Back in 1994, my wife and I learned that we wouldn’t be able to conceive children due to infertility issues. Of course, this was an emotional thing to learn about, and we went through the standard process of denial, and finally acceptance. We spent a couple of years, and a lot of money, going the route of donor sperm, intrauterine insemination and finally in-vitro, all without success. It seemed all we were doing was making doctors wealthy. In 1997 we started looking into adoption, not knowing what we might face in the years ahead.
Please keep in mind these were our experiences and not everyone will experience the same things.
Our adventure started at one of the local adoption agencies in our home town. Here we learned that a domestic adoption for a caucasian baby would cost around $30k. We didn’t have that kind of money, so we talked with them about other alternatives. The agency shared a video with us about an orphanage in the Ukraine that showed toddlers sitting in cribs banging their heads on a wall. The children were malnourished and there was no medical history available for them. Though our hearts ached for these children we had many concerns about where this could lead. In this situation, we decided to move on and consider other options.
The big benefit to an International adoption is that the children are usually available immediately and there is no risk of a parent reclaiming the child. Please keep in mind we watched this video 30 years ago and many things have changed since then.
In the late ’90s, we met with a California-based adoption coordinator who was advertising her services on the Internet. It turned out to be a $4,000 take-your-money-and-run marketing scam. Fortunately, we took notes during our calls, finding inconsistencies about a birthmother the coordinator was representing from Arizona. To make a long story short, many things we were told simply weren’t true, so we quickly ended the relationship. But, since the coordinator required an up front check before introducing us to birthparents, a check cashing service in Los Angeles area cashed the check after we placed a stop payment on it. Thankfully, our bank protected us because the check cashing service didn’t follow proper procedures, but this situation opened our eyes to the world of adoption scams.
Between 1998 and 2002, we invested a great deal of time and money on adoption agency fees, home studies, attorneys, social workers, and travel. We made trips to Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma and Kansas as we worked with agencies and birthparents in hopes of bringing home a little bundle of joy. In our quest to grow our family, we dealt with hostile hospital nurses who believed adoption was wrong, we faced a scam run by drug dealers wanting to sell a prostitutes newborn, and we worked with the FBI to help catch a prostitute running an adoption scam from a hotel.
In the summer of 2000, we had a private adoption fall through due to poor judgement and irrational behavior from our police chief. A baby girl from Arizona that had been legally placed in our home for adoption by her birth mother was forcibly removed from our home while I was on a business trip. Officers surrounded our home and took the baby from my wife at gunpoint, because the baby’s birth father (who was meeting with the chief of police) claimed his daughter had been kidnapped. In the aftermath, we learned the birth father (a convicted criminal) was flown to Texas by another couple in California so the birth father could bring the baby to them. By the time our attorney could engage fully in this matter, the birth father and baby were on a flight to California, and it was in the air. We were told there was nothing that could be done since (a) the baby wasn’t born in Texas and (b) the flight was no longer on the ground. Had the police chief followed proper process and listened to both sides, the outcome could have been very different.
In 2002, after 2 years of healing, we were ready to move on with our lives and give adoption another chance. I went to my computer, keyed in “adoption” to a young Google search engine, and www.adoption.com came up as the first hit. They offered a service I hadn’t seen or heard of before – www.parentprofiles.com. The site appeared to be an established marketing service that would give us something we needed – broad coverage to tell birthparents what we could offer a child without the influence agencies burdened us with. From our experiences, agencies tended to bias the matching process between adoptive parents and birth parents, using metrics like “how long we had been waiting” and “how much we had paid the agency”. Parent Profiles seemed to be a fresh approach that would allow us to build on a foundation we already had in place through Little Flower Adoptions in Dallas, TX (we were certified adoptive and foster parents at the time).
Within a week, we were qualified to post our Dear Birthparents letter and profile on the Parent Profiles website. Our profile went live on a Tuesday afternoon and within 24 hours, a young, unmarried, pregnant couple still in their first trimester called us to talk about how much our profile had touched them. My wife and the prospective birth mother talked for hours on the phone and developed an immediate bond. The four of us met in Houston a few days later, and over time we developed an inseparable bond. As we nurtured the relationship, our agency’s social workers provided counseling services for the birth family.
