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.

Angels Among Us

For those who wonder, I can tell you with full certainty that there are angels living among us.  I've seen many things that point to this, but none more convincing than those responding to a recent e-mail I had sent out to special needs agencies, adoptive parents, and contacts within my adoption circle.  It has always been our mission to find a home for every baby who needs one, no matter the situation.  And, thankfully, we have always found willing families, no matter the situation.  Every once in a while, a special needs situation comes up and it can be a challenge to locate the perfect family.  But, somehow, some way, there is always that special family that is the right match for the baby.  Last week, we went in search of a family for a baby who was born with severe hydrocephalus and limited brain function.  The response has been surprising.  This baby will need a lifetime of care, special attention, and will not have much potential.  Still, there are families who want this baby to be in their family.  Many families.  There are, indeed, angels among us.

Adoption Issues - The Economic Impact on Adoption

Over the 15 years I have been doing adoptions, private independent adoption has changed a great deal. Part of that may just be evolution, but the economy has played a huge part in changing the scope of domestic adoption. Many of us involved in adoptions believed that with a poor economy, we would have more adoptions. Birth mothers who were having trouble with finances would have to face some tough decisions with the economy getting worse and worse. On the contrary, what actually happened was that the birth rate went down and the abortion rate went up. While current statistics are showing an increase in teen pregnancy, not many teens actually place their babies for adoption. If they are not prepared to parent, their parents are typically young enough to help. Those who would be birth parents in a better economic time are simply opting not to get pregnant or to abort if they do. I think that someone who may have considered parenting and then realized that financially they couldn't do it, are not getting that far now. They know right up front that they can't do it financially (who can?), so they are more careful not to have an accidental pregnancy or they opt for the alternative. The actual birth rate today is at the lowest it has been since the great depression.

What does this mean? It means that independent private adoptions are slow everywhere. I just finished reading an article which detailed the closure of an adoption agency in England that had been in operation for 45 years. They just don't have the adoption rates that they used to have and they can't pay their bills or afford to stay in business. That has happened here too. Last year, some major adoption agencies closed their doors. One of them, Commonwealth Adoptions, had offices in multiple states and was a longstanding agency.

How has this impacted waiting families? Families are understandably distressed with the longer wait. Some are looking to multiple avenues, but are still hitting dead ends. All of our families will eventually adopt, but the waits are longer than they were in years past. That said, for every action there is an opposite -- a reaction. At some point, the economy will turn around, things will get back to normal and, if history is any indicator, we'll have a baby boom. (We're all waiting for that!)

One of the outcomes of this new economic situation is that women who never thought that they would place their children are facing such difficult financial times, they are placing older children. We have had a number of such placements over the past year and we are currently working on placing 3 year old twins. For those families waiting to adopt, some have opted to consider children older than newborn. There are many things to consider with older children that do not come into play with infants. More on older child adoption tomorrow...

Ethiopian Adoption Scam?

I read with interest today a story by CBS concerning a particular Ethiopian adoption in which three sisters were adopted by a family who were told they were 7, 6, and 4. They turned out to be 13, 11, and 6 and most of what they had been told was not consistent with the story the children gave them. CBS News reported that "Some American Agencies and their staff engage in highly questionable conduct". They were apparently referring to the agency cited in their story -- Christian World Adoption. I don't know anything about that particular agency, but ironically a friend of mine came home just this weekend with her Ethiopian children. She stated that the conditions they were living in were horrid and that there was mold on the walls and the orphanage was nothing more than a hut. The babies are small and under-nourished and in need of a great deal of TLC. They hadn't even been held and were in need of antibiotics and treatment for severe diaper rash.

The fact is, in third world countries where there is no Hague accreditation, there is no oversight of these orphanages or agencies there. It's true that there are American agencies who are not above board. The same can be said of anything or any profession. The bigger problem is what is going on behind the scenes in these foreign countries. Foreign facilitators are taking money from multiple U.S. agencies and are not putting it back into their facilities. They are essentially lining their pockets while the children are left to languish in conditions that you wouldn't allow your dog to live in. It's no wonder, then, that if they feel they can earn more for each placement, they may consider acquiring children in less than legitimate ways.

Some would say that no matter how the children are retrieved, they will have a much better life being adopted into foreign households where they will be treated well, fed, and clothed. But where do we draw the line? There have to be measures taken so that there is no incentive for these adoption brokers to do more and more in order to get rich, while the children suffer. I would love to go to Ethiopia and renovate an orphanage so that the children would have a clean, safe place to live while they await adoption. However, if those who run the orphanage are making thousands of dollars each week, then why aren't they improving the conditions themselves?

Hague compliant countries are on the right track, but what about the countries that are not Hague compliant? What are we going to do about that? It would be easy to say just stop all adoptions until they get everything in order, but the children would be the ones paying the price. This is a bigger problem than anyone can imagine without seeing it. I think this is one for Anderson Cooper.