On the season finale of MTV’s Sixteen & Pregnant, the young couple chose to give the child up for adoption. I don’t think I’ve ever watched an adoption that way before, so it was very enlightening concerning the process. I have to say that you leave the show feeling a great admiration for the young couple who makes the huge selfless decision. However, I have to honestly say that even though I would love to think that I myself could make the same decision, I don’t believe I could.

Not only did the two make the decision, but they made it without the support of their families. Without the girl’s mother’s signature, they could not swap the child on hospital property & had to go across the street. As they handed the child over to the new better equipped parents, you couldn’t help but feel they were driving off with the couple’s heart.

As expected, there were many moments of indecision along with buckets of tears. There was the awkward moment where the biological parents took pictures and some of their friends and family filled the room after the birth. Just as everything appears as a normal setting, there’s a knock on the door from the adoption agency representative who gently reminds them that the “real” parents are patiently waiting on their new bundle of joy.

The grandfather (who looks to only be in his 30’s) plea to keep the child gives the argument of “all a child needs is love.” His son says that his child deserves the best life has to offer and looks at his surroundings and says that they aren’t it. The couple flips through the adoptive parent’s album that is filled with pictures of a big house, younger days filled with their love of sports and each other, and traces of their current lives that are rooted deeply in their church.

There’s no way that you can really argue that these young kids who still have their whole life ahead of them didn’t make the right decision. But there’s still a part of you that can’t imagine where they got the courage to do it.