101 Best Adoption, Loss and Infertility Blogs

Carnival, Feature — By Marcie on February 4, 2010 at 7:11 am

Back in 2008 when I wrote at A Child Chosen, I created a list that has since become one of my most popular posts.  The Best of the Best: Top 50 Adoption Blogs has continued to circulate the web since I left b5media but some of those blogs have gone by the wayside and some have done so well the writers are publishing books (I should get credit, right?). Because it has been almost two years since that infamous post, we, at GIMH, thought we would update it with our absolute FAVORITE adoption, loss, and infertility blogs.

Grown in My Heart Blogs (excluded from the 101)


  1. 4 Crazy Kings (retired)
  2. According to Addie Adoptee
  3. Bump Fairy Surrogate
  4. A Bushel and a Peck Ethiopia
  5. Can I Get a Do-Over? Russia, Special Needs
  6. Chicago Law Blogger Law
  7. Gotcha Baby Domestic
  8. The International Mom China, Guatemala, Special Needs
  9. Kingcade Kitchen (retired)
  10. Musings of the Lame First Mother
  11. My Everyday Miracles Korea, Special Needs
  12. Our Little Tongginator China, Special Needs
  13. Rage Against the Minivan, Foster Care, Haiti
  14. Signs of Hope (read more about Carrie in her interview), China, Special Needs

With that said…here are our top 101.

We have only chosen sites that have been updated since the first of the year.  Grab your badge!

101 101 Best Adoption, Loss and Infertility Blogs

Informational and Adoptee Rights

  1. AdopteeRights.net
  2. AdopteeRights.org
  3. Bastard Nation
  4. Ethica
  5. FRUA
  6. Green Ribbon Campaign for Open Records
  7. Guatadopt
  8. Love Isn’t Enough
  9. Motherlode
  10. Nobody is Forgotten
  11. OriginsUSA
  12. PEAR: Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform
  13. Senior Mothers Adoption Activist Coalition
  14. Voices for Vietnam Adoption Integrity
  15. Worldwide Orphans Foundation

Domestic Adoption

  1. (A) Dad
  2. Chasing a Child
  3. Letters to a Birthmother
  4. Life from Here: Musings From the Edge
  5. Peter’s Cross Station
  6. Production, Not Reproduction
  7. this woman’s work
  8. Weebles Wobblog

International Adoption: Asia

  1. Adoption Talk
  2. American Family
  3. Another Ordinary Miracle
  4. A Place Called Simplicity
  5. Becoming a Family
  6. Crazy for Kids
  7. Do They Have Salsa in China?
  8. Kimchi Mamas
  9. La Bicicleta
  10. Ni Hao, Y’all
  11. No Hands But Ours
  12. O Solo Mama
  13. So it’s come down to this…
  14. Third Mom

International Adoption: South America

  1. Another Expresso Please
  2. Artificially Sweetened
  3. Where Laughter Lives: The Riggs Family Blog
  4. Michelle Smiles

International Adoption: Europe

  1. The Accidental Mommy
  2. American Girls in Moscow
  3. Come Undone
  4. Life With Bubba, Chicky and Nika
  5. Solnichka Babies
  6. Uterine Wars

International Adoption: Africa and Caribbean

  1. Around the World and Two Kids
  2. Ethiopia or Bust
  3. Is There Any Mommy Out There?
  4. The Livesay [Haiti] Weblog
  5. Rooted in Love
  6. welcome to my brain

First Parents

  1. Adoption Truth
  2. Birth Mother, First Mother Forum
  3. The Chronicles of  Munchkinland
  4. I Should Really be Working
  5. Magic Pointe Shoes
  6. Motherhood Deleted
  7. Not Mother
  8. Paragraphein  (password protected)
  9. Wet Feet
  10. Writing My Wrongs

