Agency Adoptions
The procedures and costs involved when you adopt a child through an agency.
Using an agency to manage your adoption can be helpful for a number of reasons. Agencies are experienced in finding children, matching them with parents, and satisfying the necessary legal requirements. Agencies will help adoptive parents with everything from finding a birth parent to finalizing the adoption papers. An agency will take care of many of the crucial elements of the adoption, such as conducting the home study, obtaining the necessary consents, and advising them on any specific state requirements.
Private vs. Public Agencies
The key advantage of a private agency adoption is the extensive counseling that agencies provide. Typically, counseling is available for adoptive parents, birth parents, and the children (if they are older). Careful counseling can help everyone involved weather the emotional, practical, and legal complexities that can arise throughout the adoption process. And it's particularly important for the protection is provides the adoptive parents. A birth parent who receives appropriate counseling early in the process is less likely to change her mind when it comes time to sign the actual consent forms after the baby's birth.
On the down side, private agencies are often extremely selective when choosing adoptive parents. This is because they have a surplus of people who want to adopt and a limited number of available children. Agencies weed out parents based on age, marital status, income, health, religion, sexual orientation, family size, and personal history (including criminal conduct).
Public agencies have many children ready to be adopted, but they are often older or special-needs children. If you want a newborn or an infant, a public agency may not be able to help you. And public agencies generally do not provide the many other services, such as much-needed counseling, that private agencies offer. Of course, along with offering fewer services, public agencies come at a much lower cost. It may cost you next to nothing to adopt through a public agency (and the agency may even provide a small stipend during the adoption process), whereas a private agency adoption will cost many thousands of dollars.
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