarding the "gee, and people see why we didn't go domestic," I think that nearly everyone is very defensive of their own process, and sometimes overlyt critical or ignorant of the others. I find that to be true, even within the same arena - for example, international adoption from Russia, vs international adoption from China vs international adoption from Guatemala, etc. I have seen some pretty mindblowing generalizations flung from one IA group at the other, and some pretty fierce defensiveness associated with comments as well. So I think every sub-group is guilty of it.. and I also think that it is a responsibility to educate ourselves against that type of overgeneralization, even if just to minimize it around here.