Perception and Reality: The Untold Story of Domestic Adoption

Adoption in the United States has undergone a seismic shift in the last 30 years. How long will it take for popular perceptions to catch up with the new, healthier reality?

By Eliza Newlin Carney

In the spring of 2001, when Katie and Jeffrey Davis set out to adopt a baby domestically, everyone close to the couple assumed they were in for an excruciatingly long wait.

As it turned out, the Davises, who live in Baltimore, Maryland, were matched with a birthmother less than a month after their adoption agency started presenting their paperwork to prospective birthparents. Their daughter, Carrie, now five, was placed in their arms just seven months after they started the adoption process.

“People think that adoption takes five years, just forever and ever,” says Katie. “They were shocked that we adopted a baby in the U.S., and that the process went so smoothly.”

Domestic Adoption Reinvented
“For many years, adoption was defined by fear. Now I see fear diminishing among both our adoptive and biological families.” —Dawn Smith-Pliner, executive director of adoption agency Friends in Adoption, in Vermont

The Davis family’s story is not particularly unusual. While international adoptions have been stealing the limelight for the last decade or so, domestic adoption has remained an untold story. Despite persistently negative and sensational media coverage, domestic adoption today is more transparent than ever before, and increasingly defined by healthier choices for birth families and adoptive families alike.

The fact that more than 25,000 American families successfully adopt newborn babies in the United States every year belies the widespread misperception that domestic adoption is a difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and risky process. The truth is that most families successfully adopt within two years of beginning the process. The cost of a domestic adoption varies widely, from as little as $4,000 to more than $30,000. On average, according to surveys conducted by Adoptive Families in each of the last five years, the median total cost of a domestic adoption is under $20,000, considerably less than that of the average international adoption.

“People watch TV and read the newspapers, and they are scared to death,” says Mark McDermott, an adoption attorney in Washington, D.C. The most damaging, and most entrenched, conviction—that birthparents return after relinquishing parental rights to try to reclaim the baby—virtually never comes to pass.

Almost as far off the mark is the common belief that most domestic adoptions are so open as to constitute virtual “co-parenting.” In fact, contact between the birth family and the adopting family typically involves periodic updates to the birth family, often via an intermediary, an experience that adopting and biological parents generally support.

Domestic Adoptions Outpace International
“A man I encountered while shopping for baby supplies refused to believe that my two-month-old daughter was adopted, because she’s not from China!” —Samantha Cleveland, Altamont, New York

Although fewer adoptions currently take place each year within the U.S. than 30 years ago, domestic adoption is far from dying out. In fact, there are more domestic adoptions than international adoptions in American families. (See chart, below right.)

To be sure, the number of infant placements in the U.S. has dropped in the last 30 years. In the mid-1970s, as many as 49,000 American infants were placed for adoption each year. In 2002, the most recent year for which accurate numbers exist, there were an estimated 22,000 domestic newborn, non-relative adoptions, a number that has been relatively consistent for the last 10 years.

The drop in the number of newborn adoptions since the 1970s coincides with a decline in the percentage of single mothers placing children for adoption, down from 9 percent in the 1970s to 1.4 percent in 2002, according to the National Survey of Family Growth. As the stigma against single parenthood has diminished over the last 30 years, so has the number of children placed for adoption.

Despite the tenacity of myths and stereotypes, domestic adoption has quietly redefined itself over a generation. Adopting parents, once resigned to a lengthy wait at their local adoption agency, now have more options, more control, and more information. Birthparents, once shamed and almost completely shut out of adoption decisions, are now actively involved in the process. Independent adoptions have increased in number and, by some accounts, now represent the majority of domestic adoptions. The Internet has made it easier for like-minded birthparents and adopting families to find one another over geographic distances that used to preclude contact.

From Secrecy to Transparency
“Meeting our child’s birth family gave us information to share with our child at the appropriate time and allowed the birth family to get to know us.” —Vicki Taylor, Virginia

While almost every aspect of adoption is different than it was in the past, it is within the family matching process that most change has occurred. In private and agency adoptions, rather than merely being assigned a baby to adopt without any background information to share with the child as he or she grows, adopting parents now usually meet or talk with the birth family.

Birthparents, by the same token, are empowered to choose which family will adopt their child. Birth families are more likely to have access to counseling and independent legal representation, and, together with the adopting family, determine the nature of contact after the adoption.

Almost everyone involved in adoption today—adopting parents, birthparents, and adoption professionals—embrace this new transparency as an antidote to the secrecy and confidentiality of the past. Birth families are reassured that their child will be well cared for; adopted children have the answers to questions that arise over the years.

Today, families who’ve adopted domestically often say that initial concern about the role of birthparents is replaced by gratitude for the opportunity to know their child’s family of origin. They note the positive aspects of adopting domestically: the opportunity to parent a newborn, and the knowledge they possess about their children’s medical and social histories.

Getting to Know One Another
“People have a really hard time understanding why we continue to exchange letters and pictures with our child’s birth family. They just assume that we would have wanted them out of our lives as soon as they terminated their parental rights.” —Kirsten Wilkerson, Edwardsville, Illinois

A perennial misperception about today’s domestic adoptions is that they involve frequent, face-to-face contact between birth and adoptive families. Adoption professionals say that the term “open adoption” could more accurately be replaced with “identified adoption”—that is, adoption in which families exchange identifying information, sometimes via an intermediary. In most cases, adoptive families and birth families agree, before the child is born or the adoption is finalized, to a mutually acceptable level of contact. Updates are usually provided through e-mail, online photobooks, or letters periodically shared with the birth family.

