Imagine my son’s delivery room. He has just been born, and our family is huddled together with the love, warmth and security that only a mother and father can provide.

I wish it had been that way, but I wasn’t there. I couldn’t be there. I chose to work in an Alaskan fishing village while my son was being born so I wouldn’t have to see him being given to another family.

November is National Adoption Month and I chose this opportunity to write to you about the toughest and best decision I’ve ever made.

It’s a complicated story.

After graduating high school, I moved to Maui for college. My best lady-friend moved in with me and we soon fell in love. We were careless and for my 19th birthday I learned I would become a father.

We were 18, unmarried, dependent and without health care. We were also strangers in an expensive tropical land, largely unknown to us. It felt like all we had was each other.

I’d never made up my mind about my stance on abortion, but she had. She was Catholic, and would never consider it; she would rather die herself. I was greatly torn, stunned by the reality of the situation, and hoped my trouble would dissolve itself somehow. I don’t know how the option of adoption came into consideration, but I soon began to spend whole days thinking about it.

It struck me that my problem with becoming a father was that it would only be an illusion. In my situation, I would be working full-time and dropping out of college to be a “father,” and in return I would never have any time to enjoy my child. This was something I could not accept. I wanted to be an attentive father, like mine had been, more than anything in the world, and that would not be possible under these circumstances.

Then I thought of others like me. I thought of good men, who pained in frustration for the chance to raise children — the way I pained.

After that, I couldn’t even think of abortion. I couldn’t imagine denying that pleasure of fatherhood to any man, as I was being forced to deny it to myself. So I made my decision; I made the right one.

Today I feel it was the right choice in every way. I am reminded of how good a choice it was every time I receive a picture in the mail, hear my son’s voice on his birthday, or get to give him a big squeeze when I visit his adoptive family in Colorado.

The adoption didn’t cost us anything. In fact, the adoptive parents, whom we selected personally from one of the many open adoption Web sites that exist, actually helped us pay our bills after my angel got to the point where she couldn’t work anymore.

Adoption needs to be considered more seriously by young people because it turns the dangerous, costly or dream-shattering reality of premature parenthood into something loving and beautiful.

I am not a hard-line pro-lifer. I don’t believe the government has the right to tell people they cannot make the decisions they feel they need to, but that doesn’t mean I don’t shed a tear for every child that receives a salty saline injection instead of a parent’s love.

The choice of adoption gave me a wonderful new family, a new person for me to love passionately for the rest of my life and even helped us pay bills when things got hard.

But even though we made the right choice, it didn’t prevent me from making the biggest mistake of my life, which was not being at my son’s birth.

I was afraid that if I was there watching, I wouldn’t be able to let go of him. Maybe I wouldn’t have, but running from your toughest choices is never the right way to do things; I should have been there.

As we celebrate National Adoption Month, remind those in your life that adoption doesn’t cost anything, and allows you to do something beautiful for the world.

By Publisher Brennan Purtzer