> Adoption laws vary greatly by state. In Minnesota there are almost no closed
> domestic adoptions of infants through social service agencies. The birth mother
> almost always picks (and can pick anyone she wants who are of legal age and
> can pass a homestudy - single gay guy, married couple). The other likely
> scenario is children who are in the hands of social services - those adoptions
> almost always (in Minnesota) happen through foster care placement - the types
> of people you are talking about are not terribly likely to participate in the foster
> care program and go private.
>
> ETA: Private adoptions are not necessarily very expensive. My pseudo sister in
> law (complicated relationship) has an adopted son that they adopted for less
> than $3k about fifteen years ago. They were looking, they knew someone
> through their church who wanted to find parents for her baby - they just
> needed a homestudy and some legal paperwork. The search can be expensive,
> but if you get lucky - the adoption isn’t necessarily expensive.
That’s the thing: adoption in the U.S. is a seller’s market. If you’re lucky and happen to know a mother who wants to have her child adopted, you may be able to arrange a private adoption for relatively little. For most parents looking to adopt a baby, that’s not true though. You can persuade an adoption agency to consider you as foster parents and later as adoptive parents. You can hire a lawyer to find you a mother. Or you can try foreign adoption.
Yes. There are few African countries that permit U.S. couples to adopt - and almost none work with adoption agencies my friends were interested in working with - the few they were, my friends were not qualified to adopt from for various reasons or had barriers my friends did not choose to accept (multi year waiting lists, too expensive.) There first original choice before starting research, in fact, was African adoption.
Sure, but the point is that foreign adoption is not necessarily faster or cheaper than domestic adoption - its still expensive, it still involves multi year waits. And has a lot of doors that close. For instance, want to adopt from Korea - you cannot have (or could not have when we adopted) more than one divorce, must be married for 3 years, must have a ‘normal’ BMI, must have an income of (something or another, can’t remember). But those rules seem to be suspended for celebrities. When Angelina Jolie got Maddox out of Cambodia, Cambodia was closed to foreign adoptions - other people waited years to get their children out.
I have no issue with foreign or domestic adoption - I have a problem when some people get to play by a separate set of rules and then we excuse it by saying “well, its good for the baby” - like getting the baby into the hands of John and Diane Smith of Omaha wouldn’t be good for the baby, too.
Why is it so fashionable to adopt a child from a 3rd-world country? There are plent of poor kids in the USA. I guess Madonna is desperate to keep in the public eye-and this little stunt appears to have paid off. Is she still into Kaballa? (Esther is her name).
What is next-maybe she will adopt an orphan chimpanzee?
> Why is it so fashionable to adopt a child from a 3rd-world country? There are
> plent of poor kids in the USA. I guess Madonna is desperate to keep in the
> public eye-and this little stunt appears to have paid off. Is she still into Kaballa?
> (Esther is her name). What is next-maybe she will adopt an orphan
> chimpanzee?
No, there are not lots of poor children being put up for adoption in the U.S. Your notion of how these things work is at least 50 years, perhaps more like 70 years, out of date. The notion that there are many families so desperately poor that they have to put their children up for adoption or that there are tons of children orphaned when their parents both die and who have no relatives to take them in so they have to be put up for adoption or that there are vast numbers of pregnant unmarried women who would be shunned if they tried to raise a child without marrying or that unmarried women have to go to unwed mothers’ homes to have their child in secret or that there are huge numbers of orphanages with children crying out to be adopted is absurdly out of date.
Most single women with children with children get by just fine. Most unmarried couples with children get by just fine. There are hardly any families so desperately poor that they would ever consider putting up their children for adoption. The number of children orphaned when both their parents die who have no relatives to take them in is tiny. The number of orphanages or unwed mothers’ homes in the U.S. must be very small.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t families or single women with children that are just barely getting by where it could be argued that the children would be better off in the long run, in all likelihood, if they were adopted by some famous person who’s searching for a child. Would you actually prefer it if people like Madonna went around finding families that are just scraping by who are expecting a new baby and told them, “Hey, I can take care of your child better than you can. Let me adopt your new baby.” Does it occur to you for a second just how patronizing that sounds?
That’s why for several decades now it has been common for Americans in search of children to adopt to turn to foreign adoption. Foreign adoption, far from being a recently fashionable thing, is actually quite well established. It’s getting harder to do this in recent years though. Foreign countries don’t like to be patronized anymore than poor families do. Even poor countries are wary of allowing children from their countries to be adopted by people from better off countries if they can possibly avoid it.
There are a few wrong impressions here. I’ve been through two private adoptions. I am not what a typical American would call “well off.” We are financially stable, but we don’t make a lot of money. Our average income for the last six months has been barely above poverty level for our family size. (My husband is a car salesman. It’s been so much fun lately.) For the last three months, we’ve been below poverty level. Even when things are going well, we do not make as much as the numbers that get thrown around as an average American household income.
