"Adoption is a courageous and loving decision" touts the Children's Home Society of Florida. We've heard this a zillion times although in my day it was often phrased as "think of your child, not yourself." Signing the papers on a rainy day a week before Christmas in San Francisco, and giving an adoption agency the power to select a family for my daughter Rebecca was not a courageous and loving decision. In many ways it was not a decision at all. I simply did what white middle-class singe mothers of (I hope) a bygone era did--acquiesced to social mores trumpeted in advice columns, soap operas, pulpits, and teen magazines.
