Abstract

Extending his work on the nature and significance of family life, Stephen Post has now drawn our attention to the important problem of Christian attitudes toward relinquishment and adoption. Though he describes his approach as theological, I take it to be more straightforwardly moral, and as a moral argument, it fails to give sufficient attention to the moral cost of relinquishment to the child. A genuinely theological reconsideration of relinquishment and adoption would, however, be valuable; in order to achieve that, we would need to begin not with the love of strangers but with the Christian understanding of the vocation of parenting.