How the Adoption Process Works
Adoption’s been in the news quite a bit recently, and not for great reasons.
Curious about how the adoption process actually works for normal people?
It’s hard! Here’s how our homestudy went. The agency needed to verify that we would be OK to raise a baby.
We had to prove 4 things.
- Safety. The fire department inspected our house!
- Finances. We will have to pay over $16,000 for adoption fees (in addition to hospital expenses), and we’re saving money in the bank like crazy.
- Childcare support. Detailed parental leave plans and daycare. Pediatrician on call.
- Relationships. We’ll be able to have healthy relationships with our families and our baby’s birthmother. Every adoption is a traumatic event. So much homework about resetting stereotypes!
We had to prove all of these things because the adoption agency wants to be sure that our baby and our family will be OK! Note: these items are beyond what our crisis pregnancy center provides.
(The process for foster families is similar.)
Our agency focuses on healthy matches for the baby, birth family, and adoptive family: The Adoption Triad. These are kids, not commodities.
Adoption can be beautiful, but it is not a silver bullet. It’s not easy. And it’s not for everyone. In full disclosure, our family has been considered but not chosen twice already. For the record, we DON’T want to raise the “supply of infants” in order to meet adoptive market demands; that attitude would be really crass.
This is just our experience with adoption in Ohio. Other cases might be different!
In retrospect, we feel it’s crazy that none of those things were audited before we tried to have a biological baby. (Which is NOT to say that all people who have babies should have been audited, or are somehow less-than for not having done all this homework! It’s just – wow, the different ways in which readiness for parenting is measured, you know?)
If you’d like to support more adoptions in concrete ways, here are some ways to help.
- Listen to stories from birth mothers and adoptees. They’re real people.
- Learn about ways childcare could become more affordable. Systemic action is required to address systemic problems.
- Volunteer with refugee assistance programs.
Hopefully this helps clear the air a little.