`Young, stable, energetic couple with heartfelt wish to become parents and provide your infant with a loving upbringing. Sunny, Winnie-the-Pooh nursery, bedtime tales and four affectionate cats await in our relaxed home. Please call us so we can get to know each other.”
This is adoption, ’90s-style.
In their quest for babies, would-be parents are placing newspaper and magazine ads; wearing T-shirts that say, “I want to adopt,” posting baby-wanted notices on bulletin boards in laundermats, grocery stores; passing out “business cards” that picture a baby or stork and their name and phone number; and installing toll-free phone lines in their homes for birth parents to call.
“I hate the word `marketing,’ but it describes what’s happening,” says Enid Callen, co-founder with Deane Borgeson of Adoption Connection, a non-profit organization in Highland Park that provides care and counseling for birth mothers and matches them up with prospective adoptive parents, much like a dating service.
“We even know of a couple who put a sign in their car that said, `Loving Couple Wishes to Adopt.’ “
Kathleen Hogan Morrison, a Chicago lawyer specializing in adoption, describes it as “a completely new phenomenon. . . . Years ago, prospective parents did not participate (in finding a baby). They simply went to an agency and eventually found themselves with a baby. Now there is much more openness.”
“The key word is networking, and it’s very, very successful,” says Ellyn Wieselman, head of Adoption Consultants in Highland Park. In the last six years, she has consulted with about 450 couples in adoption options and techniques.
“I have never met a family, that is ready to conduct a very active search, that can’t find a child they will love,” she said. “Adoption is very doable. It’s also very competitive.”
Competitiveness is one of the driving forces behind the aggressive approach being taken by would-be adoptive parents.
About 30,000 healthy, same-race babies in the United States are adopted by non-relative families per year, and another 30,000 are children with special needs, according to Adoptive Families of America, the largest non-profit organization in the U.S. serving adoptive and prospective adoptive families, with a membership of 15,000 families.
In contrast, about 200,000 couples are seeking to adopt at any given time (a very rough estimate used by Adoptive Families).
Advertising uniqueness
Prospective parents “have to let the birth mother know what’s special about them,” says Adoption Connection’s Callen. “They have to talk about what makes them different than the other guy, what sets them apart.”
Kerry, 31, and Jeff, 37 (who asked that their last names not be used), married 2 1/2 years, are the couple who placed the ad, now running in several Illinois newspapers, that’s quoted at the start of this article.
Kerry suffered a ruptured appendix that led to a hysterectomy when she was 18, so they have always known that adoption would be their route to a family.
“I wrote to 23 agencies. Then we started finding out that with the traditional adoptions, there were so many restrictions and the wait was two to five years. We weren’t even acceptable to some; we hadn’t been married long enough.
“And with the traditional, you fill out the application and then sit back and wait until they call and say your baby is ready.”
They decided to aggressively seek a baby themselves, which means they will have, to some degree, personal contact with the birth mother. “Open adoption” is the term used when adoptive parents and birth parents know each other.
“At the low end of a bell-shaped curve, open adoption is a couple who meets the birth mother maybe once,” says Kathy Casey, co-chairman of Adoptive Families Today, a support and educational group of adoptive parents in the Chicago area. “At the other end are situations where the birth mothers come regularly to visit the child in the adoptive homes.”
“We figure this open adoption can be almost like having an extended family,” Jeff said. “I don’t think most (birth parents) are interested in being co-parents, but they probably want to know how their offspring are going through life.”
In addition to their advertisement, Kerry and Jeff are mailing out 50 networking kits to friends, relatives and associates, asking each of the 50 to distribute the materials to five other people.
“The cover letter (in each packet) says that our dream is to adopt and that we’re trying to connect with a birth mother,” Kerry said. “There are baby cards. . . . Those are like business cards with a picture of a stork with a baby and `We want to adopt!’ in gold letters, with our names and the 800 number.
“There are also notices that can be put on bulletin boards. They say, `If you’re pregnant and thinking of making adoption plans, we would like to be considered. . . . We know adoption is an extremely loving, unselfish choice but it can be a difficult decision to make. . . . If you are considering adoption, please call us at home.’ Then, at the bottom, are those little strips that people can tear off, with our names and telephone number.”
Looking for a match
Almost always, something clicks when a birth mother finds the parents she thinks would be right for her baby, according to Callen of Adoption Connection.
“We have 30 couples at any given time who are in our biography bank,” she says. “When a birth mother tells us what kind of parents she thinks she wants, we provide her with a `Dear Birth Mom’ letter from a couple we think might fit her wants,” Callen said. The letter, written by the couple, talks about themselves, how they live, why they want a baby-“you just pour your heart out,” said one adoptive mother.
“If there’s going to be a match, there’s almost always a click when they read the letter. Like the girl will say, `Oh, I like that kind of music too,’ or, `That’s exactly the kind of vacation I wanted to go on when I was a child.’ “
One birth mother working with Callen was very tall, and wanted a tall family; she picked a couple in which the woman was only 5-2, but the husband was 6-4. Some specify what age parents they would like their baby to have. Many want their children brought up in their religion.
