a bunch of kind-hearted, well-qualified and fit parents out there lined up to adopt, then I'd say place the kid with the fit parents. If there's an older/handicapped/hard-to-adopt kid languishing in a group setting, foster care or otherwise not likely to be placed with a family, why turn down the chance for a kid to have a home? It's stupid.

By barring this particular fat woman from adopting, the System is rejecting the good in search of what may be the elusive perfect.

An elusive perfect? What? She's 280lbs! That's after dieting down from 300+ lbs. I don't know what "perfect" would be for her, but she's got a long way to go from morbidly obese.

She could shoot for: merely obese, then overweight, then relatively healthy, then fit, and then especially fit. Probably any of those (obese? maybe) would qualify her to adopt.

By barring this particular fat woman from adopting, the System is rejecting the good in search of what may be the elusive perfect. It's similar to those rules elsewhere that restrict gay people or unmarried people or non-religious people from adopting.

The problem is that childhood is very short. While the System waits for the perfect adoptive parent to show up, babies and kids are growing up and languishing in foster care or orphanages. Every month this Australian woman takes to diet and get her weight down to what the System thinks is an acceptable level is a month that a kid is in an unloving, affection-less environment. And a month in a child's lifetime is very long.

This is not a knock on the foster-care system or the people who work in it. I know they generally do the best they can. But any objective observer can tell you, foster care is far inferior to a real home. For a child, and especially for a baby or toddler, getting adopted now into a good home and a good family is better than waiting around for some bureaucrat's idea of the perfect home and perfect family.

As the child of a fat father (now in his late 60s) and the grandchild of an obese grandmother (now a healthy but overweight 87), I am perfectly justified in saying that weight has no bearing on parenting ability. My dad is a terrific. I couldn't ask for a better grandma. My wonderful mother who never weighed more than 125 lbs in her life died of cancer at 45, leaving small children behind to be raised by her very fat mother and fat husband. They did a great job, and three of the four of us kids have managed to avoid the obese label (at least to date).

Perhaps. Unfortunately, things like diabetes, heart disease, and stroke occur in other organs as well.

Kudos to the previous two Anonymouses (anonymi?).

I do suspect that the anti-fat guideline for adoptive mothers is fed by some sexism. Seems like it's not a very relevant yardstick for measuring a prospective adoptive mother. Sure, I can see a problem is the candidate is completely infirm, but being fat does not make you infirm. If I were to strike all the fat women out of my kids' lives, they would be deprived of the guidance of some fabulous teachers and aunties.

Seems like the emphasis on a prospective mother's beauty is misplaced. I have a friend who's an adoptive mother to two girls from China, in addition to some biological kids, and while she's not really fat or in my mind, unattractive, I can tell you she has no time in her life to be Miss Beauty Queen. She may not always get her hair combed first in the a.m., but she's a great mom.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all, and to many well-loved kids, their chubby, disshelved, fashion-impaired mothers are beautiful.

He's not the most articulate person, if you haven't noticed.

The previous anonymous had some great points. My sister is adopted, my parents are both very thin and health conscious (I would say they were even uptight about it) and she spent her childhood and young adult years chubby and overweight before finally pushing herself to get down to a normal weight in her late twenties. (With great difficulty. It was not easy for her, and I applaud her accomplishment.) So what's that argument about thin parents always producing thin kids, and fat parents always raising fat children? Sometimes it's the fat parents who are best at raising kids who don't have eating disorders leading to overweight and a real unhealthy relationship with food. I've seen examples of that. You can't always tell. It's true that education is the key and as long as they can prepare good meals and get the kids involved in exercise, the kids should be okay.

It would be ideal if Kylie could lose some more weight, but there's no reason she needs to be a stick person to be able to adopt.

Definition:

disenfranchise Show phonetics

verb [T] (ALSO disfranchise)

to take away power or opportunities

So what do you mean that women have a "disenfranchised" view of men? I bet you mean disillusioned--the wool has been pulled from their eyes.

Why all this troll-feeding?

I do have a very strong opinion on this story - it's misogyny, pretty simply. It's no longer enough to just bash women per se - you get shot down too fast. So you erect a smokescreen - women who are fat. All of us know great thin mothers, great fat mothers, and great mothers whose weight careens all over the place. This is not about fitness to parent, or as someone else said, plenty of other concerns would eclipse weight in the decision-making process. As an adoptive parent surrounded by adoptive families, I see that the kids' weight, health and fitness is due very directly to the child's genetics and the adoptive parents' education level. The chubby adoptees I know - two of them, to be exact - have known, chubby birthfamilies and normal-weight adoptive families. The many, many normal-weight adoptees I know have either known, normal-weight birth families or unknown birth families, but they have a range of adoptive families ranging from extra-thin to quite obese.

Are we worried about the parent's lifespan or about the risk of obesity in the child? If the latter, I vouch that it is not related, among educated parents. If the former, get in line, smokers, people who drive too fast, drinkers, people with family histories of cancer, etc. etc. etc.

Both arguments fail to persuade.