Never, ever go to the government for your babies. They play games.
Private agencies all, costs between four and twelve thousand each. adopted in the ninties. Should be less now with the big adoption tax credit.
Back in the early 90’s around the time when my husband and I were looking to adopt, an overseas adoption from Korea or Russia or Romania was in the four and twelve thousand range and didn’t require travel or staying in country for several months but then those countries were shutting down a lot of those adoptions around that time, especially those that were affordable through religious orgs like Catholic Charities. We didn’t belong to the Catholic Church or any organized church for that matter so that made it a bit even more difficult.
We spoke with several private adoption agencies regarding domestic adoptions and while some were in that range as far as the legal fees, several told us to expect around 20k when all was said and done and they were also a lot more restrictive. My husband was in his early 40’s by this time and we were told that was a strike against us – it wasn’t that my husband’s age was a bad thing per se but that the waiting list was so long and there were so many couples looking to adopt, that that was just one of the criteria that they used to shorten the list. It wasn’t that we were told that we couldn’t adopt but that it would be more difficult and could take longer.
We were also very middle income, middle class, lived in a very middle working class neighborhood and we both worked fulltime and neither of us had college degrees and that, we were told was something that many birth mothers in open adoptions, open adoptions being more the norm, take into consideration.
Another obstacle in our way was that my husband was a recovering alcoholic. He had been sober for over ten years by then, had no criminal record and was very active in his recovery program and in helping others, including young people get sober, but again, while that could have been seen as a positive, it was, as we were very frankly told, yet an obstacle against our favor. And our location was another problem. We lived in Baltimore City at the time and were told that this also made it more difficult; for one thing while there were more children, there were also more prospective adopted parents; and that since many of the surrounding areas were wealthy, especially the wealthy suburbs around DC, that also meant more “competition”. And that is how my whole impression of the process was: a “competition”, and not all that much unlike a robust real estate market.
We were very willing to find a way to come up with anywhere from the four to twenty thousand dollars or more as we really wanted a child, to give a child a loving home, but the reality was that we could spend thousands of dollars, do things like place ads in papers across the country and work with private lawyers and private agencies, pay for medical expenses for the birth mother with no result just as we had not all that long before spent thousands of dollars out of our pockets on infertility treatments with no results.
Never, ever go to the government for your babies. They play games.
Sad isn’t it.
Ironically at the time my husband and I were still looking into adoption, I was working as a finance manager for a private social work agency and that company ran a not for profit foster care agency that specialized in hard to place foster children. These were the kids who came from the very worst possible of neglegful homes, the most unimaginable cases of neglect, physical and or sexual abuse, drug abusing and or prostitute mothers, fathers in prison or more often than not -unknown, the step fathers, uncles, boyfriends, even some of the foster parents who, well, it was horrific, the cases I learned about – the stuff of nightmares. These were the kids that no one wanted and were so damaged and fractured in their very young lives that only the very few, those with a lot of training and patience could deal with and even then, only for a time. And even then, as dedicated as some of these foster parents were, it was a paying job to them and these kids were often shifted from one home to another and then another, only adding to their problems and feelings of abandonment. I used to have to bill the City of Baltimore, Baltimore City Schools for social work assessments we performed on a contract basis and I used to get copies of these reports in order to do the billing. I used to read them sometimes until I couldn’t read another single one – it was just too depressing.
I talked with the manager of the foster agency about becoming a foster parent and she actually tried to talk me out of it. She told me “We want our foster parents to care but to not get too attached. You have to understand that Social Services can decide at any time to place the child back with his or her mother even if that is a very bad idea or with a grandparent who isn’t prepared to care for such a child and he or she will end up back in foster care before long. But if you allow yourself to get too attached or even worse, you allow the child get too attached to you; that’s not good for either of you. We want caring competent care takers and nothing more. I think you want to become attached, you want a child of your own and we can’t give you that.”
It broke my heart.
But then one day as I was in my office, one of these foster kids, who was in a respite care day camp, a way to care for these kids so the foster parents could attend additional training classes or just get a break, walked away from the group and walked into my office, locking the door behind her. She was about 8 years old, a beautiful looking child. She picked up a pair of scissors off a desk in the front of the office and walked toward me with the coldest and deadest eye’s I’ve ever seen, looked me straight in the eye and with the scissors in her hand raised, walked up to me and said, “I’m going to stab you. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to watch you bleed.”
She held me hostage for about 15 minutes until, after I calmly picked up the phone and called for help while speaking to her very calmly and in a non-threatening voice, someone came to unlock my office door and a team of social workers physically restrained this 8 year old girl. I later learned she was taken to a mental hospital, not her first trip to one BTW, that she had a long history of starting fires, of cutting herself, pulling her hair out, and of physically assaulting and attempting to sexually assault other foster children in the homes she had been sent to, the some 15 different foster homes BTW that she had been to since she had been found as an infant in a rat infested apartment, half starved with a sour bottle of empty milk and a diaper that hadn’t been changed for at least a week and signs that she had been sexually assaulted.
I often wonder what ever happened to her. I sadly think nothing good. Some twenty years later, it still haunts me. I often wonder if she had been placed for adoption when she was found, just as an infant; to a loving and caring couple, a stable home; black or white, if that might have made any difference in her life or if she was already too far gone and damaged by then.
All I know was that during this time, when my husband and I looked into adopting through Baltimore City Department of Social Services, the very same agency that was running advertisements about how they had children looking for adoptive parents, that we as a white couple were told we were not deemed suitable.
Never, ever go to the government for your babies. They play games.
Yea they do and it’s the children in their "care" that seem to lose this "game" every time.