[BarbaraB]

I was adopted as an infant in 1962. When we had trouble getting pregnant it was much easier for me to say "let's adopt" than for my husband...which is not to say that it was easy. There were certain things I did not want to do, and a closed adoption was not an option. I think on one hand my experience as an adoptee from that era, and having found my birthmother as an adult, made me worry more about how we would go about adopting ethically. On the other hand, having grown up in a family where adoption was accepted and not a bad thing, I did not have any reservations about whether I could love a child "not of my body" just as much as I would have loved a child I gave birth to. So I guess you could say my experience made adoption both easier and more difficult. We ended up with one bio and one adopted child, and they are both perfect in different ways.

I never had to deal with an unplanned pregnancy, and I realize that we can never be 100% certain of what we "would have" done, but I am as certain as I can be that I would not have had a child and relinquished it to a closed adoption (which was the only option I had ever heard of when I was a teenager and young adult).

Also, when I was younger, before I had searched for my birth family, I did go through a phase of thinking that it might not be fair to a child to be adopted by me because it would be a double layer of "disconnectedness" from their roots. But I moved past that...I think it was just part of my figuring out what I was comfortable with in my own life.