I consider it fairly vain of myself to actually start this thread, but I don’t really have any friends that I could talk about this with besides my wife (who’s going through this with me; we do plenty of talking about it) and family (who have their own problems), so I really just need a place to kinda talk this out. Hope nobody minds too much…
My wife, Sunny, and I are in the process of adopting a kid to grow our family to four humans plus the dog. A couple years ago we never would have guessed we would find ourselves in this position someday, but life is like that sometimes. I’ve mentioned it here once or twice before, but while we were pregnant with our son, Squirt, we discovered that we’re the 1 in 900 white couples who are both carriers for cystic fibrosis. Squirt was lucky: he got my carrier gene but not his mom’s, so he gets to live as normal a life as anybody else. But Sunny and I decided that we wouldn’t take the chance again, so when we started feeling like our family wasn’t yet complete, we eventually settled on adoption to complete it.
It’s been a somewhat lengthy, but very entertaining, ride so far, and we haven’t even met our second child, Spud, yet. As I write this we’re almost ready to go active with our agency, meaning that they will start showing our profile to moms who are looking to put their child up for adoption. We’ve had to ask ourselves some tough questions to get us to this point, but we feel like they’ve made us better prepared to be adoptive parents. It’s thrilling and scary at the same time to think that somewhere out there our child may have already been conceived.
I’m not really sure where to start describing my thoughts and feelings here, so I think I’ll leave it here for the OP, except for some general details. We’re adopting from a company called American Adoptions. The average time to match an adopting couple with a birth mom and baby for our program there is 1 to 9 months, and we’ll be adopting a child from age 0 to 18 months from the United States. Our agency only handles semi-open and open adoptions, and we’ve opted for as much openness as the birth mom/family is comfortable with, so we’re also excited about the possibility of adding someone to our extended family.
So ask away. What can I tell you about this whole crazy process?
Firstly, you and your wife are awesome and amazing people for going this road.
How did you choose your agency?
I hope your process is as smooth and drama-free as possible.
Have you read “The Kid” by Dan Savage? He and his husband did the open adoption thing.
Did you have to write an essay for your profile to show to birth moms? If so, what did you say in it?
Congratulations and best wishes on your process. My wife and I have discussed the possibility of adopting a little girl from China sometime in the future.
What’s your total estimated out of pocket costs up to getting your child?
Does your insurance cover adoptions?
Did you put any restrictions on gender, race, other characteristics of the birth mother, etc.?
Are you prepared if the birth mother backs out after delivery? (This has happened to two different friends of ours.)
Sr. Olives and I plan to adopt within the next 2-3 years so I am watching this thread with great interest. We have pretty nearly settled on adopting from the state rather than a private agency.
Where there any specific characteristics of your future kid (race, health status, etc.) that the two of you decided were dealbreakers? Did you and your wife have similar ideas about the kind of adoption you wanted or did it take time to reach a compromise? How did you arrive at the decision to go through a private agency and to adopt domestically?
What are your biggest fears?
very good on considering health risks before having another child conceived by you.
extra very good for populating your family with already existing children. that is a very good thing to do after having 0 or 1 children conceived by you.
Hope everything goes well for your family. I think you’re making a great decision. I think more people should consider adoption. A lot of people seem to have old fashioned prejudices about adoption and totally close their mind to it.
What kind of reactions have you gotten from your extended family?
How do you plan to prepare your current child for the new baby?
Ask the ________, and then leave?
Thanks for saying we’re awesome! We think/hope we’ll be good adoptive parents, but it’s nice to hear that others think this is a good decision too.
We chose American Adoptions primarily because we felt like they did the best job screening adoptive couples. I don’t know if it makes sense to say it like that, but I mentioned in my OP that we’ve had to ask ourselves some tough questions; well, that was almost all a result of the questions that our agency asked of us. We had to consider the birth mom’s drug use and family history of certain diseases, things we’d never really thought about. They also specialize in open adoptions, which is what we were interested in, and a portion of the adoption fee is refundable if the mom changes her mind, which was a nice little bonus.
