On a personal note I have always been biased against the results of IQ tests being used as a marker for any sort of achievement. On the other hand we use all sorts of other markers to pick our mates, so why the heck not this one.

Re: Adopton vs infertility treatments:

Both cost a lot of money, pain and heartache but an adoption also involves giving up a lot of information from your own life to total strangers. It is a long, intrusive (rightfully so), subjective process that allows other people to make calls on your lifestyle choices. Not many people like that idea. You may not (in the case of international adoptions) get placed with your child till months after birth. All of this leaves single women, who are used to dictating the terms in their own lives, more likely to go down the AID pathway than adoption. Some of the comments in the article suggested to me that the women wanted more control over all aspects of their lives (“the child will be all mine” jumps to mind) and not having to deal with a spouse or social services makes this process a lot more appealing.

kavita said:

Furthermore, many adoption agencies, esp. those advocating for international adoptees, actually favor older single mothers (more life experience, financial security, less likelihood that the child will have to endure parents divorcing).

This wasn’t that obvious to me when I went through the process. All the questions that we had to answer seemed loaded against single people (men or women). Somebody had to stay in the country of adoption for weeks even months and then be home with the baby for the first few months once they got here.

The adoptive families whom I know would recoil at the idea that the bond they have with their child is any less than what it would have been had the child come from the mother’s womb. I also know families with both biological and adopted children in which the parents have to stop and think about who was adopted and who is related to them by blood – I wouldn’t believe it had I not seen such incidences myself, and more than once.

All of these families have made it abundantly clear that whether adopted or biological, every child whom they bring into their lives has been “their own”. However, these are all families for whom adoption has not been a last resort, but simply an additional option.

There are obviously a number of reasons why the women in this article are not adopting, possibly because they hold to the kind of reasoning that you offered. But the money / time / single mother argument doesn’t hold water given all the money and time that is being expended by these women to begin with. Furthermore, many adoption agencies, esp. those advocating for international adoptees, actually favor older single mothers (more life experience, financial security, less likelihood that the child will have to endure parents divorcing).

Anyhow, perhaps we should just ask Angelina for her take on things in a few months time…?

So are money and time and singlehood the real issues preventing them from adopting? I doubt it.

With regards to this whole adoption vs having your own – isn’t it natural to want your own? I don’t think it is right to admonish people for wanting to have their own kid on the argument that there are 1000s of orphans who could be adopted.

I’m not a parent, but surely the bond that exists between a child and their biological mother/father is far greater than the bond between an adopted kid? Just a note, I am talking about the inner bond that comes from ‘within’. Sure you could love your adopted kid as much, you could leave them all your wealth etc, but there must be something different about seeing a part of yourself in another human being.

Usually, adoption is the last resort – if there is absolutely no way one could have their own offspring, they could at least have the experience of loving and raising a child.

Yeah, I saw that. I guess I would have liked some quotes from the women though, rather than such a brief summary from the author.

Some of these women are shelling out thousands of dollars for insemination (plus raising a child in America is no cheap endeavor esp. for those New York / Connecticut women). And many spend years trying to get pregnant. I also know seven single women who have adopted children with relative ease. Seven isn’t statistically valid but most of them belong to adoption support groups in which there are many other single adoptive mothers. Thus from what I’ve seen personally, the argument that single women have much difficulty adopting doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue in this day and age.

So are money and time and singlehood the real issues preventing them from adopting? I doubt it.

I also couldn’t help but see a certain lack of subtlety between Daniela being an ad exec and the kinds of things she was implying (that if we just produce enough skinny, melanoma resistant, multi-culti kids, not only will her life be easier but that the world will be a better place)

*On that note, Nina, I just watched Fertco – rock on, sistah!

the estimates are 0.2 to 0.8. heritability probably differs between cultures and classes, high SES groups have higher heritability because there is less environmental ‘noise’ in the system to reduce the full expression of you cognitive ‘potential.’ 0.5 is a pretty good rough estimate….

What seems to fall out of is that there seems to be a genetic component. We DO NOT know what fraction it is.

narrow sense heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variance which is due to genotypic variance within the population. speaking in terms of what ‘fraction’ a trait is genetic or non-genetic is misleading.

These experiment are long assed and difficult to do, the data are not free of researcher bias, they are difficult to replicate and in some cases completely forged.

no, not “bias” anymore. even if you agree that the tests have serious problems, no one who studies the subject really believes that the bias exists anymore in the way you probably mean (questions about the rules or tennis or something). bias is controlled for in a variety of ways (the researchers check for example that different groups have the same pattern of difficulty of questions, if there is a tendency for one group to test far higher on one particular question or lower, etc., it is dropped because it suggests different levels of familiarity with different types of questions).