parenting

"The use of human adoptees to separate nature from nurture was first suggested by (1912–1913). During the early decades of the century, interest in adoptees first centered around the question of nature and nurture in human intelligence, which was stimulated in part by the development at that time of tests to measure intelligence. The adoption strategy involved a study of adoptees, their biologic parents, and their adoptive parents. As adoptions developed in the early years of this century, children generally separated at birth from biologic parents and birth environment were placed with nonrelatives who legally adopted and raised the children. In nature-nurture studies the focus of the investigation was usually a trait, behavior, or other characteristic—as in the early studies during the teens and twenties of this century when the focus was on intelligence. The crux of the technique involves comparisons between adoptees and both sets of parents, biologic and adoptive."

"While and followed their father's footsteps to , (regarded, in the absence of the disabled George, as second in age) left for a new life, as the adopted heir to a wealthy, childless couple who could offer hims great prospects. Edward's benefactor was of in , son of the kinsman who had presented the Steventon living to the Revd . The unofficial adoption of children for social advantage — so strange to twenty-first-century sensibilities — was by no means uncommon in Jane Austen's time: in her own fiction it would be central to the plot in two of her six novels, with being sent to live with the haughty Bertrams, in ', and becoming the adoptive heir of his rich aunt in '. In 's case, the arrangement worked well."

"... if offspring of poor parents, adopted when newly born into well-to-do and well-educated families, turn out markedly different from the birthright members of those families then the presumption is that the dullness, of whichever is the duller, is a saturated growth. If on the other hand they all turn out much alike there is no proof that growth is saturated for any of them. There remains the presumption that the conditions have been much alike for all the members of one family and we get a more uncertain but still useful comparison of native worth, as pointed out above. A thorough study of a hundred such cases of adopted children would do more to reveal the nature of the poorer than statistics of 100,000 poor persons brought up in poverty."

"When you are adopted, the desire to search for your parents can suddenly seem unquenchable and the curiosity has to be sated. That's when it becomes dangerous. It is an oddity that many adopted people embark on the search just when they have settled, finally, on an adult identity. I suppose they feel that now they can. Then the findings of the search throw everything into chaos."

"It was also the only country in the world to allow fully privatised adoptions from 1977 to 2008. At the height of the adoption boom, one in 100 children born in Guatemala was placed for adoption with a family abroad. “Some countries export bananas,” one lawyer who arranged private adoptions told the in 2016. “We exported babies.” Guatemala is often cited as the worst-case scenario for what can go wrong when adoptions are commercialised and children are sent from poorer countries to wealthier ones."

"In , only children ... may be adopted ... Adoption is usually associated with the desire to nurture and protect the child as if one's own, and s or illegitimate children are the most frequent candidates for adoption. ... This has little in common with adoption among the . ... Those given in adoption are mostly adults ... Very few adoptions are directly attested. Roman legal writings are one of our best sources of evidence for the actual practice of adoption among the Romans; inscriptions are insufficiently specific for certainty in detecting adoptions, and the adoptions mentioned in literary sources are numbered in tens rather than hundreds. There is even less direct evidence about the reasons for adoption. Of the adoptions that are mentioned in literary sources, those in successive imperial families are not entirely typical of Roman society at large, since they generally have a specifically dynastic and political purpose. As in private families, however, a definite preference is shown for adopting persons related by blood, or at least by marriage, where any are available. This is the case between and , among the and the , and is most evident among the ."

"It is not a question of homosexuality, we are talking about both homosexual and heterosexual couples. It is a practice to be avoided because children are not bought. It is a trade that must be blocked."

"At the Democratic convention, in the United States, I listened to the speech of a young man who was very confident, very serene, very calm, very... bright, I would say. He, I don't remember his name, said in his speech that he was the son of two mothers. And he said it simply, without too much emphasis. He didn't seem like a freak to me. It seemed normal to me."

"Sometimes I ask myself questions too. Here we are talking about love towards children, who have the right to love. That can come from a man and a woman, God forbid, but I ask myself: why can't that love come from two men or two women and instead can it be given by seven nuns? This is a question I ask myself. Why not? Why?"

