Why Adoption & Why Through Foster Care?
My parents did not understand why two intelligent individuals with multiple graduate degrees, with excellent careers and an adequate income would choose to adopt through foster care.When we began this process of inquiry in May of 05 and classes in July 05, my parents were full of questions that carried the tone of "have you lost your ever-lovin' minds?". They wanted to know why.
They understood why we did not choose to put ourselves through fertility treatments. For those of you who don't know us, I'll try to be brief:
My husband and I are 35 (33 when we learned that I have PCOS and he is sub-fertile). We both read the medical literature - real publications in real journals, not just internet pap - and educated ourselves about the risks to my body and health and, more importantly, to the baby. Eggs age - and new research has revealed that older men's sperm carries more risk of genetic disorders. Our risks of having a baby with Down Syndrome are 1 in 400 - more than double what our risk would be if we were under 30. We would certainly deal with a child with Down Syndrome - and many fabulous couples (see Pajama Mama, for example) are extraordinary parents with extraordinary kids. We had to ponder the risks.
PCOS left me with an much greater risk of miscarriage should I ever be able to conceive (RE gave us a 15% chance with IUI and a 30% chance with IVF).
The costs seemed unimaginable - $500 per IUI treatment (RE recommended no more than 3 attempts before moving on to IVF at $20,000). We could have put ourselves into debt to attempt IVF, but at what cost?
Queen Bee at My Ebeneezer also helped me decide not to do fertility treatments, as did other women who had finally gotten off the IF rollercoaster and went another route. My mental health and emotional and spiritual well-being was also a factor in our deciding not to pursue fertility treatments
Once adoption was our option, we were left to decide a route.
A nice guy I work with and his wife adopted a little girl from China 4 years ago. They suffered through multiple miscarriages before deciding to get off the IF rollercoaster and adopt. They chose international adoption because there was no risk of a birthmother changing her mind, or a birthfather suddenly appearing on the horizon and hiring a lawyer to get his child back. His daughter was in an orphanage and free and clear for adoption.
So why did we not choose international adoption? Several reasons really, but the big one was a knowledge of how many children needed homes right here in the United States - in Kentucky - in Lexington! It seemed wrong (for us) to pass those children over simply because international adoption was "easier" (which is, by the way, and enormous myth).
Still, my parents persisted in calling us to say they saw a "Guatemalan family" and "Why don't you just fly down there and get one of them?" As if children are commodities that can be bought and sold, and negotiated. Unreal.
International adoption was also no cheaper than domestic adoption.
We attended multiple "adoption fairs" - open houses where multiple adoption agencies and service providers set up informational booths and gave talks about various subjects. It all felt awful. Every time I went, I felt queezy in my stomach. Were these children little prizes? Ugh.
Eventually, we decided that we wanted to do a domestic adoption. After careful comsideration, we also decided we would want to do a closed adoption. For us, it was the right decision. We did not want a realtionship with birthparents. We again read the real research about open adoption vs. closed adoption. The agencies pimping out open adoption seek to sell it like it's the salvation of all that is wrong with the system - and it's far from that. Open adoption works for some - but for many it becomes a nightmare of navigating relationships with individuals and entire families the cannot negotiate boundaries. The research demonstrates that children are no better adjusted coming from closed adoptions as they are coming from open adoptions - its merely different.
The problem for us was that every agency we talked to told us that they prefered to do open adoptions, and that we would have a hard time "getting chosen" by a birthmom if we did not allow the process to be open. They said they would do it, but they also all looked at us like we were bad people - as opposed to people who had made a reasonable decision for who they were and how they wanted to structure their family. Immediately, we were made to feel like we were a bad couple from the get-go. In addition, we had "strikes against us" that would make us "less desirable" to potential birth mothers: I was divorced, we are an interracial couple, we are a little older than most first-time parents, I would not be a SAHM, a child would not have grandparents close by, the child would be in daycare, we are both overweight..." The list went on and on. Looking at portfolios put together by prospective adoptive parents made me gag - perfect little couples with perfect little houses, perfect little yards, and perfect little lives. This was absolutely not us. Neither of us wanted to be in a competition for a child - ever, ever, ever.
Do I even need to mention that with domestic adoption, you can have a child placed with you at birth and the birth mother can change her mind anytime within 30 days - and it's just over. Your money, your time, your emotional investment - just ripped away. We didn't believe we could knowingly risk that.
We wanted a child who needed us. We wanted something different than all that we had seen.
My mother, of all people, was the catalyst.
I had been fostering kittens for the Humane Society.
Mom said I should "quit dinkin' around and go get a human foster baby". She was half-joking, but when I returned to work, I googled "foster parenting in Kentucky". I called. I said I wanted to know how to become a foster parent. At that point, I knew you could adopt through foster care, but I didn't know what it would take.
Off we went to classes. I found out that adopting through foster care is FREE. Free? Did you say FREE? Yup.
If we were willing to adopt an older child, there were dozens of children waiting for homes.
If we wanted a baby, we would probably begin getting placements as soon as we were licensed.
The risk was huge, but the job had the ultimate reward - care for children who have no place to go until they can be reunited with their parents or family. If they cannot be reunited, you can choose to adopt them or allow another waiting family to adopt them.
There's no competition - there's more children in foster care who need to be adopted than there are people willing to adopt through the state.
We have actually TURNED DOWN more children than we have taken in (due to circumstances or already having a child in the house).
Now, long-time readers know we'd have a total of 4 other children come and go from our home before we got Cookie. After each one left, we both cried and grieved. Do we still feel the pain of their departures? Absolutely not. No. We miss Howard and Autumn sometimes and wonder where they are and hope they are thriving, but we feel no pain. We do, however, feel like we have done wonderful things. We feel like we are blessed to even have had the opportunity to serve the community in the way we have.
Choosing to adopt through foster care was the right decision for us. I'm not sure many people even consider it when looking to adopt. I think a lot of people still carry many of the misconceptions that we did: that foster parents are in poverty, looking for extra money (what a CROCK that is!!), lower socio-economic level, less educated, etc. Here, those things could not be farther from the truth. And this was the best part - everyone - everyone we ever met who wanted to adopt got to adopt eventually. And it never took much longer than it would have to do an international adoption anyway. Even foster parents who weren't even looking to adopt eventually found themselves faced with a child they had cared for who now needed adoptive parents - quite unexpectedly. The foster parents I have met - in real life and online - are some of the most fabulous people I could ever have been fortunate enoug to meet.
August 11 marked a year since we "graduated" from foster parent classes. Nest month, we will have been liscenced for a year. And we already are looking at adopting our first child. Wowzers.
Notice I say "first". Yup, we will probably do this all over again. Why? Well, Cookie needs a brother - and last month there were 10 more cocaine-addicted babies born in Fayette county just like Cookie. That's 10 that our social worker knew about and saw placed - there may have very well been more. Those 10 babies have about a 50% chance of being placed with relatives. They have almost no chance of being returned to the birthmom who would have to go through drug treatment and get clean for at least 6 months. That, apparently, is almost imposible when it comes to cocaine.
There's no lack of babies here in my city. There's a need for more families willing to adopt, in fact.
Those are just some of the reasons why adopting through foster care was right for us. It clearly isn't right for everyone. I do hope that more women and more couples would at least consider it as an option and see the many new families that have been formed.
There's so many more out there where Cookie came from. At last count there were over 600 children in foster care in our county alone. Only 50-75% will eventually be reunited with family. The rest will need people willing to adopt them. That's staggering, isn't it?
posted by No Longer In Crisis @ 8/23/2006 09:42:00 AM
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