4:36 am PST, Feb 2, Stephanie Costa, New York
This is a disgrace that these poor animals are being penalized based on their breed. Any dog is cacpable of attacking. If you ask me a chuwaua is a much nastier dog. Why aren't they being removed from homes and being banned. Any dog is a great dog. They are being penalized for the misconduct of others who have gotten them for the wrong reasons, like to fight. A dog will be how it was raised. I have 2 pitbulls. I've had them both since they were puppies. One is 14 and is soon to be put down because he is old and unable to do stairs he can't hear and he can't see but the 14 years that I had him, he never bit a single person. My other is 8 I've had her since she was 6 months old and she is a total cupcake. I have 3 girls the ages of 17,8 and 4. They were raised with these 2 dogs and they have never done anything to harm my children or anyone else for that matter. Stop blaming these dogs for the irresponsible behavior of some who get them and train them to be vicious. I have seen the pitbull become very popular as a family dog. And you are only hurting them instead of the irresponsible ones who don't have enough decency or compassion to treat them like a pet but a monster just to make easy money. Lift the ban on pitbulls. Start using your brains. Educate more people on them and how they need to bve raised and stop plastering the news with all the bad. You are just brainwashing people to believe they can only be a bad dog when I know first hand that is not true. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

My Personal Adoption StoryBy Charmaine Graham, Founder of Adoption Connections

When I was 14, I snuck out of the house and ended up at a frat party with a friend. Ridiculous at that age, but hey, I had complications growing up and I was pretty much looking for love anywhere I could find it. Well, without making the story longer than it needs to be, a boy paid attention to me (the only requirement for my attention in those days), I lost my virginity, and even though I had used protection, I got pregnant. Rather unfair if you ask me, but it happened. My parents had put a plan in place for me to move in with my sister in a different city (my request) and have the baby which I would then place for adoption. I lost the pregnancy (much to the relief of my parents, who wanted to die when their 14-year-old daughter came home to say, “Ummm, ya, I am pregnant”), and it haunted me for years. Why do I tell you this extremely personal story when I could easily skip it and no one would ever know? You’ll have to read on to find out.

Fast forward 20 years to the time when I met my current husband. Strong, ethical, demanding, clear, romantic, and dedicated to commitment. He was my Prince Charming, and 4 years later, we were married. It seemed we had both found the perfect mate in one another: he wanted June Cleaver as a wife and as the mother to his children, and I wanted a husband who could make enough money to let me imitate the June Cleaver woman I had watched on television reruns as a child. Imagine the kick to the guts I felt when, 18 months after we started trying to conceive, in my post-surgery, morphine-induced haze, my reproductive endocrinologist informed me in my post surgery morphine induced haze that, somewhere along the lines, my fallopian tubes had been damaged (imagine a blow torch over delicate human tissue and you get the picture how severe) and there was no hope of me ever getting pregnant without intervention. I was devastated.

For weeks afterwards, I remember waking up in the night and going to sit outside in my back yard or in a bathtub of cold water, sobbing uncontrollably at the horror I felt, the sense of failure I heaped upon myself for my inability to get pregnant as an adult. I raged at the injustice of having had a pregnancy at the age of 14 with protection and the irony that now, as a married woman, I couldn’t fulfill my half of an unspoken bargain. Life was cruel.

I ended up going for therapy at that point. Quite a bit of therapy actually. I still believe I paid for my therapist’s shiny burgundy cross country Volvo. Worth every penny though, as I was eventually able to work through most of those bitter, angry feelings. Thank goodness for that. I think I would have self combusted if I hadn’t! And my husband wasn’t having much fun either.

In the past, whenever I heard someone say they couldn’t have a child, I would think to myself, “If that was me, I would engage in some infertility therapy; but when it came to harvesting my eggs, well, forget that hooey!” The joke was on me because harvesting my eggs was exactly the place we had to start. With an insane drive, I had 5 surgeries, did 11 IVF cycles, allowed my best friend to try to carry a child for me, lost 3 more pregnancies and injected thousands and thousand of dollars worth of hormones into my stomach, enough to literally pay much off our mortgage!

Then, one day, I stopped. One day something happened. I would like to tell you what it was, but I don’t know for sure. I called a social worker in London and inquired about adoption. Why not? I mean, I wanted to be a parent; I wanted to raise children with my husband; I wanted to be a mother. And I was going to do it through adoption. You might wonder what it was that eventually turned my thoughts to the adoption process. To answer that, I’ll need to give you a bit of family history.

lMy father was adopted. For reasons our family will never know, his mother, a woman called May, left him at the hospital with his birth father. The year was 1945. My dad’s birth father, Charles, took his baby boy home and tried to raise him alone. From what I understand, Charles would go to work and leave my dad in his crib all day. It breaks my heart to think of this, not only for my dad, but for his father too. I just can’t imagine what it must have been like for Charles, losing the mother of his child, trying to work and stay sane while trying to raise an infant son on the heels of the war years in Canada. That must have been a very tough time for him, economically and emotionally.

A few months down the road, my birth grandfather heard from an acquaintance who knew of a local couple in their early 40s who were unable to have children. This marked the arrival of my adoptive grandparents, the Fullers, into my dad’s life. My grandmother had cysts on her uterus, which in those days meant having a hysterectomy. (I often wish my grandmother had lived long enough to know that I shared the common thread of infertility with her). The Fuller’s became my forever grandparents, and while they were quirky mink farmers, they were my grandparents, and I loved them more than I can express. From what we understand, my birth grandfather visited his little boy at the Fuller’s until my dad was 5 years old. At that point, my grandparents cut off all ties with Charles and told him to go away, permanently. Was it the time? the culture? I guess we will never know, as my grandparents are gone now too.

