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Thanks for linking the video with Preston! Though I take issue with your "not prepared for class" quip, and to be perfectly honest I think hearing you working through the question live is more encouraging to me at this point than reading another finely polished essay, for what it's worth. I'm looking forward to picking up the book in my next batch of ones I order (which means I need to shuffle things around again to make some room on my shelves, I guess...)

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"finely polished essay" -- this is more generous than my essays deserve!

And move the book up on the list! Tempus fugit and all that! :)

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Yes, yes, yes to everything you said about adoption toward the end of Theology in the Raw. Everything you said is spot on. My husband and I learned so much about the dark side of the adoption industry during our domestic infant adoption process, and we are firmly in favor of family preservation when possible. We couldn't believe the unethical things we saw from different agencies, consultants, facilitators, websites, etc. Adoption can absolutely be the right choice for expectant moms and birth moms, and their children, and we believe we moved forward in the most ethical and wisest way possible with our son's adoption. However, adoption even under the best circumstances is still complicated. When you take an industry that has such uneven effects on families due to socioeconomic and historical factors (hello, housing segregation) and then add in classism and white saviorism, it's a mess. I'm pro-adoption when done ethically and when it is the free, uncoerced choice of the birth mom, honoring her agency and her dignity, including post-placement care and support. If you talk or write about this topic again, please post about it or link it here, as my family continues to want to learn more about how to care well for our son's birth mother and how to affect positive change in the industry and in white evangelical Christianity's general impressions of adoption.

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