One less footprint

Some families choose adoption as alternative to boosting population

By jennifer anderson

Pamplin Media Group, Mar 11, 2010, Updated Mar 15, 2010

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Connor Chadney (left), 9, bounces on the family trampoline while sister Mimi, 5, awaits her turn. Terri and Jay Chadney are trying to adopt their third child after Terri bore one child. They figure the planet has enough people and there are plenty of children in need of a good home.

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Life in the Chadneys’ North Portland home is organized chaos – just the way they like it.

Three kids, three dogs, two guinea pigs and two lizards. Plus one more daughter on the way.

It won’t be a baby, though. The family is adopting an 11-year-old girl from China, making it their third adopted member of the family – sixth if you count dogs. After having one biological child and deciding to stop there, the couple was moved to adopt – again and again and again – after hearing about the needs of children in Oregon foster care and Chinese orphanages.

“I know the planet is full of people,” says Terri Chadney, who co-owns the West Coast Health and Fitness gym with her husband, Jay.

“I think it’s crazy to think kids should grow up in orphanages,” she says. “To me it doesn’t matter where you get kids. Every kid needs a loving home.”

Just ask Madonna, Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, or anyone who’s watched gripping images of Haitian children recently and felt like bringing them into the comfort and security of their own homes.

Adoption also is increasingly a socially and environmentally conscious decision on a planet expected to hold 7 billion people by 2012.

Last year, Oregon State University statistics professor Paul Murtaugh tapped into a hornet’s nest when he published a study measuring the environmental consequences of having a baby.

His conclusion jarred many: that having a child is the single-worst thing a person can do for climate change, considering the carbon emissions that offspring and their descendants will produce in their lifetimes.

Murtaugh calculates that each new baby born in the United States today, under current conditions, will produce 5.7 times more carbon emissions than one of their parents, on average, largely due to the impact of multiple future generations. Murtaugh’s math suggests that deciding not to have a baby could be the single-biggest way to limit one’s carbon footprint – more than recycling, driving an electric car, ditching meat or other indicators of “greenness” typically measured by carbon calculators.

Murtaugh made it clear he wasn’t advocating for or against having children, but simply using statistics to examine an issue of broad interest.

Regardless, many readers took offense at Sustainable Life’s Sept. 2009 report on Murtaugh’s study, appalled at the suggestion that having children does substantial harm to the environment.

Others saw the debate as an opportunity to bring dialogue and awareness to an alternative that doesn’t have the same environmental impact – adopting.

“I, personally, feel that environmentally conscious people should become parents so they can further their cause beyond their generation,” wrote mother MaryBeth Piccirilli in a letter to Sustainable Life. The Northwest Portland mother has three children, two of them adopted.

“What better way to help the environment,” she wrote, “than to provide a positive impact with knowledge passed down from generation to generation through the family tradition of caring for the environment?”

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