I have to say that my father’s adoption always left me feeling slightly unsettled. All the answers about my father’s adoption and life have gone to the grave with my birth grandmother (who we know had many other children before my father), my birth grandfather and my adoptive grandparents. It also seemed to me that my father had the right to know more about who he was, where he came from, who he looked like, and why his life was so drastically altered by a closed adoption. His adoptive parents could have provided that information for him. Why didn’t they? I believe that when you don’t always understand your own origins, it is easy to assume some very unpleasant things; things you can never clear up or put to rest. I made up my mind that if I ever got the privilege to adopt, I wanted something very different for my children and for my family. It was at that point that I moved whole-heartedly into the arena of adoption, and I set out to find out all I could about the process.

I contacted a friend of mine whose sister had placed 3 children for adoption. It was a huge risk for her to share her story with me, knowing that I might judge her, but she spilled her story to me whole heartedly, and I am forever grateful to her for that. She shared with me how her adoptions had developed over the years (or, much to her pain, had become closed), how she had survived, how it felt and, most of all, what she wished had been different between her and the adoptive families of her three children.

Then I talked to my father about his adoption, and I told him about our decision to start our own family in that same way. He was so thrilled at our intention to adopt, as were all our parents. They were heartsick, watching us walk down the emotionally and physically painful path of infertility and its related treatments. My father especially understood and when the time came for all my questions, my dad was there, ready to tell me what he had always wished for with respect to his own adoption. The answer: information and the right to access it. He especially wished that this information had been forthcoming from his adoptive parents, which it never was. My dad also told me that, on occasion, when he did something wrong, his parents would say it was the ‘bad blood’ in him. If you ask me, that was downright mean, but I’m sure that in their day and age, they didn’t know better. They just didn’t understand that an adopted child takes part of who they are from their first family, and to put down the birth family is to put down the child too. God bless them, my grandparents tried, and they were lovely, but I knew I wanted to do better.

I phoned my best friend, Kenda, to talk to her about our new plans. She too was relieved to hear about our decision to adopt. It seemed like every time I’d had a miscarriage or a failed IVF cycle, she was visiting and got to witness first-hand my exhaustion and my devastation. But I was also calling her to gain some more information about adoption. Kenda’s husband was adopted and, like my dad, he didn’t know much about his first family. Kenda also has a nephew that is adopted, a beautiful 3-year-old boy who was adopted through the Children’s Aid Society. She shared with me her views on closed adoption, and she gave me some great insight as to how public adoption works. And with those conversations tucked into our hearts and minds, my husband and I went to work on our adoption home study, our profile and our plans to create a family through private adoption..

We submitted our profile to a private adoption agency, and I decided to take some time to relax and settle back into life without hormones or the constant, nagging drone of my infertility doctors discussing with me how hard it is to transfer embryos through my extremely malformed cervix since how my uterus fused to my rectum compliments of scar tissue. It felt good to step off that merry-go-round for the first time in years. Amazingly, only 32 days later, we got a call from the adoption agency, telling us that a young mother of two was due in a week with her third child, and she would be placing her newborn baby for adoption. The wonderful news was that she had chosen us to parent her son! Seven days later, a little boy named Macarthur entered our lives. That day, that event, was the most special day of my life … the most miraculous day of my life!

And then, 18 wonderful months later, we adopted our daughter Madeline. Her mother, a young woman in her teens, had a difficult time with the adoption, and it broke my heart to watch her struggle. I wanted to raise the little girl she had given birth to, but how could I ask her to say goodbye? So I never did. I never asked her to do that. I invited her into our life, into our family and into her daughter’s new world, hoping that this would help to ease some of her pain. I know it didn’t come close to making it “easy” to place her daughter for adoption, but I hoped that seeing Madeline and knowing about her home and her family and her life would help to heal that ache a tiny bit.

Our son’s mother is unable to be open with us; it is just too painful for her. I still do what I can to include her in our lives in an indirect way. I cautiously provide her with letters, pictures, information and whatever I can without invading the privacy she requires to get through her life. I respect her for having those boundaries. Our situation clearly shows that different people have different needs when it comes to the intricate details of a private adoption.

Jumping back a bit, you might be wondering why I told you about what happened to me when I was 14. Why did I reveal such a private piece of information? I did it because I want to say for the record that people make mistakes, things happen, and sometimes you just have to do the best that you can with a not-so-great situation. I did with my pregnancy at 14, and I did once again with my infertility in adulthood. In some ways, the other people in my family and in my friend’s family have done that with respect to their adoptions. We all try, we all do our best, and we all hope for the best. That’s life. That’s parenthood. And that’s adoption too.

I still believe that if you are considering adoption, you have to sit down, put your fears aside, talk to other people and remember that when your kids grow up, wouldn’t it be great if they could say about their adoptive parents, “They were so balanced that they allowed me to honour that I have two families, that I could ask questions and get to know who I am and exactly how I came to be that person.” I want my children to feel good about who they are, who their birth families are and how they came to this world. I want them to know that even if their conception was not planned, they were planned by God and that some really special people sacrificed their own wants and needs in the hopes of providing a better life for their child. I thank God every day that they did. If they hadn’t, I would have never become a mother.