The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  It is an unavoidable reality for adoptive parents that our families and our joy in our children are often made possible by their birth parents’ sorrow. We are not only privileged to have become our children’s parents, but we are also privileged to be in a position to provide the “loving care for the baby’s desirable future” that their birth parents hoped they would find—just the sort of loving care that the birth parents would have provided themselves if they had been able. We hope they somehow know how treasured their children are and, as five-year-old Jocelyn said, we hope that their birth parents “have a daddy now and a beautiful garden” . . . or whatever the components of a good and happy life would be for them.

  Jocelyn is married now, to a man of French and English heritage, and they hope to start a family one day. That mixed-race baby is going to be among the most eagerly awaited and well-loved children on the planet.

  IV

  Adoption Connections

  21

  Our Own Adoption Agency

  By 1991, I had been with the World Association of Children and Parents for ten years and was filled with appreciation for the agency and its accomplishments. For most of my years at WACAP, I believed that private—or independent—infant adoptions, in which a family hires an attorney to handle all legal matters, were likely to be less ethical than agency adoptions because the lack of a counselor for the birth parents in the former suggested that their interests might be overlooked. But as I grew more familiar with people involved in private adoptions (usually other adoption counselors and attorneys I met at conferences on open adoption), my opinions evolved. I could see that agency-versus-independent arguments were sometimes driven on both sides by ignorance about how the other side operated and were likely to be fueled by each faction’s desire to discredit the other’s approach and win clients at the other’s expense. I also came to understand that there was room for both types of adoption and that there were pros and cons to each of them.

  Formerly, it was believed that agency adoptions could provide a more predictable time frame and a safer process than could private adoptions, while private adoptions were often faster, less costly, and more open. But as traditional agencies began to acknowledge the demand for openness, and as there were fewer babies available for adoption, agency and independent adoption grew more and more alike, with agencies being the ones to make the greatest adjustments—particularly in regard to openness. Both types of adoption were governed by the same laws and ethics, but now agency adoption was adapting in order to stay in a game in which birth parents held most of the cards and often saw no need for an agency’s involvement. As birth and adoptive parents grew more comfortable with openness and with each other, independent adoption grew, making it increasingly hard for traditional agencies, with their set ideas and high fees, to compete—even though independent adoptions, lacking a fixed-cost structure, sometimes turned out to be even more expensive than agency adoptions. But the perception of lower costs, combined with greater control over the process, made independent adoption attractive to both birth and adoptive parents.

  My time at WACAP and with the Options program had given me a solid understanding of birth-parent and adoptive-parent counseling and a rudimentary understanding of the business side of adoption. It seemed that the primary business-side problem at Options was that it had grown dramatically during five years under a federal grant, and when that source of funding expired, the program had to support itself by raising fees at a time when adoptive families and birth parents were being drawn to independent adoption. There just didn’t seem to be a clear advantage to either birth or adoptive parents in working with a large adoption agency and taking on their part of the costs of maintaining it. While an agency’s reputation might be reassuring, people were less willing to pay for that reassurance as stories of successful independent adoptions spread.

  My concerns about Options and where it was headed came to an end when I accepted a position as social work supervisor for a new adoption agency that handled things differently. It had been started by two adoptive mothers (Dee Talarico and Nita Burkes) who had astonishing energy, good business sense, good timing, and chutzpah. The fact that one of them was a sculptor and the other a ski patrol volunteer, and that they each had two young children at home (one of them with significant special needs), hadn’t deterred them from their goal of operating an adoption agency. They had adopted their children independently, had learned a lot in the process, had been informally advising other prospective adoptive parents, and had eventually decided they wanted to be getting paid for their work. Although it seemed improbable, given their lack of credentials, Dee and Nita kept plugging away and eventually obtained the same child-placing agency license as those held by large, well-established agencies.

  Although their new agency, Precious Connections, was licensed as a child-placing agency, there was a crucial difference in their approach: legal custody of babies went directly from the birth parents to the adoptive parents instead of to the agency first, as was customary at the time. This distinction pleased both birth and adoptive parents and reduced the overall legal and financial risk to the agency. Legally, Precious Connections adoptions were handled like independent adoptions rather than agency adoptions. Families contracted separately with an attorney—usually one of four in Seattle, all of whom were members of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys—and the agency handled all other aspects of the adoption.

  Since Dee and Nita weren’t counselors themselves, their license stipulated that they be supervised by someone with a master’s degree and some years of supervisory experience. Ours was a fruitful partnership, with me benefiting from their business sense and willingness to rise to whatever challenge came along, and them benefiting from my professional experience and credentials. We operated as a team of three for several years. Then Dee, who had recently given birth to a third child, decided to focus her energies elsewhere, and another ex-WACAP counselor, Patti Beasley, became a co-owner of the agency, along with Nita. Some time later, Nita also decided to leave. I had never aspired to own an adoption agency, and I didn’t see myself as having either the knowledge or the interest required of a small-business owner, but nevertheless was excited at the opportunity that had more or less dropped in my lap. In 1990, Patti and I renamed the agency Adoption Connections (no connection to the various other agencies with either identical or extremely similar names that emerged around the country in later years).

