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Kathy,
I'd just pitch in that divinity school, law school, and med school are really different. I think I could handle doing divinity school with kids, because most of your work is on your own, and you can do a lot of it at home (reading, for example). Law school is more challenging, because it is a lot more demanding on your time, and people are often under pressure to take 60 hour a week internships, etc.
But med school is a whole different ball of wax, mostly because of rotations. Medical students are expected to do rotations in hospitals. These rotations can be incredibly long hours at times when child care is hard to find. A surgery rotation might have you in the hospital for 36 hours straight. An OB/GYN rotation means being on call for deliveries in the middle of the night. What do you do if you have a kindergartner asleep in the other room, and your pager goes off? You can't just say to the patient, "Oh, sorry you're having a heart attack, but I don't have a babysitter"
And after med school, there's residency. Residents pull 24-36 hour shifts, and are often on call at other times. There's now a limit of 80 hours per week for residencies, but most programs go right up to that limit. How do you parent a small child and work 80 hours per week?
I'm a single mom, so I know what the workload is like. It's great to say, "if you really want to do it, you can do it." But the brute fact is, without a lot of support, it's just nearly impossible to parent a small child and pull 80 hour work weeks when you can't work from home. I barely manage a 40 hour work week, and some weeks, I have to work less.
I'm totally in support of women who want to parent keeping their babies. I think adoption should only happen under very limited circumstances. But I wish all the people saying "keep your baby, you can still do whatever you want!" could provide a more realistic outlook for women making such a big decision. The truth is, being a parent (and particularly a single parent) means that you can't do it all. Parenting limits your options. Yes, you can juggle and sometimes manage to parent and do amazing things, but it's very, very difficult.
People making the decision to place or to parent need solid, realistic information---both about adoption, and about single parenting. A rosy picture on either side isn't very helpful. They should know the good, the bad, and the ugly about both sides before they make a decision.
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