"As experience shows, the absence of sexual bipolarity creates obstacles to the normal development of children possibly placed within these unions. They lack the experience of motherhood or fatherhood. Inserting children into homosexual unions through adoption actually means doing violence to these children in the sense that their state of weakness is taken advantage of to introduce them into environments that do not favor their full human development. Certainly such a practice would be seriously immoral and would be in open contradiction with the principle, also recognized by the UN International Convention on the Rights of the Child, according to which the best interest to be protected in any case is that of the child, the most weak and defenseless (from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Considerations regarding the projects for the legal recognition of unions between homosexual people )"

"It was a beautiful gift to Italy to have prevented two people of the same sex, who are prevented by nature, from having the possibility of having a child. We prevented an anti-natural and anthropological revolution and I believe it was our achievement."

"It is too simplistic to believe that a child, to grow in a balanced way, needs the presence of a father and a mother of different sexes. No scientific research demonstrates that being the children of homosexuals is dangerous for the acquisition of one's gender identity. The truth is that society needs time to adapt to changes: just think of what happened 30 years ago to the children of separated people, who felt uncomfortable and tried to hide their reality. Now, however, being separated children is almost normal."

"I have met wonderful same-parent families in America and a couple here, and it is certain that overseas they have a much better chance of living like so-called "normal" families. Even on the 'gestation for others', the horrible term uterus for rent, my position is one of great acceptance, even if I would never resort to it or give it to myself. But for me individual freedoms are above everything."

"After all, what establishes relationships is essentially the emotional relationship, that is, love. Let's stop thinking that homosexuals are essentially "sexual". First of all, they are emotional, they have significant cohabitation relationships just like heterosexual families. They can very well adopt children because it is not necessarily the case that two people of the same sex are "bad". And children need love, not necessarily sexual differences. Let them stop saying that the family is made up of a man and a woman, because this is a fundamentally materialist vision, defended by Catholics who always talk about the spirit. Because if the criterion of being together is simply to bring children into the world, then this is the most sinister materialism. While being together also has the meaning of loving each other, of dedicating oneself to an educational work. [...] children are children not because you sleep with a woman and the woman sleeps with a man, they are children because you raise them, because you are together [with them], because you answer their questions , because you pay attention to their needs. This means "fatherhood" and "motherhood", whoever it is carried out by."

"The natural family is under attack. They want to dominate us and erase our people."

"My mother was a widow and I am gay, but I know many other children of widowed mothers who, despite missing their father, did not become gay. After all, I am convinced that for a child almost anything is better than an orphanage. Nor can we pursue perfect family balance. It is sufficient that the adopters are normally civilized, not sadists who slice up creatures, that they have an income to support them, without necessarily having to be an Agnelli."

"We parents, [...] hetero couples, know well that the serenity of children is not dictated by having a mother and a father. Their serenity begins precisely from the feeling of love and understanding that is felt in the family and, instead, it often happens that we parents, instead of helping them, contribute with our fears to instill taboos and insecurities that they would not have. It is not easy to be a parent, even less to be a good parent, but sexuality is certainly not the discriminating factor between a good parent and a bad parent. These are just lies dictated by fear of change. Meanwhile, the world changes anyway and will change again."

"I speak as an open homosexual. [...] I conceive the family [...] in the traditional sense of the term, that is, made up of a father and a mother because nature wanted it that way."

"For too long schools have been afraid to intervene, while in truth there are delicate methods to explain to children, already in primary school, that some of them have two mothers and others two fathers, as in the case of our son."

"What children need is adult, mature and responsible love from parents who put their needs before their own and who at the same time know how to set the right limits for them and help them grow. Growing up with two women or two men is no problem. In the Middle Ages many children grew up in monasteries with only women or only men and many of them became saints."

"...compared to love, affective availability equally belongs to different behavioral genres. What does it matter if they are two men with a child, or a man and a woman, or two women? I don't know who is able to decide how it is right to love."