One adoptive mother remembers a friend who sent a birth mother a picture of herself and her husband at a party. “There was a can of beer in the background. It wasn’t theirs, but the girl (birth mother) rejected them. She didn’t want her baby to have parents who had anything to do with drinking.”
Connecting with a birth mother, and following through to a successful adoption, is virtually a full-time job.
Many couples start off by going to an adoption consultant who advises them on all their options. If an interstate adoption is a possibility, the couple must have a foster parent license, which necessitates a home study by a licensed child welfare agency, such as Lutheran Social Services of Illinois. Counseling, medical costs and sometimes other expenses such as rent and clothing for the birth mother are paid by the adoptive parents through organizations such as Adoption Connection. An attorney is essential.
Total adoption costs, in either an open or closed adoption (in which adoptive parents have no personal contact with birth parents), run between $10,000 and $20,000.
Ad leads to a mother
Two years ago, after five years of infertility, Debbie and Chris covered all the bases when they decided they would start their family via adoption.
They consulted with Wieselman, signed up with Adoption Connection and spent $1,000 on newspaper advertisements. They found their birth mother after one month, through an ad. Now they’re seeking a second baby. Their new ad reads: “Loving parents, a big brother & 2 friendly puppy dogs await your newborn. We have the love in our hearts and the stability in our lives to provide a happy home. Call collect.”
“The first time . . . the birth mom was staying at her best friend’s house and the best friend’s mother saw our ad and called us. We sent her a biography of ourselves and our picture. Then my husband and I met the birth mom and the friend’s mother at a restaurant,” Debbie said.
“We didn’t eat too much; you’re on edge. I think I ordered spaghetti. We told her about ourselves, and why we wanted to adopt a child. She wanted to know if we wanted a boy or a girl, and we told her that after five years of infertility, we didn’t care.
“And we asked her a lot about her family life. The birth father didn’t know she was pregnant. We talked for about 2 1/2 hours. We left it hanging. My husband told her that it was so important that we all needed to think. I called her the next day, and told her we would like to go with her. And she wanted us.”
The baby was born two months later. The birth mother had asked Debbie and Chris to come to the hospital for the delivery, “but the baby came so fast, she hardly made it, and we didn’t,” Debbie said. “We got there afterwards. The (birth mother’s) grandmother was there, and she gave us a hug and kiss and thanked us for taking the baby.”
Debbie and Chris have sent pictures and a letter to the birth mother through Adoption Connection. “We agreed to keep contact through the agency. If our son wants to look her up later on, he can go to the agency. But she (the birth mother) would not be under obligation to see him. We also agreed to keep in touch for any possible medical reasons.”
But good-faith agreements to ongoing contact are not legally enforceable, says attorney Morrison-an issue both sides need to understand.
Openness can lead to problems
She also warns that an exchange of identifiable information-full names and addresses-could lead to problems down the road if one side wants more openness than the other.
“Both sides need to consider that how people feel at the time of placement might not be the same way they feel in coming years,” she said. “Birth parents might want a growing level of openness than they did at first. Or sometimes the adoptive parents might want more contact than the birth parents.”
Although persistence for more contact could become uncomfortable, she says, open adoption is as legal as closed adoption. “Under Illinois law, the only way adoption is subject to attack is if one of the birth parents mount a legal challenge (saying the adoption was based on) fraud, coercion or duress, or deception.”
Trying to find a baby through newspaper ads and bulletin boards can sometimes lead to scams.
“We heard from a birth mother supposedly in England who was pregnant with twins,” Robin said. She and her husband, Ron, started advertising in November, after four years of trying to have a baby. “I talked to her on the phone for about two hours, I thought she was calling (collect) long distance. She wanted to know if we would send her air fare, so she could fly here and meet us. It didn’t sound right, and we said no.
“When we got our phone bill, the call wasn’t from England, it was from Roselle. . . . It was a scam; it’s my understanding she’s in prison now.”
But Robin and Ron believe the benefits far outweigh the risks.
They are now meeting with a birth mother who called them after reading their ad. “For a birth mother to trust us enough to give us a child, that’s like a miracle. . . . We know we want our child to be raised knowing they are adopted. It should be part of who they are, just like having brown hair or blue eyes,” Robin said.
“The key value to open adoption is getting information, not only psychological issues but health and medical records that are tied to a genetic background,” says lawyer Sally Wildman, past chair of the American Bar Association Adoption Committee of the Family Law Section.
Adoption is not the way most couples initially figure they’re going to build their family. As Robin said, “It was like a death, being unable to have a child.
“But there are other ways of forming a family. I never would have thought that I would ever be handing out baby cards to clients at work. It’s personal (marketing), but after you’ve done infertility, most of the sensitive parts of your life have already been exposed.
“It’s the end result that counts.”
