Better neonatal care to prevent all sorts of early environmental insults (pathogens, to name one example) — not a small concern if the baby were born in South Asia.

hey,kusala, first you get that pregnancy is helpful for the bonding process, but then you get all worked up about a comparison with adoption, and even what you identify as the need to own one’s chromosomes– which last, BTW, is completely irrelevant when you bear an adopted embryo to term. Sure, you can bond without pregnancy, and love unreservedly without pregnancy– but I’m pretty sure from watching my great-aunt and my friends who have adopted babies and adopted teens that bonding is a different process at each stage of a embryo-baby-child’s development. You can have a lousy birth mother just as you can have a wonderful adopting mother– there are many mediating factors,.

I think this is totally hogwash. Even if you have had bio kids and adopted kids, and this was true to your personal experience, it would be true to you only. To extrapolate a universal truth from your own experience is silly to say the least.

I wasn’t extrapolating anything from my experience alone, Sonya, and no, I haven’t adopted kids to make a comparison– and in fact I wasn’t making one. That is entirely in your imagination! Like I said, chickens and other avian species are also known to create bonding and coordination among their brood through vocalizations while hatching eggs. Most researchers in this area of biology/behavior operate on the understanding that it’s more than likely that most species engage in prenatal mother-infant communication, since this is observed in birds as well as mammals, including humans and other apes and simian species. What I AM saying is that things go on during gestation that are helpful to the mother in learning about parenting– why not wait until you’ve been through the chemical changes of pregnancy before calling this hogwash.

I know of a desi family that adopted a white kid. Of course this is in the US.

“so I got a $5k premium just for being asian. Add in another $5k for going to an Ivy League school, another $1,000 for every 100 points over 1400 I got on the SAT, and another $1,000 or so for every IQ point over 130, and you can make some serious cash.”

I really hope “Ivy league” wasn’t the exact terminology used in the terms of payment. I don’t understand how anyone in their right minds can place Brown anywhere near the realm of MIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc. Secondly, “$1,000 for every 100 points over 1400″ and “$1,000 or so for every IQ point over 130″ do not reconcile with each other very well. By those figures, a 1600 is worth only $2,000 whereas a 140 (which should be a piece of cake to earn for most 1600-ers) is worth $10,000. Are you sure you didn’t mean $1,000 for every 10 IQ points? I know quite a few people with 173+ IQs who would be thrilled at the prospects.

Personally, I think attractiveness is underrated in clinics and by academics in general. The underrepresentation of the (naturally) beautiful among doctors and academes lends to a severe bias against attractiveness. Coupled with the prevalent fatigue-factor among the learned over having to witness beauty being overvalued in pop-culture, the bias is understandable. I still somehow feel that a tier-1 model is worth as much if not more than a tier-1 scientist. Unless we’re suddenly talking about male models, because male models are clearly inferior to scientists

Hard-boiled reality: egg & sperm banks are for-profit and customer driven, and it is their business to know heredity to the extent possible with the current science. The brain is just another organ after all. People can inherit personality traits, or else I am delusional. You’ve never seen a kid who is “just like” that dad he never knew, or that grandmother who died before the kid was born? OTOH, the kid could be an original, like nobody in the bio-family. It’s a roll of the dice, but it seems to me, the dice are loaded. SATs sure don’t measure one’s worth as a person, (much less iq) but one doesn’t really score high by “getting lucky” on them. Luck is not statistically significant on such tests. They do, however, push outrage buttons because they are held to tell more about someone than seems possible or fair. They measure speed of synapsis perhaps–the way one processes information, figures stuff out. If the person comes from a rather un-enhanced background, a high mark is more remarkable. However, in and of itself, a high SAT (or iq), does not guarantee success for an individual, nor do they guarantee good character traits. They don’t necessarily even make an interesting conversationalist, though they seem to help. Ideally, people choose the father or mother of their future children with at least some consideration of character and mentality. Most in the “West” choose based on fleeting physical attraction, but I digress. Adoption of already born kids, whose bio-parents are already a done deal, is a different issue, but one which offers some useful information. My brother and his wife have one son born to them, and several adopted kids. The bio-family of two of the adopted kids was abusive and was actually ordered by the state not to produce more kids, which of course they violated. Social services called my sister-in-law on an emergency basis, to take the newborn. Later they decided to adopt the baby’s older sister. So began my brother and sister-in-law’s second family. They are close and bonded, but the adopted kids have another whole dimension going on there. Three have learning problems, but my sister in law and brother are patient and encourage their strong points, so the kids are doing great. The two bio-siblings have a special bond, even when they are at odds. They have these wonderful parents who chose them, and who have devoted a major part of their lives and resources to them, but nobody is doing anybody a favor–it’s a labor of love and kismet, not condescension. These particular people are just meant to have a “complex” sort of family, and to be together. What is important to my brother and sister-in-law is that the kids grow up healthy, continue to be kind, decent people and use the brains they’ve got to their best advantage. The statistical probability is that, once they reach young adulthood, their behavior and choices will start to more closely resemble those of their bio-parents than those of their adopto-parents. In the end, it’s their lives and their choices. I think this is a case where nuture trumps nature. If not, their parents will love them anyway. After all, they’re their kids.

Better yet – how about every Indian couple (living in India) adopting just one homeless, street or orphaned kid in India?

That would solve alot of issues and help alot of kids.

Mass propaganda should be spread for this.

Naina, I must commend you on channelling Angry Asian Man!

Sonia – thanks for touching upon all the hurdles surrounding adoption in India. I am currently living in Bangalore and have some friends here who are expats from Germany. This is a couple who had been trying desperately to have children through numerous failed IVF treatments both in Germany and here in India. Because of the trauma surrounding repeated failed attempts, they finally made the decision to look into adopting an Indian child, and MY GOD! There are so many rules surrounding this, and as foreign expats they were absolutely last on the todem pole for adopting a child. The other option posed to them was implantation of an Indian embryo – NOT an Indian woman’s egg inseminated by the male in the couple’s sperm.

I heard a call for a doctor. I’m not a fertility specialist, but I’ll use my general medical knowledge to try and fill in the gaps… Apparently, as more and more Indian couples are trying to conceive using IVF, there are many frozen embryos which go unimplanted into the mother’s womb. The way the treatment works is that initially, the woman’s ovaries are stimulated with various hormonal meds. Eggs are harvested and inseminated with the male’s semen in vitro. Subsequently numerous embryos are created. Because of the high probablility of genetic abnormalities leading to embryo’s which are non-viable in the womb, usually several are implanted into the woman’s uterus. Others may be frozen for future attempts at implantation. Though if lucky, one embryo will successfully implant leading to pregnancy for the couple. Sometimes couples may decide to not proceed with implantation, or in the case of successful pregnancies, at times numerous embryos that weren’t implanted will be remaining. This has resulted in EMBRYOS which are “left behind.” Some couples will allow them to be donated for implantation in another woman’s womb. This appears to be the case in the couple this article discusses.

Going back to the German couple I was talking about – well they gave IVF one last shot… and the wife is pregnant! The due date for the happy couple is in September…