Letters to the Editor
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
Perhaps. Unfortunately, things like diabetes, heart disease, and stroke occur in other organs as well.
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Weight has no bearing on parenting
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).
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The perfect as the enemy of the good
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.
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perfect?
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.
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if there's
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.