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But that’s what it is.  Amy and I are happily married. We have a house, a dog, two cats, and a rat; respectable careers; and a slowly growing nest egg. After dating three years, then tying the knot two years ago, we’re ready for this most monumental of steps: raising a child.

Amy feels no compelling desire to give birth, and except for never wanting more than one biological child, I’ve always been entirely open on the means of creating a family. So adopting our first child was a no-brainer. Deciding we were finally ready to take the plunge, however, we came face-to-face with the sad fact that no matter where you adopt a child from, another family’s tragedy is your gain. And that’s not all. The adoption world isn’t just colored by grief, but controversy and outright absurdity.

My dad’s reaction to our adoption news, though he was ecstatic, is a good example. I’ve been told numerous times you just can’t talk money with members of a previous generation, given that costs seem to defy translation. But after I made the mistake of telling him how much our international adoption was going to cost, his response, much to Amy’s horror, was to ask if he could save us money by searching near his home in northern Idaho for a “pregnant, well-fed, 16-year-old preacher’s daughter.” He assured me there’d be plenty out there.

The sad truth is that my father’s general assessment, absent some hyperbole, is correct. There’s no shortage of children, here in the United States as elsewhere, in need of loving homes. (Not “forever homes,” as some agency social workers are fond of oh-so-smarmily telling adoptive parents. “That’s heaven,” a churchgoing friend assures me.)

So why do many U.S. couples and the occasional daring single look abroad for babies? After all, adopting locally can often be cheaper, and some research suggests may even be better for children.

The answers aren’t clear-cut. You could blame it on the “Angelina Jolie effect,” much-talked-about in adoption circles. The swarm of media attention over the actor’s adoption of children from Cambodia and Ethiopia has helped bring the topic to the forefront. Her private, overseas adoptions have also highlighted a significant choice every adoptive parent faces: whether to pursue a private or an increasingly common “open” adoption.

A friend and his wife with three biological children and four adopted from within the United States purposely avoided choosing an agency that offers only open adoption, in which adoptive parents maintain some level of communication with the biological parents. By utilizing an agency offering private adoptions, they avoided what my friend refers to as “renting” a child, not rearing one.

Amy and I have heard too many horror stories about open adoption to be comfortable with it. At one of many pre-adoption workshops held by our agency, an adoptive mother had the entire crowd of prospective parents on the edges of their seats as she described the emotional rollercoaster of one failed open adoption attempt. After she and her husband arranged for the adoption, paid stacks of legal and medical bills, and prepared their home for the arrival, the birth mother seemed to waver, hanging on to the newborn until the last day allowed by law. In fact, she hoped to extort the adoptive parents of thousands of dollars. Imagine the strength of will it took for the couple to walk away.

Of course, raising a child no matter his or her birth circumstance requires endless reserves of strength and fortitude. But as the friend with seven children points out, adopting a child takes tons more forethought than giving birth to one. Amy and I have not only had to think about—and discuss, ad nauseum—our motives for wanting to be parents, but other issues as well. This includes the elephant in the adoption world living room: infertility.

The sad reality is that most of us come to adoption through infertility. That’s the reason our chosen adoption agency puts prospective parents through the emotional and intellectual wringer. Here’s the first of dozens of questions on a homestudy prep sheet given to us by our agency: “What is your experience with infertility and how have you resolved your grief over infertility?”

Amy and I might have an easier time answering this question than many adoptive parents since we don’t yet know (or care) whether we’re infertile. But other questions haven’t proven so easy to answer. Thinking about the Reason Why you’re adopting is just the tip of the iceberg, if perhaps the most important. There’s also the How, Where, and How Much.

Globalization has pretty much given adoptive parents their choice of child by age, gender, ethnicity, country of origin, and health condition. Think of it this way: Most any child stuck in an orphanage is going to be malnourished. But would you take a child with jaundice, webbed toes, or a club foot? A child born of incest or rape? A hyperactive child? A child missing a toe or arm or ear? What about albinism? Ichthyosis? Hydrocephalus with shunt?

Signing off on page after page of medical forms, it was hard for me not to feel as if I’m participating in a eugenics exercise. Forget my wife’s hereditary likelihood for Alzheimer’s disease or my genetic preponderance for diabetes, alcoholism, or skin cancer: If I want, I can choose a child so perfect he or she wouldn’t even possess a little birthmark like the one my grandma tried to scrub off my leg when I was 5. Never in my life did I think my wife and I would argue over whether something as medically correctable as a cleft palate was grounds for rejecting a child.

Adoptive parents aren’t the only ones doing the soul-searching. While our country with its disposable wealth might be one of the greatest importers of adopted children, many countries around the world are constantly closing their borders and then reopening them to various agencies as they re-evaluate their internal adoption policies. This might be frustrating for prospective parents, but anyone with empathy realizes it’s for the best. If you think abortion or same-sex marriage are flashpoint issues, just think about the water-cooler conversations we’d have if wealthier people in other nations began wholesale adoption of U.S. children.

One hint of how we might react is provided by a filmmaker in South Korea (the fourth-highest provider of babies to Americans) who made a film exposing the insatiable U.S. hunger for adopted babies for what it supposedly is: a way to satisfy our country’s massive black-market need for body parts and organ tissue. The film was never released, whether due to government or societal pressure I don’t know. But if our two countries’ adoption flow were reversed, is there any doubt we’d dust off Rambo to save our babies?

My friend has a sobering spiel at the ready on how the cost of an adopted child depends largely on the shade of his or her skin, but I’ve thankfully seen some signs that this isn’t always the case. While Russia was long known as one of the most expensive countries from which to adopt, our agency’s fees for Russia are currently about $16,000, compared with Guatemala’s $20,000.

A recent New York Times article points to one reason for such disparities: baby brokers. Guatemalans call them jaladores, middlemen who ply impoverished pregnant women and girls for their babies in exchange for medical reimbursement and meager cash compensation—if the middlemen aren’t discovered and chased out of town first.

Thankfully my father’s own homespun offer to be a jalador came over the phone, not giving my wife the opportunity to run him out of town. Months have now passed since his initial offer, and while it’s becoming easier to picture my beloved little mystery child, acceptable health concerns and all, I’m also realizing that it was dad’s acceptance of our adoption news that I needed most.

His response showed me he had moved beyond his yearslong push for me to supply him with a young, bustling genetic copy of himself. My father began to realize having a grandson or granddaughter not tied by blood has its benefits. For one, he might finally have a family member he can talk to about pro ball and Formula One racing (he swears that his sons’ disdain is the fault of Mom’s gene pool, not his).

So while my father eagerly awaits teaching his grandchild lessons on the environmental destructiveness of our species or the heartbreak that comes with devotion to the Minnesota Vikings, Amy and I look forward to providing a safe, loving home for our impending child. Not a forever home. But a home until the child is ready to strike out into adulthood as a true citizen of the world. A home he or she can return to for uncompromising love, acceptance, and support. Our home.

Scott Nichols (B.A. ’95) is editor of the East Side Review in St. Paul. He is the proud son of Jack Nichols (B.A. ’62, M.A. ’67) and grandson of Ralph Nichols, late emeritus professor of communications at the University.