Ryan and Sara Hall adopt 4 Ethiopian Daughters

I wonder if Ryan will be the stay-at-home dad assuming Sara keeps racing? or will the kids be able to throw down 7 minute pace right off the bat?

notanexpert wrote:

xenophobe wrote:

Maybe I am a jerk, but aren't there plenty of American children that need his help and desperately need to be adopted. What is with the American obsession with adopting foreigners?

fair question - I think there are few healthy american kids to adopt - certainly not whole families.

American kids up for adoption are often messed up in some major way - not so for 3rd worlders.

I agree 100% with your sentiment. Alternatively, adopting an infant can avoid a lot of the potential behavioral issues by providing a stable household early enough. Domestic adoption may become even more of an important civic duty if conservatives get their way and dismantle PP / Roe vs Wade.

xenophobe wrote:

Maybe I am a jerk, but aren't there plenty of American children that need his help and desperately need to be adopted. What is with the American obsession with adopting foreigners?

Same obassion America adopted your parents' sorry ass!!!

xenophobe wrote:

Maybe I am a jerk, but aren't there plenty of American children that need his help and desperately need to be adopted. What is with the American obsession with adopting foreigners?

Not sure if you're trolling... but the Halls did a lot of aid/ministry work in Ethiopia, so it makes sense that they would adopt from the country. Maybe they met these girls in an orphanage years ago and started the process.

There are kids in the US that need adopting. You are right about that. A couple of points, though: It is very hard to adopt in the United States. Well-meaning laws and restrictions can end up hurting the children by delaying adoptions, increasing time in foster care and turning potential parents away.

While I would never say that orphans in the US have it easy, it is typically not a life-or-death scenario. It can be a life-or-death scenario in other countries. I have a friend who adopted two boys from Sudan years ago. They would never have survived had it not been for the adoption.

One shouldn't judge someone for taking another person's child - let alone four - into their home, foreign or domestic. It is a good thing.

Very cool wrote:

Very, VERY, cool. I now love this couple. Adoption is amazing.

Every Pro-Lifer should be required to do this. Unfortunately, the anti-choice nuts really don't give a rip about what happens to unwanted, displaced and abused children. They care only about their agenda.

This is one of the many reasons people adopt international. Crazy right :) The biological parents have more rights than adoptive parents. If this law would change, I think more people would adopt domestically.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/15/us/tennessee-adoption-battle/

good response, didn't know or think about most of the points you made (I am 18 and haven't remotely thought about this issue)

I've never been a big fan of the Halls, but this is pretty damn awesome

Very, very cool. Good on the Halls. Guess we'll be seeing the Hall name in the record books for a couple more decades.

The cool thing is that the Hall's children will never lose the feeling and ideas of what it means to be Ethiopian. I assume that the children will spend part of the year with their parents in Ethiopia as their parents train. It makes me sad to see adopted Ethiopian children lose their heritage because they have no connection to Ethiopia. It is very important for adoptive families to go back and visit the native country.

Good luck to them. I hope they understand the drastic lifestyle change that will take effect immediately. I can't imagine that caring for 4 children is going to help their running careers. How will they travel to races? How will they coordinate their training. Watching multiple children is a full time job. Maybe they are now set for life and don't need to run for a living, but if not, somebody needs to make money to feed and house 6 people.

RetiringFromRunning wrote:

Good luck to them. I hope they understand the drastic lifestyle change that will take effect immediately. I can't imagine that caring for 4 children is going to help their running careers. How will they travel to races? How will they coordinate their training. Watching multiple children is a full time job. Maybe they are now set for life and don't need to run for a living, but if not, somebody needs to make money to feed and house 6 people.

My word, you're right! I bet they never thought of that.

The vast majority of Ethiopians couldn't run a sub 4'even with ideal training.

Anti-Hypocrite wrote:

Very cool wrote:

Very, VERY, cool. I now love this couple. Adoption is amazing.

Every Pro-Lifer should be required to do this. Unfortunately, the anti-choice nuts really don't give a rip about what happens to unwanted, displaced and abused children. They care only about their agenda.

Absolutely. And similarly everyone advocating for tighter laws against robbery, larceny, etc., should be required to financially support poor people.

Anti-Hypocrite wrote:

Very cool wrote:

Very, VERY, cool. I now love this couple. Adoption is amazing.

Every Pro-Lifer should be required to do this. Unfortunately, the anti-choice nuts really don't give a rip about what happens to unwanted, displaced and abused children. They care only about their agenda.

