Answering Boomerific’s questions
Boomerific asked:
The thing I like best about our agency is that there is no such thing as a ‘match.’ If the potential birth mother and potential adoptive family want to meet, the social worker will facilitate it. But no money changes hands and no promises are made. As our SW says, “it’s not a match until the baby is in your [adoptive parents'] arms.” I really like that way of looking at it. I like that they recognize potential birth mothers as true mothers both before and after the papers are signed. Our agency is part of a community health organization that provided health care for women in crisis long, long before there were adoption services on site. Before a woman comes to adoption she has full access to all of the resources of the community that might be necessary for her to parent. Of course, no situation is totally coercion-free, so I’m still cautious. What is your advice for any pre-birth contact so that the situation is as coercion-free as possible? What should potential adoptive parents say or do to make it clear that they don’t yet view themselves as parents and don’t view potential birthparents as their personal baby-factories?
My long answer is below the cut.
Our agency does match and it is specifically an adoption agency. We feel fortunate with the way they played out because we really didn’t go into this knowing much about adoption and birth parent issues.
There are four agencies here in Columbus. One is with the Catholic social services, one is with Lutheran Family services and two are private, non-profits that are very similar to each other (social workers from one started the other). The Catholic social services I know very little about and they didn’t return our calls (we hear they’re over-worked). The Lutheran program didn’t return our calls after sending us an information packet. We were told that they don’t like creating transracial families but this is a rumor and we don’t know if it’s true.
Adoption Circle is one of the private, non-profit agencies. Most of the people we spoke with in our local Interracial Families in Friendship support group adopted from there and they were happy with it. We got a brochure from them that didn’t say much more than their web site. We went with Adoption by Gentle Care because they got back to us first with a phone call and they said they had a need for parents wanting to adopt African American babies.
Now I can only talk about the program we worked with, which was the African American/Biracial program. From their web site:
African American Infant Program: This program is defined to include a child born to 2 African American parents. Bi-Racial Infant Program: This program is defined to include a child born to 1 Caucasian, Asian, Native American or Hispanic parent and 1 African American parent.
The fees for these programs are about half and are also deferred. Every agency in Columbus has this kind of pay scale and we knew we wanted an agency in Columbus. Also, frankly, these scaled fees made it possible for us to adopt.
Our agency employs four social workers (well, more now because they jobshare). Two work exclusively with potential birth mothers and two work exclusively with wannabe adoptive parents. They split the state and have to travel. Our social worker was Denise and J’s social worker was Trina.
I’m not sure how it works when a potential birth parent first calls but I do know that with J, she was given information about programs in our community that would allow her to parent and they case managed her to get her in touch with them. If a woman qualifies, she’s also hooked up with WIC and welfare.
Our agency doesn’t show profiles to women who are less than seven months pregnant with rare exception (this frustrated J). Their reasoning is: They feel that first a woman needs to really accept her pregnancy, which is easier to do when she’s showing and feeling the baby move; and also they feel that it’s unfair to ask a waiting adoptive family to step out of the pool for longer than two months.
At seven months (or later — some potential birth parents show up at the agency closer to the end, some call while they’re in labor, and some contact them after the baby is born), if she is still interested in making an adoption plan, she is shown profiles of people who match her specifications. If she wants a family with a dog, she’s shown only families with dogs. If those don’t work for her, she can ask for more. If those don’t work for her, they will help her find an agency with a larger profile-base. But they also tell her, “It’s a big decision but if you’re having trouble choosing, it may be that an adoption plan is not right for you.” Also, some women want to meet several potential adoptive parents and they can do this if the potential adoptive parents agree.
(When we were pre-called about J, we were also told about a woman who wanted to meet some people before making a decision about matching with anyone. She wanted to meet with us and one other couple but by the time she called the agency to say this, we were out of the pool for J.)
If a potential birth mother chooses someone, she can meet them or not. She can call them or not. The agency will facilitate this. In our program (it may be different for the “caucasian” program) our money didn’t go to J. The agency distributes needed funds but it comes from a general pool. After placement, we became responsible for some counseling fees but beforehand, our fees were not earmarked for the potential birth mother who chooses us. (We were chosen twice.) Also potential birth parents do not have to make any kind of promises or assurances about their plans — the plan is seen only as one option for a woman faced with a crisis pregnancy.
On the waiting adoptive parent side, if a potential birth mother chooses you, you are indeed “matched.” However the social workers (at least Denise did this with us) stresses that a match just means you’re part of an adoption plan and nothing more. We were told repeatedly that there is no way to tell who will place and who won’t and that things can look like a go the whole way through and a woman can still change her mind at the last minute. The number we heard repeatedly was that the chance is always 50/50 that the mother will parent. We would nag Denise, “Does this look good? Does this look bad?” trying to get her to look into her crystal ball. She’d repeat, “There’s no way to predict so prepare yourselves for this to go either way.”
While matched, each social worker checks in with her client weekly. Trina and Denise spoke to each other and sometimes I would say, “Could you ask Trina to talk to J about this or that?” J was fairly disinterested in talking to Trina and I was worried that some of what Trina was saying — about grief counseling, about parenting options — wasn’t getting through. I’d tell Denise, Denise would tell Trina and Trina would check in with J again.
