[LisaCA]

my two cents:

I think people are just ingnorant about a number of things (not a negative, just a statement). Folks do not know about genes, dna, and other issues, so when they think adoption they can think 1) bad seed ("you don't know what you'll get" as if "good families" guaranteed anything; 2) mental illness and behavior are solely genetically determined (only partially I suspect); assumptions about cost and the process (remember how invasive we all thought the homestudy would be? and we went to classes and read a lot:-); fear of the "psycho bmom" as one person put it ("what if she tracks you down and takes the child back?" "What if she changes her mind in a few years?" etc) and also thinking it will take forever (ours went quite quickly).

dh and I have always said that we thought we'd adopt in the future (20 years of saying this:-) and the responses we've received have been amazing. Most folks were rather negative about it, including a few who had adopted siblings. When we said that we were going to adopt, the input changed and we received mostly positive feedback. after the adoption, only my mil has made comments about the scary bmom and how she hopes "this openness doesn't come back to bite us later"-ugh. For my inlaws, blood is family and family is blood, period. We've disagreed over the years (as an anthropologist, my feeling is that family is whom you choose to include, and "blood" means nothing), but I haven't been able to change their mind. It will be interesting to see how they respond to their new granddaughter.

LisaCA