I hope you read Nikki’s gorgeous and kind piece on transracial adoption yesterday, but if you didn’t, please do, and this is the heart of it, I think:
If another set of white adoptive parents asked me those same questions today—Should we adopt? Could we be good parents?—I still wouldn’t say no. Those answers are so often unknowable. I might say that I no longer think of adoption in terms of good or bad, but realistic and unrealistic. I would explain that my own parents tried very hard to be good parents, and in many ways were good parents, and we did not have a single honest conversation about race until I was in my late twenties and are still dealing with the consequences of that.
To this day, the pill is the only medication we refer to as if it were the only medication. In fact, it’s probably the only object we label quite so generically. As Jonathan Eig points out in his new book, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution,” there is “no such thing as The Soap or The Vacuum or The Car,” but the oral contraceptive is different. The crusaders of Eig’s book referred to it in that singular way because it was a dream they had chased for so long, a silver bullet that actually turned out to be one. Some of the women who began asking their family doctors for the oral contraceptive when it first went on the market, in 1960, under the brand Enovid, called it “the pill” because it made the request more discreet.
I strongly recommend reading Hanna Rosin’s piece on Stephen Glass, and I do not like The New Republic‘s decision to name it “Hello, My Name is Stephen Glass and I’m Sorry” bc this piece is ALL HER, and really good, and is more about forgiveness and understanding than it is about this dude getting another chance.
Personally, I think a painless death for an animal incapable of understanding mortality is a completely neutral moral act, and a painless death for an unhappy one is a mitzvah, so, yeah, go ahead and euth the cat. And I say this as someone who got literal brain surgery for their dog (he lived on and prospered, no regrets.)