Jeez, hang on just a second here… I just posted my OP yesterday morning! I’m thrilled at the number of questions I’ve already gotten, and I’ll get to them just as soon as I can, but I have a life outside of this thread, too.
Sunny has read The Kid, and she loved it. She recommended that I read it (it’s on her Kindle), but I don’t know how in the world I’ll have time for that any time soon. We’ll see…
We had to write a number of essays and a letter for birth moms to read. For the essays we got to pick which topics we wrote about out of a list of possibilities, and I think we had to write six altogether. A few of those went into the four-page paper profile that birth moms will see, but all of them are going into the online profile that anyone will be able to browse. I can provide a link to our online profile or email a PDF version of our paper one; if you’re interested in seeing what one looks like, PM me and I’ll hook you up.
Has considering adoption colored your opinion on a woman’s right to choose?
If you get the chance to meet the bio-dad, what will you ask him?
Are you willing to pay the birth mother/father over and above the agency’s requirements if they ask?
Have you and your wife talked about making your marriage strong enough to survive a child suffering from prenatal drug exposure for weeks, months or years after they’re born?
In our pursuit of surrogacy we’ve talked to many other parents who’ve created families in a non-traditional way and heard every adoption story imaginable. I hope my questions don’t come off as insensitive, I apologize in advance for any offense perceived.
First, good luck on your adoption, whenever you and your family decide to take that journey! I hope this thread can help you at least a little.
Our adoption budget is $25,000, but that doesn’t cover the profile fee ($325), the activation fee ($2000 for our program, which I’ll explain in a second, $10,000 for the other program), the homestudy ($1100 for ours, which we’re getting from a third party), or the travel to and from wherever our birth mom turns out to be located. Overall, the expenses are… considerable, but not nearly as much as it could be.
I’m in the military, and the only insurance we have is the health insurance which covers Spud’s health as soon as we’re matched.
I mentioned different programs with American Adoptions, and here’s where that comes into play: “agency assisted” adoptions are for African-American children, and “traditional” adoptions are for all others. Because of the greater numbers of African-American kids that are put up for adoption, the government provides subsidies for adopting parents, making “agency assisted” the cheaper and quicker option. We were originally signed up for both programs, and decided that the only race we wouldn’t be okay with adopting would be Arab, because of the fact that I’ve fought in Iraq and Afghanistan (I know there’s a difference between Arab and Iraqi/Afghani, but the agency doesn’t really split hairs in that regard because they don’t place many children that fit those criteria).
We switched to the agency assisted program so that we could save money on the adoption, and therefore have more money to spend raising our child, so our baby will be at least partly African-American. We didn’t put any restrictions on gender, and only a few on family history of certain diseases.
The other big one was the birth mom’s drug use. We weren’t too concerned with stuff like antidepressants, but illicit drugs were another thing. We know we would be okay raising a baby who was born addicted, but since we’re looking for an open adoption, we decided not to accept those cases, because we don’t want to raise our child with those kinds of people in his/her life. If it takes a while for us to get matched, we may change to asking for a semi-open adoption (all contact goes through the agency) and allow for more drug use on the birth mother’s part.
Well, we’ll deal with this only if the need arises. We’ve talked about the possibility, of course, but we think it’s kinda like preparing ourselves for a miscarriage… there’s only so much preparing to be done, but mostly you have to work through it with love and compassion for one another.
Speaking as the father of a 7 year old adopted son…
One thing we were told by both our family doctor AND the adoption professionals is that, while nobody should be thrilled about drug use by a birth mother, adoptive parents often worry about the wrong things. Our social worker told us, “To put it bluntly, if you had to choose between the baby of a heroin addict and the baby of an alcoholic, I would tell you to go for the heroin addict’s baby every time.”
Our total adoption expenditures were about $25,000 seven years ago, and I can only imagine things cost more now.
One thing we found is that, if you’re open to adopting a black child, things mover MUCH more quickly. We stayed in touch with many of the couples who attended a griup seminar with our chosen agency, and the first three couples to get babies all adopted black kids. Indeed, the first couple from our group was a lesbian couple from San Antonio who took home a little black girl just weeks after our seminar.
