Before we started on this adoption journey I didn’t give much thought to what the adoption process actually entailed. I was somewhat familiar with foster care because I’ve had family and friends foster children, and some friends have even been able to adopt the children they fostered. But I didn’t have any idea how you started the adoption process, and I wasn’t even sure what the difference between adoption and foster care was. I started to research and as you can imagine, information overload quickly kicked in.
We want our family and friends to have a better idea of what happens during the adoption process without having information overload, so over the next few weeks I’m going to delve into the different aspects of the process.
First, a little crash-course in the 3 main types of adoption:
- Fost-adopt: A child is placed into a home as a foster child with the expectation that the child will become legally free and be adopted by the foster parents if reunification with the birth family cannot take place.
- International adoption (also called intercountry adoption or transnational adoption): A type of adoption in which an individual or couple becomes the legal and permanent parents of a child who is a national of a different country.
- Domestic adoption (also called domestic infant adoption, private adoption, or agency adoption): The placement of U.S.-born infants for adoption by their birth parents, who legally consent to the adoption with an adoptive family of their choosing.
We both wanted to adopt a child from the US, so international adoption wasn’t something we looked too deeply into. We did some initial research and then attended a fost-adopt seminar, which was when we started to understand that the goal for a child in the foster care system is reunification with the birth family. While we have not ruled out fost-adopt forever, we knew we would have a conflict of interest if we pursued it at this time. A domestic adoption, on the other hand, happens when a birthmother legally consents to an adoption with an adoptive family of her choosing. We decided on a domestic infant adoption pretty quickly after understanding the different types of adoption and knowing what our goals were.
For our purposes, when we talk about the adoption process we’re talking about a domestic infant adoption through an adoption agency. There are 5 steps in the domestic adoption process we’re working through:
- Complete a home study
- Get matched with an expectant mother
- Placement
- Post-placement visits
- Adoption is finalized
We’ll get into specifics about each of these steps in the weeks to come. In the meantime, please share our website or facebook page to get the word out about our domestic infant adoption. Feel free to comment below if you have any questions about the types of adoption that are out there, we’d love to hear from you!