Adoption Services or Baby Selling?

As an adoption professional, we network with other adoption facilitators, agencies, and attorneys in order to locate families or birth mothers for specific situations.  With the recent rise in abortion rates and drop in the national birth rate, there have been fewer situations overall for everyone.  I think that is responsible for some desperation in the adoption world.  Lately, I have been stunned at some of the e-mails that have arrived in my in box.  Typically, the birth mothers have their choice of families (as it should be), but a recent e-mail outlined a situation with an agency in which a Caucasian baby boy was being placed for adoption.  After a mind-boggling list of exorbitant expenses, the child could be had for a mere $42,000.00.  I am baffled.  How is this not baby selling?  Is it simply because an agency is offering the situation?  The note insinuated that anyone interested and prepared to pay the fees could have the closed situation.  Another e-mail offered a special needs baby for a fee of $32,000.00.  Since when did we put a price tag on infants?  While I am well aware that there are legitimate expenses including agency expenses and fees, and some potential birth mother expenses (none of those fees were for medical, by the way), these fees are way out of the ballpark.  In the past, we have charged zero for special needs situations, just as a means to find a good family for a hard to place infant.  That someone would charge such obviously inflated fees to families willing to take on a challenge is amazing to me.  Why does it seem that adoption has become so outrageously expensive?  Every agency and facilitator I know is struggling with the downturn in the number of adoptions, but fees up into the 40K and 50K range that used to be unheard of are becoming all too common.  We need to have some national adoption laws because leaving it up to the states has been a fiasco.  Adoptive parents in Indiana don't have the same rights as adoptive parents in California, and birth mothers in Pennsylvania and Ohio aren't able to get the support that those in Nebraska or Missouri do.  We won't even talk about birth father rights in Utah since they are basically non-existant.  I think caps on the amounts that can be charged need to be in place, as well as some uniform laws about offering situations on line for specific fees.  All agencies have or can locate families to adopt if fees are reasonable.  There is no need for a baby to go to the highest bidder.