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.

Internet Marketing of Adoption

The Internet is a part of our lives and is here to stay. It is a wonderful tool for gathering information and we have all come to depend upon it. However, there are times when ethical lines are crossed and good judgment goes by the wayside. I am talking about the practice of putting birth mother information or adoptive parent profiles on the Internet for all to see. The first issue I have with this is privacy. Privacy evaporates on the Internet. Even when you take things down, much of the time those old posts can be found. Personal information is out there and it's not limited to those who need to know. In many cases, there are phone numbers listed. This puts adoptive parents in a precarious position because they have no idea who is accessing that information. There's no buffer to protect adoptive families who are all too vulnerable. I wonder how many times an unscrupulous person has purported to be someone they're not in an attempt to extort money from an adoptive family. You can read about it all over the adoption chat boards (another hot topic!). Secondarily, how many birth moms are really "shopping" for an adoptive family on the Internet? On one adoption website, the adoptive families are instructed to provide their phone numbers. Presumably, birth parents (and others) call them. If the situation isn't right or doesn't match with them, the adoptive parents become glorified office assistants for the agency, writing intake information and forwarding calls to the agency. I guess it saves the agency money because they don't have to hire additional workers, but what are the adoptive parents paying for, if not service and professionalism? Additionally, I wonder how long it takes a family to match when they are competing with hundreds of other couples on the same site? What happened to taking some time to get to know a birth mother and finding out her preferences and what she really wants? What happened to telling her about prospective families who may have a common bond with her that can't be communicated in a few pages posted on a web site? Birth mothers and adoptive families deserve better than this. These websites are more like Internet dating sites, where people -- based on looks -- decide whether to "keep this one" or "throw this one out". It reeks of baby selling, with some agencies even putting "prices" on each baby. Why is this legal? I have no idea, but I object to it. I think it's trafficking in human beings. The adoption of a child shouldn't be like shopping for a puppy. Perhaps Dateline should do a show along the lines of their highly successful "To Catch a Predator", only this one would be entitled "To Catch a Baby Broker". For those who do these postings, hiding under an agency banner or behind a shield doesn't make it right. It's time that our legislators look into these practices and make some changes. If you care, write your congressperson.