"[On the detractors of the Cirinnà bill who oppose homoparentality to the family of the Christian tradition] If you consider in which family Jesus was born, you realize [that] Mary conceives from a sacred entity outside of marriage, Joseph adopts - because "putative father" means "adoptive father" - a son who is not his and he does so out of love for his wife. And faced with this situation [...] the Cirinnà bill becomes fresh water."

"I am in favor of civil unions but children are not a right. And they can't be bought. Point. Anyone who disagrees respects the opinions of others."

"I'm gay, I can't have a child. I believe that you can't have everything in life, if it isn't there it means it shouldn't be there. It's also nice to deprive yourself of something. Life has its own natural path, there are things that should not be changed. And one of these is family."

"On the adoption of children I instinctively find the traditional figures of a man and a woman more appropriate. I try to think about the balance needed by children, but it is a complicated issue. It is not that one can argue that a heterosexual couple is necessarily able to give more love to a child."

"[On the contrast between those who are in favor of civil unions and homoparenting and those who are against] [...] I would like someone to explain to me what the traditional family is. That of 5th century Athens? The one in Sparta? The one in Rome? [...] The patriarchal one of fifty years ago? That "wife, husband, son-two sons"? Is that? Is that the traditional family of the last fifty years? [...] The family is a socio-cultural product. [...] It is therefore completely clear that its concept is changing. [...] it would be necessary for these transformations [...] to take place with a minimum [...] of cultural foundation, of awareness, of conscience. Not in the face of "We want everything" and everything that comes to mind is a "natural right" because then two "naturalisms" are opposed: the Catholic one which is totally absurd because anything can be a Christian except a "naturalist "; and the one on the other side of the so-called "natural rights" which are a ghost [...]."

"Adoption by same-sex couples"

"Same-sex marriage"

"Homosexuality"

"Civil union"

"(About prostitution and surrogacy) Both are industries that commodify women and turn what at the foundation of human life into products. In prostitution what is sold is sex without reproduction. In surrogacy, it is reproduction without sex. In both cases, however, it is the woman who is sold and she is denied the fundamental point of the activity itself: she does not get pleasure from sex and she does not get any children from reproduction. In both cases she is totally dehumanized."

"Who are we to know that all women are unaware, uninformed, exploited? Who are we to decide that any woman who consents to gpa [Gestation for Others], even if well paid and properly informed, has no sense of her own femininity and integrity? We believe, dear mothers, that it is possible to connect the desires of some and the availability of a woman to carry on a pregnancy for them. We reject the idea of ​​the barbaric man and the manipulated or manipulable woman. A special thank you therefore goes to the new fathers and the new families, and I am not referring so much to the same-parent families, but above all to the hetero-parental families who support all families if they are based on love, respect and care for their children, and who have in the square, on April 30th, to celebrate rainbow families, families like any other."

"There's something about the concept of a rented womb that scares me. And it has nothing to do with homosexuality or heterosexuality; The logic of "we do it because it's possible" scares me."

"As long as it is on a voluntary basis and there is no exploitation, in my opinion it is legitimate. Research shows that altruistic motivation and the transfer of money - for example in the form of expense reimbursement - can coexist. Let us rather make a strict law that does not allow abuse, given that 95% of Italians who resort to it abroad are heterosexual. However, I am surprised by the battle against surrogacy that some feminist comrades are carrying on."

"I have many reservations about surrogacy [...]. It is a practice that lends itself to the exploitation of women."

"The term "womb for rent" has in itself an offensive connotation, as a term used, both for the woman, who is reduced to her uterus, and for the people who believe they can resort to this instrument to pursue the aim of have a child."

"I have always found it monstrous that you can rent a woman's uterus and then take away her baby - and the baby will never know who its mother is - out of a form of emotional selfishness which however does enormous damage to both the mother and and to the children who will always wonder whose children they are. [...] First of all you create the unhappiness of a mother who will not know where her children are just because in a moment of economic difficulty she had to accept money to do an action that she will regret Surely. [...] If you want a child, you adopt him first of all, and this is a wonderful thing, because those who are rich can also afford to adopt not one, but ten children, visit them, cuddle them, give them gifts, prepare A beautiful life. Why does one have to say "No, this is my son because he comes from my seed but I stole him from his mother"?"

