Should fertile couples adopt?

A friend asked me this, wanting to know my opinion. What do I think about fertile couples adopting? Are there valid reasons that a couple able to have biological children should not adopt, thus allowing more infertile couples to do so?

Should fertile couples adopt? My opinion:

Yes.

Also, who cares?

The following are a couple reasons why I don't care about the status of your reproductive organs when you've decided to adopt (and why I don't think you should care either).

1. (Domestic infant) Adoption is, and should be, expectant parent driven. 
For someone to even hold the opinion that fertile couples should not adopt because they are somehow "taking babies" from infertile couples, their entire concept of domestic infant adoption has to be skewed.

Adoption is about finding families for babies.

It is not about finding babies for families.

By "expectant parent driven," I mean that the expectant mother or parents can choose whichever family they want to adopt their unborn child.

They choose. She chooses.

She might envision a couple with a stay-at-home parent, or a same-sex couple, or a multi-racial family, or a Christian family, or a non-religious couple, or a childless couple, or parents who already have biological children. The entire process of choosing a family has nothing to do with who "deserves" it more, or who can or cannot have biological children--it has to do with what this expectant mother carefully and purposely chooses for her unborn child.

This isn't waiting in line for the newest iPhone, where the people who already own one should wait behind the people who don't.

These are humans and lives and incredibly life altering decisions.

Hopeful adoptive parents are resources available to women who, for whatever reason, have chosen an adoption plan for their unborn child. There is no such things as being more or less deserving then the next family.

2. There are still unmet needs.
To the infertile couple who is not willing to adopt the drug or alcohol exposed newborn with brown skin whose mother wants an open adoption with visits:

Who is going to adopt this baby, if you won't?

Generally speaking, there are plenty of hopeful adoptive parents waiting to adopt healthy newborns that look like them. And you can tuck away that t-shirt you got with James 1:27 on it from a short term missions trip, because domestic infant adoption is not "saving the orphans" (but that's another blog!).

If you are committed to meeting a deep need, consider whether your family is equipped to adopt the child with special medical needs, or with prenatal drug or alcohol exposure, or who is weaning off morphine in the NICU. Consider adopting an older child waiting in foster care, whose parental rights have already been terminated as reunification with biological family is no longer an option.

Us infertile couples can't do it alone.

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To ask whether fertile couples should adopt is to ask the wrong question. We should be far more concerned with the posture of our hearts, and with our ethics and motivation for doing so than we are about the ability or inability to conceive children biologically.