Both the private adoptions I was involved in were done through an agency. A private adoption just means that the child was never in the custody of the state - private individuals or entities (including the agency) agreed upon the adoption. There are certainly private adoptions that are facilitated by attorneys, but at least in my state, those are riskier in regard to custody.
Also, I don’t know anyone in the adoption community who is aware of a birthmother being approached and offered large sums of money for her baby. In my state, even advertising that you are a prospective adoptive couple is illegal. In the first adoption, the birthmother approached the agency and wanted to place the baby. We were available as a waiting couple and she chose us. In the second adoption, a relative of the birthmother approached my husband directly and asked if we were interested in adopting the baby. We asked her to go through our agency to avoid custody problems.
(ETA: Also, in many states, offering the birthmother any money at all for any reason is illegal and cause for denying the adoption. In some states (not mine) adoptive parents may pay for rent and a few other things, but cash payments are illegal.)
Private adoption can be extremely expensive. The first agency we used when we didn’t know any better was terribly expensive. (They’re now under sanction from the state and unable to do domestic private adoptions. Huh.) The second agency, and one we would use again, is very reasonable, and has a sliding scale according to income. Those kinds of agencies are out there, but you have to look hard.
Regarding choosing foreign adoption rather than domestic … it’s complicated. There are a lot of factors. In a foreign adoption, you don’t have to navigate the foster care system, and you don’t have to be chosen by a birthmother. You don’t have to worry about ICPC, the legalities surrounding bringing a child from one state to another at the time of placement - I know of a mother who stayed in a hotel 1000 miles from home for a couple of months while paperwork was being pushed back and forth between states. There was no problem with the adoption, just with the states talking to one another.
Honestly, I think the biggest reason that people (average people, not celebrities) pursue foreign adoption is because there is no risk of the birthparents rising up years later to sue for custody. Everyone has heard horror stories of having a child ripped from a home. I’ve actually lived through it. That first adoption experience I talked about? The agency was either malicious or negligent in matters of custody and the end result was that the child was removed from our home two months later. We’d had him from birth. Losing him was the single worst experience of my life, and while I’m okay, I’ll never be the same. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, “That’s why I’ll never adopt domestically. I’m going to _____ (fill in appropriate foreign country).”
Adoption is complex and difficult, and there are a lot of reasons people make the choices they make.
Maybe she was there doing work for the charity causes she’s interested in (as has been discussed, this all came about after her work on a documentary to bring the AIDS epidemic in that country to the forefront), met this particular little girl, and fell in love with her.
No, no. She clearly must just want a little brown thing to drag to the Ivy with her. Just like she does her other kids every day- yup yup.
> This is just wrong. The National Council for Adoption estimates that 20,000 or
> more U.S.-born infants are placed for adoption every year. That’s more than the
> 19,000 or so international adoptions annually.
This doesn’t contradict what I said at all. I didn’t say that there weren’t a lot of infants being put up for domestic adoption. What I said was that there weren’t a lot of infants being put up for adoption because the family was desperately poor or because the mother was worried about being socially ostracized because she was an unwed mother. The fact is that those 20,000 domestic adoptions will satisfy only maybe half of the demand for babies to be adopted each year. That’s why there have to be another 19,000 foreign adoptions each year. There are probably more people who want to adopt but can’t find a baby.
I was replying to ralph124c’s claim that “[t]here are plent[y] of poor kids in the USA” who could be adopted. That’s what’s not true. Do you have any statistics on why the mothers put up those 20,000 babies for adoption? I suspect that the main reason is that the mother, while she doesn’t feel that she would be ostracized for being an unwed mother, has decided that the child would do better with a married couple. Are there any unwed mothers’ homes anymore? As recently as fifty years ago, they were all over the place. A young woman who got pregnant outside of marriage would be strongly encouraged to move to one of them before she started to show. An excuse would be created for her to be out of town for some months so no one in the community would know that she was pregnant.
That seems uncalled for. Do you actually know anything about foreign adoptions other than how they are arranged for by celebrities, or do you just fling around casual, not-so-thinly-veiled accusations of racism just for fun? As StuffLikeThatThere points out, adoption is complex and difficult…there are many, many factors to be considered before choosing a country to go to, I sincerely doubt that race is much of a factor for most people who have already taken the step of considering foreign adoption.
I tend to have the same concerns about this as Dangerosa. While I’m sure that Madonna has sincere intentions, I think it’s better for all concerned that she be made to follow the rules like everyone else. Not because I want to deprive her or this little girl, but because I’m afraid that these situations may actually end up causing fewer children to be adopted in the long run.