Now as far as what I was doing to let J know we didn’t see ourselves as parents, well, that was harder because J most definitely saw me as Madison’s future mother. She was absolutely 100% committed to her adoption plan and was insulted any time I implied that she might change her mind. So I’d say, “There are grants to help you go to school and pay for childcare” and she’d say, “I am not changing my mind!” She was getting fed up with me. At one point she told Trina, Trina told Denise and then Denise told me, “J feels you’re not very excited about Madison. She’s worried that you’re not really prepared for her.”
So then I called J and told her that I worried that talking about my preparations, which were not Madison specific seeing as how I’d been waiting for a baby for going on four years, would feel like pressure to her. She said, “But I need to hear it.” And then I told her about the clothes we had waiting and the plans we had for after a baby arrived. This was hard for me. I said, “OK, I’ll talk about it as long as you understand…” and she interrupted, “I know!”
For me, what helped was being at the hospital. We talked more then about what she could do and what she might do. I was able to talk to her friends about supporting her if she parented, telling her we would understand and love her should she change her mind. Also the agency was talking to her and saying the same thing: Dawn and Brett are not part of your equation right now but they know you’re struggling and they support whatever decision you make.
While in the hospital, J had questions she hadn’t had before about a whole range of things. She wanted to know how would we talk to Madison about her? How did we feel about sex education? How often could she come visit? Would we encourage Madison to play sports?
The nurses didn’t have a huge amount of adoption training but they were good. They never treated J as less than the “real” mom (this can be a problem at some hospitals, who will sometimes treat potential birth mothers poorly), they also never weighed in on what they thought she should do (some hospitals pressure women to parent — J did get some unsolicited advice in the cafeteria, however). The nurses didn’t treat Brett and me like parents and always deferred to J. But they were also kind to us and friendly when we visited.
No one assumed J had made up her mind even when she herself assumed she had. She put our family last name on Madison’s birth certificate and on one piece of paper she listed the three of us as parents. Even so — even with all of this — our social worker told us, “She can still change her mind. Prepare yourselves either way.” Her own social worker reminded her that she could take Madison home or place her with a foster family if she wanted more time.
All in all, I feel confident about how this specific adoption went down in regards to the agency. I know that J is, too, because we talked about it. I would still recommend this agency to others (and have).* However, even with an ethical agency, coercion can still be present. When I talked to the social workers about how they try to combat this, they told me it was frustrating. They try to get the woman alone but some women are clearly under the control of parents or partners. They also deal with coercive agencies because they sometimes contract with outside agencies to do home studies or counsel birth parents. And they sometimes have wannabe adoptive parents who behave inappropriately no matter how much the social workers intervene.
Having contact ahead of time, I think, should be up to the potential birth parent. J needed to talk with us and this was both so great and so hard. Contrary to my expectations, J was not at all ambivalent about her decision before Madison was born. She was a strong advocate for herself — and for Madison — and knew exactly what she wanted, which was to place. After Madison was born, J struggled again with her decision and because of this, she wanted us at the hospital more. I kind of expected she would want space — she originally thought she would want space. But she decided she needed to see us parent, she needed to see us fall in love with Madison, and she needed to ask us more questions.
There are things I wish I’d known then so I wouldn’t have felt so guilty. I wish I’d known about the conversations that J had with her trusted adults because at the time, I worried that she was totally alone. She wasn’t. I wish I could have understood that she could both grieve her decision and feel good about it. It took me a long time to appreciate that.
*Gentle Care had an unwritten policy at some point where they discouraged placement with gay couples; we did not know this when we signed on with them. I have talked to the director — who wasn’t there during the time the policy was in place — and was assured that this is no longer true either as a written or unwritten rule. I mention this because their secretary was giving wrong information about it and I was appalled to find out I’d been recommending an agency that wouldn’t place with gay couples. And I was surprised because Denise and I had specifically talked about placements they had done with both gay singles and couples. The director assured me that he would speak with the secretary and get things cleared up and then followed up with me to let me know he made this happen. That said, as happy I’ve been with our experience there, I encourage hopeful adoptive parents to follow their own gut instincts when finding an agency.
Thank you, Dawn. I think I’m trying so hard not to ‘mess up,’ and while I wait I’m trying to make sure I know what I should and should not do. But it sounds like I need to take it one moment at a time, as you did with J., and see what everyone in the process wants/needs.
With our agency, you pay nothing until the baby is placed with you. Then you paid a minimal agency fee and the medical expenses of the birthmom and that is it.
I felt we were matched from the moment we met (about 2 months before Mallory was born.) I totally felt like we were this baby’s parents and that is how we were treated by the birthparents. The agency (their social worker and ours) always reminded all of us their were other options.
The only thing truly coercive that I did, not really realizing how coercive it was unitl years later, was tell Noelle I would completely understood if she changed her mind, until we took the baby home. I told her if she had any doubts, tell us before we left the hospital. I was being honest, but it now it seems completely unfair. Shit she left the hospital less than 24 hours after giving birth. Not much time to remake this huge decision. I am thankful that she still says years later she never doubted it from the day she made it.
I was thinking of my own heart being broken, and figured I could stand anything up until a baby was placed in my arms, and then taken back. In retrospect, I should have been more concerned with her heart.
Have you checked out Gentle Care’s new fee structure? There is now no difference in cost based on the race of the child, and it is now a sliding fee scale based on income. The rates still look quite reasonable.