It is amazing that advocates for abortion still unabashedly depict pro-lifers as "anti-choice" when each abortion destroys an innocent human being and a lifetime of choices. Abortion is a net destroyer of choices. Further, many of these so called "pro-choicers" leave the public no choice: they insist on public funding of abortion entities yet when advocating for abortion insist that abortion is a private matter, strictly between a "woman" (rarely "mother") and her "doctor" (rarely "abortionist").

And since you used "rip" I add that if the abortionist's instruments were about to systematically rip your limbs off, you would not likely refer to the procedure as "choice" nor to your defenders as "anti-choice nuts." Sadly, in your statements what's good for you is not good for a human fetus. You simply refuse to abide by the silver rule, the golden rule or other traditional measures of morality and justice.

notanexpert wrote:

xenophobe wrote:

Maybe I am a jerk, but aren't there plenty of American children that need his help and desperately need to be adopted. What is with the American obsession with adopting foreigners?

fair question - I think there are few healthy american kids to adopt - certainly not whole families.

American kids up for adoption are often messed up in some major way - not so for 3rd worlders.

I need to correct some of you some of your notions regarding domestic adoption that, from my experience and research, are just untrue.

a) yes, a certain % of children given up for adoption domestically did have moms abusing drugs or alcohol, which can of course result in developmental or health problems.

b) however, plenty of "3rd world" children given up for adoption are either in the same boat (moms that had substance abuse issues), or often worse: they were stuck in some orphanage for months to years with very little love and attention and nutrition, which seems to really cause issues later on (this is often true with some Eastern European adoptions). True of some Asian adoption too. Ethiopia does have a better track record of caring for little ones put in orphanages. This is one reason it has become a more popular place to adopt from.

c) the majority of domestic adoptions, the kids are not "messed up in some major way." Again, I would say the %'s are higher with foreign adoptions.

d) In my neighborhood alone I literally know 10 kids that were adopted domestically. Each and every one seems healthy, well adjusted, and happy.

e) I have an adopted child. The process was very smooth and easy. We had to travel twice across the country, but I would much prefer that to have to travel 1/2 way across the globe and spend weeks in a 3rd world country. (yes, such a visit could be rewarding too, but I am only focusing here on the "easy" factor)

f) we had our child from day 1 (well, she spent a few days in the hospital). It is my understanding that foreign adoptions usually involved at least a few months in an orphanage of some sort.

FYI: this is not a moral judgement on domestic vs foreign adoptions in any way. Only trying to correct some misconceptions about the differences, and the supposed difficulties surrounding domestic adoption. my understanding is that domestic is often easier/more hassle free/kids are healthier than foreign adoptions at this point in time (at one point in time it might have been different)

Point taken. I humbly detract my use of the terms "anti-choice" and "anti-choice nuts." I stand firm on the rest of my stated directive.

If any of these kids turn out to be great runners people will claim they really are the offspring of Ryan and Sara. Almost like Lagat and Meb being

American.

xenophobe wrote:

notanexpert wrote:

fair question - I think there are few healthy american kids to adopt - certainly not whole families.

American kids up for adoption are often messed up in some major way - not so for 3rd worlders.

I agree 100% with your sentiment. Alternatively, adopting an infant can avoid a lot of the potential behavioral issues by providing a stable household early enough. Domestic adoption may become even more of an important civic duty if conservatives get their way and dismantle PP / Roe vs Wade.

FYI: Since Roe v. Wade (January 1973), out-of-wedlock births have not decreased but have skyrocketed. The following paragraph is from a paper published in 1996 by George A. Ackerlof, who shared the Nobel prize in Economics in 2001, and his wife, Janet L. Yellen, Chair of the board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve:

"Since 1970, out-of-wedlock birth rates have soared. In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites. Every year about one million more children are born into fatherless families. If we have learned any policy lesson well over the past 25 years, it is that for children living in single-parent homes, the odds of living in poverty are great. The policy implications of the increase in out-of-wedlock births are staggering."

(Both Ackerlof and Yellen have described themselves as supporters of legal abortion, by the way.) Fast-forward to today's rate: about 41% of births in the USA are to unmarried women, despite a high abortion rate. I myself was born in the Bronx in New York City. In 2012, the place of my birth had an out-of-wedlock birth rate of about 67% on top of a roughly 48% abortion rate.

Ackerlof and Yellen argue that the widespread availability of artificial contraceptives and direct abortion disarmed the shotgun marriage, causing an increase in out-of-wedlock births and an increase in poverty among women and children.

Well, I appreciate the retraction very much. : )