  Our work with adoptive families generally started with the home study, the creation of the family profile, and then writing and placing ads in various newspapers around the country. In the early days of the agency, before the Internet, families placed ads in newspapers, and an investment of a few hundred dollars would often yield at least a few calls from prospective birth mothers. We placed most of our ads in free newspapers in states where adoption laws were favorable to independent adoptions. Often, the people who responded to the ads hadn’t been specifically searching for an adoptive family by reading the newspaper, but a particular ad had caught their eye. If they were pregnant, or knew someone who was pregnant and didn’t feel able to raise the child, the ad might start them thinking about adoption as an alternative.

  Callers were usually women who had just discovered that they were pregnant and wanted to explore their options, or they were women who were in the later stages of pregnancy and had made up their minds (or thought they had) to do an adoption. Sometimes we would talk to callers and then not hear back from them and assume they had decided against adoption only to hear from them again late in the pregnancy when they were “ready to go ahead.” One memorable call came from a woman who told me that she had seen a family’s ad six months earlier, when she was newly pregnant. She hadn’t been considering adoption at that point, but something about the ad prompted her to tear it out of the paper and put it in her wallet. Now she was calling to see if there was any chance that the family was still looking for a baby because s
he had made the decision to do an adoption and she was still thinking about them. Needless to say, that adoption felt fated.

  You never knew at first where these calls would lead—to elation, disappointment, or anywhere in between. I worked with one family, for example, who placed a ninety-dollar ad in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Little Nickel shortly before Christmas, a notoriously bad time to advertise; they got a stunning return on their investment. They connected almost immediately with a couple who wanted to relinquish their nine-month-old son, and the adoption proceeded smoothly. Only a few months after it was completed, the birth parents called the adoptive parents again, with the news that the birth mother was three months pregnant and wanted to know if the adoptive parents were interested in adopting the new baby as well.

  They were.

  Few families managed such a quick-and-easy adoption, but this type of advertising was how most of our families connected with birth parents in the early years of the agency, and it was generally the case that if a family placed an appealing ad, someone would respond and they would eventually become parents.

  In later years, families began advertising on the Internet and investing $1,000 or more in creating a profile that could be easily found and seen by an enormous number of people. While this was much more efficient in terms of reaching a broader array of potential birth mothers, it came with a significant downside: not only did the greater exposure seldom lead to a faster or smoother or less expensive (or more ethical) adoption—it also led to a dramatic increase in the number of responses we received from scammers. (More about that later.)

  After the initial flurry of activity in preparing a family for adoption and getting their ads in place, the excruciating wait for the phone to ring would follow. Families put the agency phone numbers in their ads so that we could take (and screen) the calls for them. In our first conversations with a prospective birth parent, Patti and I would explain who we were in relation to the family placing the ad, answer questions about adoption and about the family, and then take whatever next step was indicated.

  We learned early on to identify ourselves to callers as “adoption specialists” rather than counselors because most callers didn’t seem to see themselves as someone in need of counseling. We also learned to downplay the fact that we were an agency because many callers equated an agency adoption with a loss of control. Birth parents were reassured when we told them that legal custody of the child would go directly from them to the adoptive parents, and that they controlled the process—and the destiny of their child—throughout the pregnancy, birth, and eventual decision on whether to go ahead with the adoption.

  After that first call, if the situation seemed promising, we would usually arrange for a conversation between the caller and the adoptive parents. I would always wait anxiously to hear from both parties after their first talk. Sometimes the conversations didn’t go well, and sometimes concerns came up—an unwilling birth father, for example—that made an adoption seem unlikely. Other times, the call would seem to go well, but the caller would never call again. Remarkably often, though, things would go very well, and the birth and adoptive parents would both report back to me with delight and the desire to proceed with planning a possible adoption.

  A surprising number of referrals and adoptions proved to be serendipitous. Placing ads in newspapers was only one way for prospective birth parents to become aware of Adoption Connections. They also learned about us from attorneys, medical professionals, other adoption agencies and counselors, school personnel, other adoptive parents, birth parents who had had a good experience with us, and still other sources. When prospective birth parents came to us through a referral rather than in response to an ad, we would talk to them about all the families with whom we were working at the time.

  Our families also sometimes benefited from the ads that other families placed. When it was apparent to us that a caller responding to a particular family’s ad was going to be a poor match with them, we would talk with her about not only that family but also about other, potentially more promising, families. One birth mother, for example, wanted her baby adopted by a family practicing a particular religion; another wanted adoptive parents of a different race from that of the family whose ad had prompted her call.

