Private Domestic Adoptionby Shoshanna Grey | More from this Blogger 17 Jul 2006 12:08 PM I spend a lot of time on a number of adoption forums and there is one situation that has come up enough that I thought it warranted discussion. The question is usually along these lines: "A friend of mine called me because she knows we are interested in adopting. Apparently her niece is pregnant and wants to make an adoption plan for the baby. We have talked and she wants us to adopt her baby. How do we proceed from here?" What this person wants to do would be classified as a Private Domestic Adoption. Basically, they are going to skip the "middle man" by not using an agency or child placing service. Instead, this will be an agreement between the birth parents and the adoptive parents and they need to make sure that they work out all of the legal stuff to be certain that everything is in order. There are essentially two things that you need in order to get started with a Private Domestic Adoption. First, you need a homestudy. In order to adopt any child, no matter who that child is or what your relationship is with the birth parents, you have to have a state-approved homestudy. In order to get this done, you can simply look in the phone book under "Homestudies" and you should have several choices. The second thing you need is an attorney. It is best to hire two attorneys - one to represent the birth parents and one to represent the adoptive parents. Make sure that you select attorneys who have experience in adoption and make sure you get references! A good adoption attorney will help make your adoption process run smoothly. While doing a private adoption does require you to do more of the work than with a traditional agency adoption, the benefit is that your process is much more personal and you can make sure that it runs in a way that is comfortable to both the adoptive parents and the birth parents. Learn more about Shoshanna Grey  Shoshanna Grey has worked as an occupational social worker, teacher, child care provider, customer service reqpresentative, college recruiter and several other positions over the years. Relevantadoption tags Food | baby | holidays | children | parenting | christmas | pregnancy | relationships | family | Scrapbooking User Comments sandraspeaks (10) 28 Aug 2006 07:03 PMI personally did a domestic open adoption and it started basically the same way. The bmom's mom found us and we all sat down and talked BEFORE we introduced an agency into the picture. We wanted the baby, and they wanted to pick a local home for this child. I think your article makes it sound like it's a bad thing. IT's NOT! Once we talked, we put our homestudy in high gear so we were ready to be an "at-risk" foster home by the time the baby was born, this way the baby could come to my house until the paperwork was finished and the TPR (termination of parental rights) was done. Everyone had a lawyer along with the agency being involved. It might have been considered a messy adoption, but we walked out of the hospital with a baby that was less than 2 days old. He has always been with us, and it's worth it. I would do it this way again too. Lots of times agencies have lists of paper ready parents but don't have US babies to offer them, so agencies would say not to do it this way because you are basically jumping to the top of the list. The agency was also ready to tell us that if we couldn't afford to adopt this child, they had a room full of people that could. What a wonderful blessing to be a part of the bmom's choice. Oh, we were invited by the bmom to be at the baby's birth (another no-no if the agency is more involved.) Because we all stayed friends, the agency couldn't play us against each other too.  Shoshanna Grey (2785) 05 Oct 2006 05:57 PMI'm sorry if this article made private infant adoption sound like a bad thing. That was not my intention in the least. I think that private adoptions allow a lot more freedom and openness than agency guided adoptions. I'm so glad that it worked out well for you. As I said before, this type of adoption requires more work and effort on the part of the birth parents and adoptive parents, but the result is a much more personal. Community Tags adoption, babies, children, domestic adoption, parenting, private domestic adoption, private adoption Discuss this article
|
Adoption categories
More adoption tagsFood | baby | holidays | children | parenting | christmas | pregnancy | relationships | family | Scrapbooking |