Adoptees

  1. 3 Generations of Adoption (adoptee and adoptive mom)
  2. Adopt This
  3. amy
  4. Anti-adoption
  5. Baby Love Child
  6. The Daily Bastardette
  7. Ethnically Incorrect Daughter
  8. Faiths and Illusions (adoptee and adoptive mom)
  9. Joy’s Division
  10. Harlow’s Monkey
  11. Heart, Mind, and Seoul (adoptee and adoptive mom)
  12. Land of the Not-So-Calm
  13. Outlandish Remarks
  14. Out of the Fog
  15. Ungrateful Little Bastard
  16. Shadow Between Two Worlds

Infertility/ Adoption After Infertility

  1. A Little Pregnant
  2. And I Wasted All that Birth Control
  3. Baby Interrupted
  4. Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed
  5. Stirrup Queens
  6. So Close
  7. The Egg Drop Post
  8. The Fertile Infertile
  9. This Cross I Embrace
  10. Silent Sorority

Foster Care / Foster Care Adoption

  1. Fostering Pride
  2. Overwhelmed with Joy
  3. Upside-Down Adoption

Loss

  1. Crib Chronicles
  2. Life after Fertility and Loss
  3. Naptime Confessional
  4. Parenthood for Me
  5. The Spohrs are Multiplying
  6. Sweet/Salty
  7. To Write Their Names in the Sand

Surrogacy

  1. The Good Eggs
  2. I’m a Smart One
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    32 Comments

  • Tracey says:
    February 4, 2010 at 8:20 am

    I found a lot of great new blogs to follow…thanks for publishing this.

  • Michelle@gotchababy says:
    February 4, 2010 at 12:05 pm

    Impressive, Marcie!! Will have to check these out!

  • Mel says:
    February 4, 2010 at 2:42 pm

    Thank you! I’m honoured to be included.

    And don’t forget Weebles Wobblog (http://www.weebleswobblog.com/)–her post about explaining her daughter’s first-father was so eye-opening to me (http://www.weebleswobblog.com/2009/02/reunion-in-open-adoption-part-2-telling.html). It’s easy to explain a first-mother without explaining…er…other things :-) Not so easy to explain a first-father and it was something I had never considered before.

  • findingmaddy says:
    February 4, 2010 at 6:52 pm

    thanks, I have been looking for something like this for a while.

  • Christina says:
    February 4, 2010 at 7:27 pm

    I too am incredibly honored to be included on this list (Adoptees ~ Out of the Fog)…thank you! I’ll check out the blogs on the list as well :)

    ~Christina

  • Lindy says:
    February 5, 2010 at 6:32 am

    Thanks for posting. BTW, is “American Girls in Moscow” an adoption blog?

    (I’m wondering if you can have these links open into separate windows, so we don’t leave your site. It would make it easier to pull up the blogs.)

  • admin says:
    February 5, 2010 at 9:07 am

    I added American Girls because of all of the references to adoption and the wonderful links to Russia.

    And yes, working on the links.

  • admin says:
    February 5, 2010 at 9:25 am

    Lindy, should be all set!

  • O Solo Mama says:
    February 5, 2010 at 11:10 am

    Thanks for including me. Where’s my badge. *pout*
    Seriously, thanks.

  • Mei-Ling says:
    February 5, 2010 at 11:11 am

    Hey – thanks for adding me!

  • Rosemary says:
    February 5, 2010 at 11:44 am

    Awwww, shucks! I feel so honored to have our little corner of the world (Becoming a Family) mentioned on this amazing list! Thanks so much for the recognition. I am seriously going to have to bump it up now that I’ve been counted among such “real” bloggers. This is making me sweat…

  • atlasien says:
    February 5, 2010 at 2:02 pm

    Thank you for including my blog on the list. I appreciate it, and I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of these other blogs as well.

    However, I would like to point out something about the statistics of which blogs have been included in this list. This is not meant as an attack, or a personal criticism of anyone who created this list… it’s just an observation, and a reminder for people not to draw any numerical conclusions about people involved in adoption based on the list, although it looks like a good resource otherwise.