As good fortune has it, this couple placed their healthy baby girl with us eight months later in 2003, and the adoption was finalized in the same year. It was scary to go through eight months of waiting with the fear of our previous experiences, but the time allowed us to develop a relationship of incredible respect the was filled with experiences that we never thought we would get to experience (think ultrasounds, feeling the baby kick, and being in the operating room watching and videotaping the C-Section of our daughter)! Over the life of our daughter, we have maintained a very open adoption with the birth parents. We get together at least once a year, share life experiences over the phone, and celebrate occasions together. The entire experience has been a huge blessing to all of us.
When our daughter was five, we wanted to grow our family again. We stuck with what worked for us previously, and after updating our story, we began the process again. We used the same agency in Dallas for the home study and the same parent profiles service to post our Dear Birthparents letter. The home study and background check process took a couple of months. Once the Dear Birthparents letter went live, it took roughly two weeks before we heard from a couple who had seen our family profile. From there, we involved our social worker again for counseling, and everything fell into place. We met the family a week later to get to know them, and enjoyed watching our kids play together. Two months later, they congratulated us for being the new parents of a healthy baby boy. .
In both cases, the birthparents wanted open adoptions, which we were willing to provide. I can’t tell you how rewarding life has been since we became parents. Our kids are bright, innovative people whom we’re very proud of, and we’re all looking forward to the contributions they will bring to our world. Our daughter is now in college and majoring in bioscience, and our son is wrapping up his final years in high school. One of his aspirations is to become a member of the US armed forces. Both kids love wildlife, our National Parks, and they’ve developed passions for astro, landscape and wildlife photography.
If you are thinking about going through an open adoption, congratulations! I can highly recommend this path. Few things in life can be so fulfilling, but there are a few major lessons learned that should be shared to make your life easier. This is based on our own adventures and lessons learned.
- Go into this with your eyes wide open, and with an open mind. Understand that you will meet people from all walks of life with many different life circumstances and beliefs.
- Decide what expenses you are willing to pay for and understand that you may have to go through this multiple times (we did). Some birth families need help with food, medical or other bills. Keep in mind any financial help is considered a donation. If the adoption falls through, the money will not be returned. It’s also a good idea (and may be legally required) to have any donations go through your agency so there is a record of it.
- Always follow the adoption laws in your state and/or the state which the birth family is from. If you are moving across state lines, there are special considerations which must be addressed through your agency and the courts (such as the Interstate Compact for the Placement of Children, also known as ICPC).
- Understand that this is a journey. There are families who can’t care for their child, and they want to place their baby in a good home. The key is in forming a bond that everyone involved can relate to and respect.
- Select an agency and attorney in your home state. Make sure they have a good reputation, and ask lots of questions to make sure you are comfortable with them. Understand how they will represent you to birthparents, because it is important to get this right. If you are planning to do most of the footwork, see if they will provide their services once you’ve matched with a birth family. This is commonly known as an Identified Adoption.
- Take the time to study other parent profiles, and build one from the heart that represents your family. Include pictures that demonstrate how loving and effective you are with other kids!
- As you talk to potential birth parents be honest about yourself and the type of relationship that you’re hoping for. Don’t be deceptive in any way as this could haunt you in the future. Establish healthy boundaries for the relationship with them. Make sure contact information is shared and kept up-to-date. Answer email in a timely manner.
- Get to know the birth parents. Know that it’s awkward for them just as much as it is for you, at least until you get to know one another. We met and developed relationships with extended family from our birth parents, because it just made a lot of sense. Be sincere. You are dealing with people and emotions that can’t be taken lightly, and are likely to last for life.
- Understand that birth families may not know the gender of the baby. If you are planning to be gender specific, you may make the birth family uncomfortable. Be up front about this in your profile.
- If you know which hospital or birthing center the child will be born at and there is time, go there with the birth mother and talk with the social worker on staff to make sure it’s an adoption-friendly place. Get them to commit to signing a birth parent plan, which is a document that expresses the birth mother’s wishes. It can include simple things such as who will be in the delivery room, or who holds the baby first. The real purpose is to communicate the birth mother’s wishes to the staff. It helps establish boundaries for people that may not agree with adoption, encouraging them to keep their opinions to themselves. This is a lesson we found out about the hard way.
- Keep commitments made to minimize heartbreak and broken relationships later. If you commit to send pictures to the birth family, set a reminder in your calendar to do it, or create a shared photo folder that can be shared with them. Put updated photos in the folder based on what’s agreed.
- Finally, be patient, and don’t appear desperate. When the time is right for the match to occur, it will happen. Sometimes at the most unexpected moment.
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