If you are interested in adopting a child, check out one of your local crisis pregnancy care centers. I don't know how many of them do it, but the one I volunteer for provides adoption services as well as counseling. Shoot me an email if you'd like any more information about it.

We're signed up with the local Catholic agency, which counsels pregnant girls/women in three counties. So we're actually casting a pretty wide net.

The bottom line, though, is that there are more families waiting than there are available babies.

I'm very sorry but the idea of forcing women to have children so that you can get a child just plain makes me shudder.

Btw, I was adopted.

Forcing? I think I made the point that I'd really like to see the numbers of abortions in this country reduced voluntarily. But they should be reduced. We have the most liberal abortion policies in the Western world, and the sheer numbers of abortions going on are simply obscene.

What I really like to see is genuine choice, rather than girls and women getting hustled into abortion because the culture pretends that the only two options are abortion vs. raising the child oneself when one is clearly too young (I was 19).

And the boyfriend who hustled me into it was also an adoptee. He said he just couldn't stand the thought of a child of "his" out there in the world that he might not ever know.

And here's the kicker:he also decided that I should do this drug-free, and not take the valium they usually gave women before the procedure. So I had a panic attack on the table right in the middle of it all.

Yeah, it's my responsibility. And, yeah--I was weak at that age and should have made up my own mind.

But let's not pretend that girls and women are not under pressure to have this done to them. They are.

You know, under Clinton, who support safe abortion, and comprehensive sex and birth control education, much as you probably hate him, abortions reduced year after year. Under Bush, who has launched the inane abstinence only push on sex education, started the assault on birth control, and launched massive assaults on safe abortion, abortion has gone up year after year.

OK, I'm sure no one is reading these comments now, but I just have to let you know that those "studies" that flaime cite have been proven to be completly flawed and abortion has been dropping under Bush.

How funny. I could have sworn that I responded to Flaime, asking him for links. I guess my response didn't show up due to some sort of bug.

But the notion that Bush has something against birth control is laughable, and the assertion that he launched "massive assaults on safe abortion" can only stand if one counts partial-birth abortion, which truly is a barbarous practice unless the woman's health is in danger.