"I have met wonderful families homoparentality in America and a couple here, and it is certain that overseas they have a much better chance of living like so-called "normal" families. Even on 'gestation for others', the horrendous term uterus for rent, my position is one of great acceptance, even if I would never resort to it or give it to myself. But for me individual freedoms are above everything."

"Surrogacy is an abuse of power in an economically unbalanced world like the current one we live in. It increasingly puts poor women in the position of choosing whether to commercialize and sell their motherhood or condemn themselves and their children to poverty. It is extremely cruel, as it is also when women have to emigrate and abandon their families to earn a minimum wage to survive or end up in the network of prostitution for the same reason. [...] Apart from economic exploitation, I reject surrogate motherhood for ethical reasons: a person's psyche begins to build itself during pregnancy through the perception of the voice and the effects of maternal hormones that circulate in the fetal tissues and which match to the mother's voice and state of mind. Therefore, separation from the biological mother is always traumatic for the child and should be avoided whenever possible."

"Surrogate mother. Uterus for rent. Far-fetched words, to express a reality that is not human. [...] Nobody here condemns the desire for motherhood or fatherhood, God forbid. But children are not a right, they are a gift, and if science can help us it is clear that it must have limits. Children must have only one father and only one mother (an aggravating factor for the horrible spectacle of homosexuals hugging their stuffed animal), and having to prove this is so ridiculous that it really seems like the times have come - Chesterton – in which "everything will become a creed... fires will be stoked to testify that two plus two equals four, swords drawn to demonstrate that the leaves are green in summer"..."

"When we are faced with an altruistic gestation, when we have clarified the difference that exists between the principle of non-marketability of the human body and intangibility, we must also recognize, at this point, the principle of female autonomy. The moment a woman decides clearly, autonomously, altruistically to help a couple become parents, having already been a mother herself, having already carried on a pregnancy, having no particular economic needs, in the name of what we must victimize her and we must consider that she has no ability to freely express her consent?"

"I have no absolute certainties, but I recognize that the world is changing, that sterility is increasing and young couples who want a child don't know what to do. If other countries emancipated from the point of view of public ethics accept this choice, with conditions, I don't see why we can't do it. Reality comes before political and religious positions."

"[Offering one's body, even if for financial compensation, to donate a child to someone who cannot have it independently, is it not an act of freedom?] If done with love, why not? The world changes, new realities, new needs arise. I consider the desire for motherhood or fatherhood to be legitimate. And beautiful too. It is not an act of selfishness: there is the desire, very human and ancient, to prolong life, to find those who will continue to follow our path after us, to take care of and grow a new creature that will have something of us, despite being autonomous."

"We didn't invent the family. The Holy Family made it an icon, but there is no religion, there is no social state that matters: you are born and you have a father and a mother. Or at least it should be like this, which is why I am not convinced by those who I call children of chemistry, the synthetic children. Wombs for rent, seeds chosen from a catalogue. And then go and explain to these children who the mother is. Procreating must be an act of love, today not even psychiatrists are ready to face the effects of these experiments."

"I have always been against it, I would never use a woman as an incubator."

"Homoparentality"

"The greatest gift you can bestow upon your children is your time and undivided attention."

"Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons."

"I am now the father of four. In the tradition of my mother, my wife and I read individually to them every night. As a result, they love books too. There is no greater tool for bonding with children than books. There is no greater instrument for teaching lessons for life. Now my children reach for books before they reach for the remote control."

"Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children's minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage through their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day. If you could keep awake (but of course you can't) you would see your own mother doing this, and you would find it very interesting to watch her. It is quite like tidying up drawers. You would see her on her knees, I expect, lingering humorously over some of your contents, wondering where on earth you had picked this thing up, making discoveries sweet and not so sweet, pressing this to her cheek as if it were a kitten, and hurriedly stowing that out of sight. When you wake up in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on."