Can't Get Enough Babies

E.J. Graff has a long, interesting (not to say disturbing) piece on RH Reality Check about international adoption. It's called The Lie We Love, because we all like to think that children in need of homes are out there, just waiting for loving adoptive parents. We can feel good about that story; caring parents rescue those far-off children and bring them home to a happier life.

Apparently it's not quite that simple. It never is, is it?

The piece details how countries will seem to have large numbers of healthy 'orphan' infants for adoption as long as citizens of Western nations like the U.S. are free to adopt them; but if regulations are tightened and adoption is made more difficult, you don't see anywhere near those numbers languishing in institutions. Those healthy infants are being cared for by someone once adoption isn't available, which makes the author wonder how orphaned they really were.

It appears that basically the presence of willing adoptive parents with cash to spend creates a market, which then produces a supply of babies that might or might not have been present before. Maybe parents are talked or pressured into giving up children they would otherwise have kept. Maybe they're deceived into signing papers they don't understand. Maybe the children are simply stolen. 

Regardless, the uncomfortable evidence suggests that we're buying babies. By being able and willing to pay amounts of money that are huge by local standards, people in developed nations cause adoptable babies to be found for them. Ah, the old demand and supply.

It's not a simple situation, of course. Adoptive parents genuinely, often desperately, want children. It's not their fault they want them, and not a bad quality in anyone to want to care for a child. And it's not as if they intentionally set out to purchase an infant, or know the potentially unsavory details (in those cases where details are unsavory: no doubt many adoption agencies operate under good, stringent policies to ensure these things don't happen).

One could also argue the children will have better lives--certainly they're likely to be better provided for materially--in the United States or Canada or Europe than in the poorer countries that have tended to provide adoptable babies. 

But other parents, the parents who gave birth to the children, may be losing them unfairly and cruelly and against their wishes. It's pretty hard to feel really comfortable with that.

The article reminded me of a book I read last year called The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption. Similar to some examples in the article, the book describes how Georgia Tann (whom author Barbara Bisantz Raymond, an adoptive parent herself, credits with inventing modern adoption) deceived women into giving up their children, paid nurses to tell parents their children were dead, and sometimes just plain kidnapped babies and gave them to other people.

It's probably unavoidably in the nature of adoption to get very deeply into a lot of complicated issues. Need and desire, finding joy in others' misfortunes, love and care and sorrow. Add in the profit motive, and it can get really uneasy.

I don't have any words of wisdom on the topic, or a pithy summary of my thoughts about this article and book...but they sure do make me think.

Sure Sign of Something

I've started getting a lot of spam messages referencing Facebook. 

Like, "Melinda sent you a message on Facebook." 

They may have been around before, but I don't recall getting them before this week. Has Facebook finally reached a critical mass of users, such that it's efficient to try to lure people to open messages pretending to come from it?

Sure, I personally think "Who the heck is Melinda? Also, why is this in my Junk folder, and why does the return address contain a weird(er than usual) string of letters and numbers?" but someone with a less effective spam filter, or who knows a Melinda, might well go ahead and open the message. 

And then purchase the pharmaceutical knockoffs or incur the virus infection or whatever the message is about. So very clever, these spammers.

I guess that's a sign of cultural relevance for Facebook. Or something.

Now for Something Really Dramatic

I see from Sid Schwab at Cutting Through the Crap that after some no-doubt painstaking calculations the Milky Way is now considered to be very likely the largest galaxy in the immediate stellar neighborhood!

It is at any rate at least as large as Andromeda, which had previously been awarded that crown. So, yeah! We live in an important cluster of stars! 

I don't know about you, but I feel better about life in general. 

Makes me want to renew my acquaintance with the Astronomy Picture of the Day, in hopes of one day seeing an illustration of our galaxy kicking Andromeda's butt in terms of hugeness. Yeah, that's a hard shot to get (multiple galaxy wide lens, anyone?), but I can hope.

Resolutions

I like iLibrarian's list of 10 Social Media Resolutions for 2009. Reminders 5 and 6, to Create Good Habits and Get Organized, are particularly telling for me. 

I should get organized, and form better habits for managing my various socially networked personalities!

I've left a profile or two to languish, unloved and un-updated. Is that any way to stay networked? On the other hand, who has time to cherish every single membership?

Still, it's a good list. 

Oh, Drugs, Drugs, Drugs...

An interesting article in the New York Review of Books discusses the familiar concern of pharmaceutical company sponsoring research, conferences, continuing education, and physicians' general well-being (everyone loves those free pens!).