    On this list there are 8 “domestic” adoptive parent blogs (“domestic” standing for private adoption, I assume), 31 international blogs, and 3 foster care/foster care adoption blogs. That breaks down to 75% international, 18% private domestic and 7% foster care.

    The most reliable source of adoption statistics I’ve seen is pretty old — it goes back to 2001 — but I don’t have any reason to believe the statistics have changed much since then, other than the fact that international must have shrunk a lot in the last half of the last decade. The link is here, at childwelfare.gov:
    http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/s_adopted/s_adopted.cfm

    According to that data, 15% of all adoptions were international. 40% were public agency: that is, from foster care. 45% were tribal, kinship and private agency. Since stepparent adoptions are included in that figure, I’d estimate less than 5-10% of all adoptions in the US are private domestic non-kinship adoptions. There’s also going to be some overlap because some foster care adoptions are also kinship adoptions and some private adoptions are also kinship adoptions.

    If the above list more accurately reflected the population of adoptive parents over the last decade — let’s say it cut out most relative adoptions though, for the sake of simplicity, although that isn’t really fair — it would have something like 27 foster care blogs, 10 international blogs and 7 private agency domestic.

    The reasons behind this huge, huge imbalance in media representation are complicated. It deserves to be discussed, and not ever taken for granted.

    Also, I noticed that in terms of category names, “International” doesn’t mean, for example, international adoptees: it stands for international adoptive parents. So the list also reflects an imbalance tilted to the side of adoptive parents, who are classified according to distinctions that are not applied to other people involved in adoption.

  • kris says:
    February 5, 2010 at 2:34 pm

    i was really happy to see the list of adult adoptee blogs, several of which i follow and really love.

    hi mei-ling :O)

  • Suz says:
    February 5, 2010 at 3:05 pm

    Thank you. I had no idea. Found out about this via another blogger on your list.

  • admin says:
    February 5, 2010 at 3:27 pm

    I would love for someone to point us in the direction of some more foster care sites but from what we have found there are few. So, we took the best.

  • atlasien says:
    February 5, 2010 at 3:44 pm

    Here are more I would recommend, in no particular order, out of a bunch of ones I have in my reader. These are all foster adoptive parents and some of them also have experience in social work and adoption work.

    Tubaville: http://tubaville.wordpress.com
    Thoughts from a Foster Family: http://pflagfostermom.blogspot.com/
    Postcards From Insanity: http://afostermamaslife.blogspot.com
    Never a Dull Moment: http://fletcherclan.blogspot.com/
    The Adoption Counselor: http://theadoptioncounselor.com/Blog/
    Big Mama Hollers / The Bodie Bunch: http://thebodiebunch.blogspot.com/
    Finishing Off My Family: http://tudusamom.blogspot.com/
    Life in the Grateful House: http://lisajordanpuddin.blogspot.com/

  • Tonggu Momma says:
    February 5, 2010 at 3:47 pm

    Those are great points, atlasien. I think this list reflects less of favoritism and more of a disproportionate number of international adoptive parent blogs as opposed to domestic and foster care adoption blogs. I suspect this might be because many IA parents blog about their adoption trips overseas (so that family and friends might follow along) and then continue blogging when they return home.

  • atlasien says:
    February 5, 2010 at 4:29 pm

    I tried adding a list of foster care adoptive blogs but I think the blog might have eaten my post by accident, thinking it was spam because of the links. But I have at least 30 of them in my reader, so they’re definitely out there. I have a bunch in my active blog list, and Thoughts From a Fostering Family also has a pretty big list.

    However, I agree with the general point that there are more international parents blogging, and also much more international adoption presence in the media, even though international adoption actually consists of the a small minority of actual adoptions. I believe this is partly due to marketing by agencies, and also reflects the fact that international adoptive parents will have, on average, much higher incomes, and therefore much more access to media resources, both online and offline.