  In such cases, we would secure the advertising family’s permission to talk with the caller about other families. Patti once worked with a very blond adoptive couple who were adamant about wanting to adopt blond children. At first glance, this seemed unduly picky (and likely to require Patti to put in many extra hours trying to find them the right match), but it turned out to be a blessing; the ads the blond couple placed resulted in successful adoptions by two other families, with each adopting wonderful, non-blond children. Eventually, the blond couple was able to adopt several blond babies, and they were not only spared any guilt feelings over their preference for children who looked like them, but also took a great deal of pleasure in knowing that they had played a part in helping the other families find their children.

  Some of our Adoption Connections families found children through sheer luck—being in the right place at the right time. In addition to being co-directors of Adoption Connections, Patti and I had private practices as counselors, and we often did home studies for families who were not signed up with our agency. It sometimes happened that one of these families had the precise quality that a birth mother responding to another family’s ad wanted. For example, I worked with one young woman whose baby was going to be part Hawaiian native. She had looked at all our waiting families, but there was no match that felt just right to her. Coincidentally (mysteriously? marvelously?), I was in the middle of completing a home study for a family in which the wife was of Hawaiian native heritage. I hadn’t had time to fully prepare the couple for an open adoption, but the birth mother was due soon, so we all decided to go ahead and set up a meeting. They loved each other, and everything went smoothly toward a happy adoption.

  This sort of random good luck was surprisingly frequent; there were more than a few times when someone would call about a baby who had already been born, Patti and I would start contacting families . . . and fate might simply take the form of the first family to answer when we called.

  Sometimes everything would happen in a rush. One morning, a hospital social worker on a nearby island in Puget Sound called to say that a baby had just been delivered and to ask if we could get there immediately, as the mother wanted to do an adoption. We jumped in the car with a handful of family profiles and went to meet with the birth mother, who was in her mid-thirties, had kept the pregnancy a secret from her family, and was determined to keep the adoption secret as well. She claimed that she didn’t even want to look at the profiles we had brought but wanted us to pick the adoptive family for her. I explained that if that was the case, then we would go with the family who had been waiting the longest and asked if she wanted to see their profile. She agreed, looked it over, and declared them to be “fine.” That gave us an opening to ask if she wanted to try for something more than “fine,” and she cautiously accepted our pile of profiles. To our relief and delight, she looked carefully at them all, then settled on a couple she seemed genuinely enthusiastic about. Patti and I left the hospital late that night, just managed to catch the last ferry off the island, and arrived home tired but happy. Obviously, we were happy for the adoptive family, but we were also happy for the birth mother and tremendously grateful to have been able to provide some comfort and reassurance to a woman who was expecting neither.

  More typically, we found ourselves working with birth mothers for many months before they made their decision. The process was slow and careful, as it should be, and we got to know both the birth mothers and the adoptive families well as we navigated the endless highs and lows characteristic of adoption.

  Sometimes our successes took the form of a birth mother deciding that she would be able to raise her baby after all. One nineteen-year-old couple, on their way
to college, were certain throughout the pregnancy that adoption was the right choice, but were struggling with the decision and continued to struggle after the baby was born. On Day Three, still insisting that they planned to go through with the adoption, they wanted to meet with me a final time before going to court. I asked them at our meeting to tell me how they envisioned their futures, thinking they might say something about the education and careers they hoped to have. Instead, they each talked about their desire to be together and settle in the community where they lived, to eventually buy a house with a little land where they could do a lot of gardening, and to have at least two children. After a long silence, I finally asked, “Then what are we doing?”

  The couple did get married, getting a lot of support from his parents while they grew up a bit more and figured out how to handle things on their own. Some years later, I saw that lovely young mother walking down the street with a new baby in a carrier on her chest and her little first-born boy by her side, and it looked to me as though that hoped-for future was being realized.

  We also dealt with monumentally bad outcomes. One prospective birth mother was a fourteen-year-old girl who was prevented from completing an adoption by the abusive, alcoholic mother of the birth father, a seventeen-year-old boy who was afraid to stand up for his own right to decide what should happen for his baby. The girl had no choices other than to become a parent at fourteen or to hand her baby over to a family she knew could not properly care for him. She ended up keeping her baby, and the birth father (in practice, the alcoholic mother of the birth father) got joint custody. This was a nightmare for that poor girl and a decisive end to her childhood and plans for the future. Her own mother had returned to work a few years earlier, to a job she loved, and the family had just been getting back on its feet financially after some hard times. Eventually, things improved, and, of course, everyone in the birth mother’s family fell in love with the baby, but the girl and her parents never felt that raising him was the best thing for her or the baby. And they were extremely unhappy about the enforced contact with the boy’s dysfunctional family and the role those people would always have in their lives and in the life of the child.