The piece, which reviews three books, is also a nice, concise overview of several other drug-related issues we may remember from previous reading, including: 

• incompletely revealed study results, where write-ups of negative results are unlikely to be published and positive ones may be written to make a drug seem more effective; 
• promoting drugs for off-label uses for which they haven't been proven to be effective; 
  
• highlighting vaguely-defined ailments like social anxiety disorder as serious and requiring medication; 
  
• advertising directly to consumers to convince them they need particular drugs.

Even the hallowed DSM is based more on "a complex of academic politics, personal ambition, ideology, and, perhaps most important, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry" than on hard evidence.

It doesn't even talk about the much-lamented high cost of prescription drugs and how that could be tied into the promotion of new medications of generics and all that. But let's just sum up thusly: 

Drugs: a Complex Issue. (I also considered Drugs: Gimme Some!)

The article is rather disheartening, concluding that 

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines

but it's a good read. Well, I'm off to fling my prescriptions out the window.

I Know There's a Better Way

--to get photos into Picasa than just uploading five at a time. I even know what it is, because it's right there: Uploader for Mac. 

But I can't make it work, and in my dazed, vacation-brained state it's somehow easier to upload my photos slooooooooowly a few at a time than try to figure it out.

I'm trying to finish an important science fiction novel at the same time, so the pauses between one 'choose photo' episode and the next are actually useful. Or so I tell myself.

In an utterly unrelated note, I want to salute Cara at The Curvature for two lengthy, detailed, and beautifully thought-out posts on Yoko Ono and her relationship with John Lennon and, by extension, the Beatles. I'm sticking it in here because I am unlikely to have a more graceful segue to the topic anytime soon, and found this analysis of a subject that has become part of pop-cultural history fascinating.

So yeah, that's all.

Paying for What You Use

This Staring at Empty Pages post has me thinking about my cell phone plan. It talks about how we may hesitate to spend money--even a little money--on something if the alternative is an inclusive "all you can use" package.

The post is specifically about text messages on cell phones: it might feel wasteful to send them at 5 or 10 or 20 cents each. They're often so casual and rather frivolous: "Hey, what's up?" "Here's a picture of my goofy new socks!" "My neighbors are singing loudly upstairs."

So instead we might get a text-message package for 5 or 10 or 20 dollars a month and then we can send as many as we want at no additional charge, yay!

Good deal, maybe. As the post points out, it doesn't really matter to the phone company, since anything they charge is way more than whatever it costs them to deliver the message. And it may sometimes be that the number of messages we send would never actually add up to the cost of the monthly plan, which is no bargain at all to us. 

I'm interested in the whole concept of the "big deal" (to bring libraries into it),  and the "all you can eat" (I can never eat enough to get my money's worth from buffets) and similar packages. They're always things you have to really think about to know whether or not it's actually a good idea. 

And thinking about these things is tiresome, and involves research and reading of small print, and honestly, maybe in some cases it's not worth your time to worry about it: just buy the monthly plan and forget it!

I kind of did that with our landline (which we still have, for no very pressing reason now that we both have cell phones) and internet plan: did some initial research, picked a plan that includes unlimited something-or-other, and haven't touched it since, even though it's now more expensive that it was, and I'm no longer sure it's the best deal for the way we use it. I just don't feel like doing all that reading and comparison all over again!

I did do extensive research and went with the pay-as-you-go cell plan, though, and I think it saves me money in the long run. Sure, 25 cents a minute isn't a great rate...but I rarely use 10 minutes in a month (just not a big phone-conversation person), so I spend far less than I would with a flat-rate plan that gives me a lot of talk time I wouldn't use. I spend a fair amount on 5-cent text messages, I suppose, but it still doesn't add up to $20 a month.

So, in the end, bargain!

I do want to try to talk more regularly with family in future, so maybe my phone needs will change. (I'm not making a resolution, because I don't make New Year's Resolutions, but it's a sort of general personal goal not tied to a specific arbitrary demarcation of time. Call people more often. You know, just in general and because.)

I hope I can get around to re-evaluating the available pricing options and making sensible adjustments if things do change significantly. If another plan turns out to be better in another situation, I will happily make the switch, as long as I know about it. (Brand loyalty? What's that?)

I just have to do the work to figure it out, since it's not particularly in the phone company's best interests to tell me "this is the way you can spend the very smallest amount of money on wireless services and still meet all your communication needs."

I guess what it comes down to is that it's often not really about finding One Forever-True Answer, it's about finding the Best Answer Right Now. Which is unfortunate, because you have to keep doing that work over again, but then, I like to think it keeps the brain lively.

Happy New Year, and here's hoping 2009 treats all my adoring followers and their lively brains well. 

Evaluate those package deals, people! I'm not saying they're all horrible swindles. Many of them are convenient and practical and will serve you well. But you should know that for sure, in these trying economic times. 

After all, if you save some money on your phone bill, you'll have more left over to buy me chocolate.