in the bleak midwinter by julia spencer fleming

In their book, providing the egg and sperm for a child is more important than providing him with a good life. It doesn’t matter to them if she’s underaged, if she lives in a dump, if she’s going to be a welfare breeder all her life. If they get their hands on the birth mother, they’ll do everything in their power to persuade her to hang onto the baby. They act as if genetics were sacred destiny. You have no idea what those people are like. You’ve never dealt with DSS, Reverend Clare. The most obvious answer, of course, would be one of the Burns’. Clare teams up with police chief Russ Van Alstyne to try and figure out who would want her dead and why. The Miller’s Kill police department manages to piece together that the woman was the baby’s birthmother. A few days later, a young woman turns up dead. The child is placed in foster care while the case is investigated. Whatever it takes to get the baby into our home as soon as possible.” Maybe someone in the congregation has a friend of a friend who knows Senator Schumer. Clare Fergusson is a former Army helicopter pilot turned Reverend. The baby was found by the new Anglican priest in town. “We’ll need to be able to argue that the baby has bonded with us, that she is an unfit mother, and that the child’s best interests will be served by remaining with us.” “That’s why we need custody now,” Geoff said. Geoff and Karen are all that is wrong with PAPs. In upstate New York, a baby is found outside a church with a note indicating that the birthmother wanted the baby to go to a local couple, Geoff and Karen Burns. “Just as a logical starting point, wouldn’t you say we were better parent prospects than a girl who would leave a baby out in the cold on the back steps to the church kitchen?” “We’ve been up one side and down another with them.” She opened her arms, encompassing herself and her husband. And there were a lot of things wrong with the prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) in this story. As an adoptee myself, it’s one of those subjects that makes me bristle the way it’s traditionally been presented.

This was a book I nearly quit on after the first chapter. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

All Creatures Great And Small (Original Series).

In the bleak midwinter by julia spencer fleming