    Please note I’m NOT saying that all international adoptive parents are rich. I’m talking about averages, especially in relation to the digital divide.

  • Kristen (Rage Against the Minivan) says:
    February 5, 2010 at 6:32 pm

    Wow, thanks! What an honor. I can’t wait to peruse all of these blogs.

    By the way, while we are under the international heading, we are also fost-adopt parents as well. :)

  • Theresa says:
    February 5, 2010 at 7:30 pm

    Thank you very much!

  • Lori in Denver says:
    February 6, 2010 at 3:55 pm

    Thanks to Mel for the recommendation and thanks to GIMH for the inclusion on this list.

    I have another foster blog I follow and enjoy: Our Full House by Melissa, herself a late discovery adoptee: http://ourfullhouse.com

    I already follow many of these blogs. Thanks for the suggestions of more to look into.

    (P.S. Why don’t spellcheckers recognize the word “adoptee”?)

  • M3 says:
    February 7, 2010 at 12:50 am

    Oh wow, what a great surprise! Thanks for including us, it means a lot. I’ve followed some of these blogs from way back when and am so thrilled to get to know the new ones — thanks for the list!

  • Essie says:
    February 8, 2010 at 10:26 am

    WOW! Thanks so much! This is so exciting for me- Thank you.

  • luna says:
    February 10, 2010 at 12:17 am

    thanks so much for including my blog on this list! what a wonderful resource. I look forward to checking out some new blogs.

  • Ann says:
    February 10, 2010 at 1:06 pm

    LOVE the list. Hugely helpful and some really great resources and reads on there. THANK YOU!!!!!

  • Kymberli says:
    February 11, 2010 at 6:19 pm

    Thank you for including my blog “I’m a Smart One” on this wonderful collection of blogs. I’m honored.

  • Esther Crawford says:
    February 11, 2010 at 8:51 pm

    I was disappointed when I clicked on a bunch of the links that they were not regular bloggers… for instance in the Foster Adoption section 2 of the 3 sites listed haven’t been updated in months.

  • Patricia McDonald says:
    February 12, 2010 at 12:11 pm

    Check out my blog I just found my birth mother and will be blogging a great deal these days about finding her and the process of reunion. http://walkingsuburbia.blogspot.com/2010/02/finding-lana.html

  • Margie says:
    February 20, 2010 at 7:05 am

    I absolutely do not deserve to be listed, given how little I have been posted these past few months. This honor inspires me to get back into the fray.

    Thank you very much!

  • Don Gordon Bell says:
    February 21, 2010 at 8:05 pm

    Thanks for putting this list together! I heard of it by my FSS link thingy with Margie of Third Mom. I have been pulled back into THIS THING OF OURS-ADOPTION since I met several Domestic Korean adoptees who were Late Discovery Adoptees. I have been living back in Korea since 1995, teaching English and decided to just stay. I was a founding member of Global Overseas Adoptee’s Link (GOA’L) started by ICA adoptees to help other adoptees who come here to the motherland.

    I seek balance and argue that we all need to listen to the voices of others. I have found though that the voices of some few influence many that adoption is horrible and birth mothers are robbed and their babies stolen by adoption. I challenge that assumption because as I have delved deeper into the situation in Korea, the standard for ICA, I have found many wrong ideas and conclusions that DO NOT accurately reflect the Real Korean people’s views even in today’s society, 2010.

    I welcome anyone in This Thing of Ours-Adoption to drop by, leave comments, contact me by email, etc. We can all learn by reading the perspectives of others, YET we must remember that there are many gaps of perspectives that simply do not blog about it. Again, I love this grouping of different parts of the whole. I have lots more study!

    Don Gordon Bell
    Korean War Baby
    Holt Adoptee-May 21, 1956, #A-20

  • Rebeccah says:
    February 26, 2010 at 5:58 pm

    Thanks for including me! This is a great list. Looking forward to reading more of your site.

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