There is no “typical” scenario, however. Some birth and adoptive families meet infrequently after the adoption, while others see one another more frequently. Still other families start out communicating only via an intermediary but later decide to meet.

Adoption professionals report that, after the initial reassurance of photos and letters in the first years following a child’s birth, some birthmothers move on with their lives. In these cases, contact often diminishes. Smith-Pliner reports that contact is sometimes renewed in later years, by either the adopting or placing family. 

Domestic Adoption by the Numbers In 2007: U.S. newborn adoptions (est)................... 25,000 International adoptions to U.S...............  21,600 Cost & Timing Data from Adoptive Families’ 2007 Reader Survey Average time from preparation of portfolio to match with birthmother (excluding time in failed adoption): 6 months or less....  56% 12 months or less... 78% Time from birthmother match to birth of child: Less than 3 months  75% Matched after birth   15% Families that worked with more than one birthmoer before successfully adopting ..............  31% Ethnicity of baby adopted: Caucasian............. 48% African-American... 16% Asian/Bi/Multiracial/ Other...................  28% Latino....................  8% Total adoption cost (before tax credit or employee benefits):  Less than $20K...... 48% Between $20 and $25K ...................   19% Between $25 and $30K ..................... 10% More than $30K..... 20%

Adoption is Forever
“When we tell people that we see our sons’ birthmothers, they always ask, ‘Aren’t you afraid they will take them back?’ They seem to think they can change their minds at any time. We explain the legal revocation period all over again.” —Sonya Dobbins, Indian Trail, North Carolina

The fear that domestic adoptions are legally risky remains widespread. While there are no data on how many adoptions land in the courts, experts concur that less than one percent of domestic adoptions are legally contested after the relinquishment of parental rights. “People are at much greater risk of being hit by a bus than they are of having a birthparent regain custody of a child,” says Richard Pearlman, executive director of the Family Resource Center, an adoption nonprofit based in Chicago.

Kirsten Wilkerson and her husband, Pete, adopted their daughter, Meghan, now age three, less than a year after they began the process. At the beginning, the Wilkersons had fully expected to adopt from China or Korea. That plan was driven, in part, by “the belief out there that birthparents would come back to reclaim their child,” explains Kirsten, a psychologist who lives in Edwardsville, Illinois.

But chance—or, as Kirsten says, fate—intervened. Her doctor told her about a pregnant patient who was considering placing her child for adoption. The doctor wanted to know whether Kirsten and Pete were interested.

As it turned out, that call never came—but it did get Kirsten thinking. Soon afterward, a chance conversation led her to another pregnant woman interested in making an adoption plan. As soon as she met Meghan’s birthmother, recalls Kirsten, her fears about a birthmother’s change of heart melted away. Three months later, she and Pete were parents.

Breaking Down Birthmom Stereotypes
“Both of our sons’ birthmoms were in their thirties, raising other children. Both were employed, but knew they couldn’t feed another child. People assumed that there was something terribly wrong with them, that they were women who ‘give away’ babies because they didn’t care.” —Amy Santoro, Danbury, Connecticut

Even as domestic adoption evolves, negative stereotypes of birthmothers refuse to die out. Attorney Mark McDermott has been working to correct such stereotypes for 21 years. “Sometimes I feel like I have not made a dent,” he says. Most damaging are the portrayals of birthmothers as heartlessly “giving up” their children. In reality, most of them have made a painful, but loving, choice—one for which there is very little societal support.

Despite the perception that most birthmothers are irresponsible teenagers, many are single mothers who already have a child, and who face economic pressure to place a child. “Women are educated and empowered to make a choice, and they want the best life possible for their child,” says Steve Kirsh, an adoption attorney in Indianapolis. Adoption professionals see a crying need to de-stigmatize adoption, and to fight the damaging biases that discourage women in crisis pregnancies from considering adoption.  

Understanding About Adoption Grows Year by Year
"Each year adoptive and biological families are more and more educated about adoption, more comfortable with connections. There’s still a long way to go.” —Dawn Smith-Pliner

Adopting a newborn domestically is eminently doable, say professionals.  Nonetheless, waiting parents should educate themselves about the process, and about all their options. It’s not uncommon for waiting parents to pursue more than one route at a time, filing paperwork with an agency and also networking independently. “Anybody who puts several irons in the fire should be successful within 24 months,” says Pearlman. Wait times are shortest for parents who place the least restrictions on the description of their dream child. “The broader the parameters of an individual or couple, the more opportunity an agency has to find a baby for that family,” says Smith-Pliner. 

For Lisa and Paul Mausser, an adoptive family in Maryland, the process was dramatically different for each of their two children. When the Maussers adopted their son, Adam, in 2003, the process took three years from start to finish, and cost about $12,000. In the case of their daughter Alyssa, the Maussers waited just nine months—but the cost was almost $20,000.
To the Maussers, the important thing is what their children’s stories have in common. “As soon as we met our kids’ birthmothers, we just knew that it was right. Our children felt like ours immediately,” says Lisa.

Many families have already discovered what the rest of America has yet to figure out: that the real story of domestic adoption has thousands of happy endings. As Kirsten Wilkerson puts it: “It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s a lot more straightforward than people think it is.” 

ELIZA NEWLIN CARNEY is a journalist and a frequent contributor to AF. She and her husband live in Maryland with their daughter, adopted domestically.

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