Continued from the previous post

Children in America are far from immune from the potential of sexual abuse with between 39 and 60 million survivors of childhood sexual abuse struggling to exist today.

• 1 in 4 girls is sexually abused before the age of 18.
• 1 in 6 boys is sexually abused before the age of 18.
• 1 in 5 children are solicited sexually while on the internet.
• Nearly 70% of all reported sexual assaults (including assaults on adults) occur to children ages 17 and under.

With 30-40% of victims abused by family members ... and in the huge majority these are biological family members ... pointing an accusing finger at adoption defies logic.

So, back to the article that started this thought process today ...

Apparently, there is a growing legion of parents who are prostituting their children, both live and in cyberspace.

Authorities are posing online as parents willing to sell their children for sex, sometimes for money, but in one case ... get this! ... for tickets to a Miami Dolphins game, and this is common enough a bargain to not raise red flags for the sicko child sex freaks.

The US Department of Health and Human Services says the number of American children at risk of sexual exploitation is around 400,000 and about 10% are being 'pimped out' by their parents.

Parents like the 38-year-old woman who gave her daughters to James Colliton, a father of five and tax attorney who had sex with them "numerous times between 2000 and 2005, who had been prostituted by their mother," and Kenda Henry, the Dallas woman who used the Internet to prostitute her three young children to pedophiles from as far away as Great Britain.

Children like Crystal, now 17 and in care, but abused by her father who then started selling her at the age of 5.

These stories are sickening. I'll be skipping lunch for having written about this this morning, but I feel it's important to make the point that sexual abuse of children does not have 'adoption' stamped all over it, nor vice versa.

Like the few 'angry adult adoptees' and the regret-ridden birth mothers who rail against adoption as an evil in the world that is to be halted at all costs, the torch-bearing that uses Masha Allen is not meant to do more than solicit knee-jerk negative reactions that clear thought and information dilute to next to nothing.

Keep in mind that Masha Allen's tragedy is known in no small part because she is an adoptee, a fact that has been shouted from rooftops in hopes of making some point about adoption. We know her name. We know her story. What do we know about the children mentioned above, those prostituted by their biological parents? Nothing. Do they deserve less outrage on their behalf?

When adoption can guarantee a life free from all threat of anything bad ever happening, perhaps everyone will opt to be adopted. In the meantime, adoption serves a purpose, and on rare occasions it disappoints and even harms.

That, I'm afraid, is life, and proof only that adoption is, and should always be, part of it.