We didn’t consider that route because, even though I have zero doubt we would have loved a black child, there are JUST enough idiots in our extended families to have made things uncomfortable for the child.
Well, now I’m extra glad I started this thread! 
I kinda covered the first part of this in my previous post… there isn’t much that we wouldn’t accept in Spud. Our not wanting to adopt a child of Iraqi or Afghani descent was kinda selfish on our part, but I just can’t imagine telling my son or daughter that I shot at and tried to kill Iraqis and Afghanis at one point. Especially with an open adoption, we’d have other people of that same descent in our extended family, and that would be terribly awkward.
Sunny and I definitely knew that we wanted an open adoption right away. Her mom put Sunny’s sister up for adoption many years ago and has never heard from her in the decades since. She still feels bad that she was never able to answer the questions her daughter must have had at some point. For that reason, and because we think that more people in a child’s life to love it is a positive thing, we wanted an open adoption. That, in turn, really narrowed down the options as far as the places we could adopt from.
Without a doubt, that we won’t feel an instant parental connection with Spud. We already love him/her as an abstract part of our family, but our biggest fear by far is that we will actually see our child for the first time and feel nothing for it.
Good for you. I have adopted two kids and had a thread about it a few years ago.
Oh, and you will fill an instant love for you child. I promise.
Everybody’s different. I fell in love with my (adopted) son the moment I saw him, but not everybody has the same experience.
But let’s face it, not everybody falls in love with their own biological children right away, either! I hope you adore your new child right away, but if you don’t, don’t assume it has anything to do with adoption.
In any case, since you already have a kid, you know that, in the early days, you’re going to be incredibly busy taking care of the new baby’s basic needs. You’ll have too much to do to spend much time worrying about whether you love him/her enough!
By the time things get less hectic, I have no doubt you’ll have bonded.
Our family is 100% supportive of us adopting. The few problems so far have stemmed from the fact that we’re adopting a black baby. Just this week, Sunny’s sister expressed her concern for us, starting her statement with, “Well, I don’t have a problem with it, but…” :rolleyes:
Really, if I’m totally honest with you, there was some concern and questions from my family many months ago when we told them we’d be adopting. Once we explained our reasoning, though, they’ve been extremely supportive, at least to us. Whether anyone in the family has private doubts, I obviously couldn’t say.
As for preparing Squirt for meeting Spud, so far he’s been good with very small kids. Sunny runs a daycare service out of the house part-time, so Squirt’s had plenty of exposure to other kids so far. Unless Spud and the birth family are more than perhaps a 16-hour drive away (a sizable portion of the country from here), we’ll be driving to pick him/her up, and we’ll take Squirt with us. That way he’ll be involved with his sibling from the start. If we have to fly, Squirt will most likely still come us. The real sticking point, and one of the few things we still need to determine in this process, is how much leave I’ll be able to get when Spud is born. It’s looking likely that I’ll be able to go at first, but it’s unknown whether I’ll be able to stay as long as I need to, which could be up to a month to get everything finalized. If I have to come back home, I’ll probably bring Squirt with me to ease Sunny’s burden traveling back.
A little. Mostly I still feel like adoption is the right choice for some women and abortion may be a better option for others, but this process has gotten me wondering how many moms-to-be even consider adoption, or if the default thinking when “taking care of” an unwanted pregnancy is always abortion.
A lot of the same questions we want to ask the mom. We want to know how they arrived at the decision to put their child up for adoption, and how open they’re willing to make the adoption. Our hope is that the father and mother are on good terms with one another and have made the decision as a couple, but we’re aware this is a pretty tall order.
Absolutely not.
We hope that our misadventure with cystic fibrosis prepared us a little bit. There’s no doubt in our minds that our marriage is strong enough to survive a special-needs child. There’s no way for me to explain exactly why we believe this is so, but we believe it as strongly as it’s possible to believe.
Why is this? If you could expound, I would really love to hear.
Good luck!