In a Christian Post column his week, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land argues that single women are unqualified to raise their children and should always give their kids up for adoption as “the best option for everyone concerned.”

“Keeping the baby is almost never preferable to allowing a baby to be adopted into a solid, faithful Christian home,” Land writes. Although Land notes that there are “more than 100,000 children in foster care in America alone,” he cites the Judgment of Solomon to suggest that single mothers are being selfish by not putting their kids up for adoption.

Currently there are more than 100,000 children in foster care in America alone, with many times more across the globe, awaiting permanent adoption into loving “forever” families.

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Adoption is not only the best answer for the heartache and loneliness of foster children and those in orphanages both here and around the world, but it is also the best answer in almost every case where a mother finds herself with a “problem” pregnancy. Such pregnancies can arise from numerous circumstances, but most commonly they are a “problem” because the father is not married to the mother. Currently, almost all such single mothers choose either to abort or keep their babies (only 1 percent of such pregnancies currently end in adoption). Last year, 53 percent of babies born to women under thirty were born to single mothers. And yet, though adoption is seldom chosen in response to such pregnancies, it is virtually always the best option for everyone concerned.

Killing your “problem” or “unwanted” pregnancy through abortion is never an acceptable option (unless the child is a direct and immediate threat to the mother’s continued physical life.) In an abortion, the baby always dies, and we lose that child’s unique and never to be known God-given gifts and contributions to the world. Further, an abortion is much more traumatic physically to a mother’s future reproductive life than carrying a baby to term would be. There are also often lingering psychological issues for the mother as well.

Keeping the baby is almost never preferable to allowing a baby to be adopted into a solid, faithful Christian home. A single mother who keeps her baby is quite often denying that baby the father that God wants for that baby, and every baby, to have. Furthermore, in most circumstances, keeping the baby circumscribes and forecloses both the mother’s and the baby’s economic futures in tragic and unfortunate ways.

If the mother is doing what is best for her baby (one of the defining marks of maternal love), she will part with her baby so that it will have the future God intended for him or her to have. The Old Testament story of the two harlots who both had babies and one died in the night comes to mind (1Kings 3). Both women claimed the surviving baby was their child and wanted the king to give the baby to them. King Solomon decided to have the baby divided in two and each be given half. Immediately, the real mother told the king to give the baby to the other woman in order to save the child’s life. In other words, she was thinking of the child’s best interest, not her own.

Adoption allows the mother to give her child both a mother and a father who will love and cherish the child.