Life Is Beautiful. Period.

     Lately I've been thinking about all of the different ways it's possible to have kids in our modern age, and how each type of having kids is praised by some people and frowned upon by others.

Here are some responses I've heard to several common ways of having kids:

1. Biological: "You're being irresponsible, bringing kids into this broken world that's going to fall apart in thirty years due to climate change. You should adopt kids that are already here who don't have families."

2. Adoption: "You're not equipped to raise a child from a different culture or race. By adopting kids from other races, ethnicity, cultures, countries, or languages, you're just exercising your "hero complex" but really you're permanently damaging these kids."

3. Fostering: "You're a child molester who uses the money you get to take care of your foster kids to buy drugs for yourself. You're a monster who permits a broken system to remain broken."

4. Fertility treatments: "If you can't have biological kids without science, you shouldn't be having kids. Just adopt."

5. Surrogates: "You're perpetuating class differences by having the money to pay someone less financially secure to ruin their body in order to have your kid."

On the other hand, there are the positive responses:

1. Biological: "You're so brave to put your body through that, kudos to you. Pregnancy and birth are some of the hardest physical (and often emotional and mental) things a person can go through, and you're a Superwoman for that."

2. Adoption: "Adoption can be such a risk, I'm inspired by your willingness to love a child no matter what their history or background is."

3. Fostering: "Fostering takes a special type of person. It's emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausting....you go through really hard times with a child, or multiple children, fall in love with them, and then have to say goodbye, over and over again."

4. Fertility treatments: "It's amazing how far science has progressed that we are able to help create life in so many different, beautiful ways, and help women and men realize dreams that otherwise never could have been in years past."

5. Surrogates: "It's a beautiful thing to be able to donate your time, energy, effort, and body to help another woman have the child she has always dreamed of. It's beautiful to trust another human with the life of your child, to share in the process of creation."

     In my humble opinion, every way a child is brought into this world and raised is beautiful, as long as they are surrounded by love. The only time that any process of conceiving, birthing, or receiving your child is broken is when it's done with any kind of malice or bad intentions. Instead of fighting over the "right" way to have children, we should be investing more time in making sure that more children all over the world are being raised in happy, safe homes where they have resources and opportunities. Let's celebrate life, in all it's crazy, confusing, and miraculous forms.

-SE Wagner