Dear Abby, the iconic giver of advice to the lovelorn (whose column has been taken over by a daughter), often was w-r-o-n-g on the advice she gave and especially in the selection of letters she published.
    I’ll get to the one brilliant thought she imparted in a few paragraphs; meanwhile, how has she missed the mark? Let me count the ways:

    Usually the letters she gets run like this:
    Dear Abby: I’m pregnant for the fourth time and the guy I’m with refuses like to let me use disposable diapers on my three babies (from two other guys). Well, “Jim” complains that buying Pampers is too expensive and that it takes away from his beer money. I finally put my foot down, gave him some money and told him to march down to the 7-11 to buy some Pampers. Well, my question is: Since the store gives a free Slurpee and some trading stamps with every purchase, who should get them? I really could use the stamps to help pay for my Plan B pills.
    Should I give up our baby? All three of them? P.S. I’ll be starting high school this fall.”
    Sometimes the answer people seek is blatantly obvious. But Abby misses it nevertheless.
    Someone once wrote to ask why a department store Santa Claus in Appalachia said what he did to her child. It seems that when her kid got her turn on Santa’s lap, he asked her where she was born. The child gave Richmond, Va., as her home town, to which Santa replied that state didn’t exist.
    Santa said, “There is a West Virginia, but no Virginia.”
    Now why would Santa say that? Can any reader supply the answer?
    The one brilliant thing Abby wrote deals with adoption. She once mentioned that some young couples try too hard to conceive, and when no baby appears in the hopper, they adopt. And what happens then?
    Conceivably, the wife gets pregnant right after signing the adoption papers.
    Abby pointed out that one couple’s adopted child didn’t look like a sibling but looked enough like his new parents to pass for their blood.
    And when people would ask the couple, “Are they both really your children, the reply would be, “One I gave birth to and the other I adopted, but I can’t remember which is which.”
    Now that was brilliant. Why should people feel compelled to make distinctions? And who ever ruled that adopted kids deserve less love?
    Before we became parents, we sponsored an Amer-Asian child through the Christian Children’s Fund. Sponsorship entitled us to twice-yearly personal letters from the child, photographs, the opportunity to send gifts, and the warm feeling that we were making a difference.
    We reread each letter and felt enriched that $12 a month provided such satisfaction. But one day, after a couple of years of sponsorship, we received a letter that began with, “We regret to inform you that …”
    Fearing a tragedy, I forced myself to finish the letter, and I still wish the writer had used a different choice of words.
    The “regret to inform you” context was merely that our child was doing well and was being taken from the nursery and placed into a home. The “regret” was that our sponsorship of that child was ending. And, by the way, would we consider having our monthly donation go toward sponsoring a different child, a boy?
    It continues to amaze us now how deeply we cared for a girl, now approaching her mid-40s, whom we never met, will never see, and who lives halfway around the world.
    After our third boy was born, in 1978, we traveled to Albuquerque to look into adopting a girl to love and also to balance our male-to-female ratio.
    For myriad reasons, the adoption never took place.
    But we have no doubt that our joy in welcoming another child, albeit an adopted child, would be no different from what we’ve experienced with our natural-born children.
    Tuesday’s newspaper describes a court decision that could change the face of the rights of adoptive vs. natural parents. The case isn’t cut-and-dried.
    Both sides need to be heard. But I still think it’s wrong when courts award children to the natural parents who years earlier opted to put the baby up for adoption.
    It’s heart-wrenching to learn that an Albuquerque man who fathered a son 30 months ago has gained better footing in his fight for sole custody of the child. He says he didn’t become aware of the existence of the child until just recently. Wouldn’t a responsible person bother to check? Wasn’t he ever curious about his chromosomological relationship with the mother and child?
    Following an appeal by the birth father, a judge wrote, “In resolving the best interest of the child … the court should not be bound by the tradition … of awarding the child like a trophy to whichever party wins the litigation.”
    Many are curious about the results of the case and the precedent it sets. If the adoptive parents lose possession of the child, that’ll likely discourage others from attempting to adopt in the future.
    As for me, I’m rooting for the real parents.
    (And by “real” I don’t refer to the sperm donor and the incubator but to the adoptive family who gave real love to the boy for the past two-and-a-half years.)