Quote:
Originally Posted by thismama  Geez, we're not going to get into right wing classist diatribes in the Queer Parenting forum now, are we?...This kind of rhetoric in here I find extremely disheartening. To say the least.
|
Can I just say a big
: to thismama? What world did I just walk into?
We chose a known donor for many reasons. At the time, we didn't have much cash, but we knew we wanted a kid. So a friend donated, his tests were covered, we paid him $0.00 (we live in Canada, we couldn't pay him anyhow) and then went the semi cheapy route to adopt our kid ($1000, not that cheap, but better than $3000 we've heard quoted). Our next kid, we will do the same. We have a new KD, we will pay him nothing, AND, now that we can put our names on the birth certificate automatically in Ontario, we are going to do so and just have him sign away his parental rights on a form we got from our first adoption and have it notarized by a lawyer friend. We know things can get sticky, but we've had pretty good talks with our donors, and we realize that anything can change at any time (from our side, from our kid's side, from their side).
And yes, kids cost money, but we have in no way shape or form spent more than $100 on our kid every month. Our childcare is subsidized (ooo! we are letting the state pay for our kid, bad bad parents) he wears a lot of hand me downs, we use cloth diapers, he breastfeeds and we made his baby food (he now eats what we eat) he has minimal toys, most are hand me downs or paid for by nanas and papas and we have universal health care (thank goodness). Our big ticket stuff was purchased by friends and we found as many people with babies as we could so we could rotate clothes, toys etc. We've finally landed better jobs, so we are actually a bit more financially stable, but if we weren't we'd use as many state resources as we could. I'm not sure why there is this idea that poor people make bad parents.
As for the race question, I totally want to talk about it. I really agree that as queer folks we often get overly critiqued about race choices because it is seen as more of a 'choice', but we all know straight people are doing the same. So what do you do? We are an interracial couple, and we initially wanted a mixed race donor, so that our kid could 'match' us as we said. After investigating a whole bunch of internalized racism on my part, I realized how I've been conditioned to prefer light skin and this is what I wanted my child to look like (light skin, "good" hair). We ended up with a white donor (and a black donor for my partner) and have now fallen into the seemingly problematic need to 'match' our kids with our family (we have a light skinned kid, who, as we all know, could have come out any shade). I don't know - I certainly do not have all the answers, but I do know that it wasn't an easy decision for me as a black person TTC and using a white donor. I'm wondering how others who are differently racialized have thought through it (those of colour, those who are not of colour).
Follow Mothering