Talking about Adoption

I'm never one to shy away from a pedantic discussion about semantics, so I really liked the following passage in one of the open adoption books I'm reading:

Adoption is a process. We advocate that the process be kept distinct from the person who is the adoptee. On the simplest level this means preferring "Betsy was adopted" to "Betsy is an adopted child." The first (Betsy was adopted) correctly describes a single and past event in her life. This is no different from a birthmother proud of the experience of giving birth describing to another, "I had my son by cesarean birth." The same birthmother would not refer to that child after the event as "my cesarean son."

By contrast, "Betsy is an adopted child" or even "Betsy is special because she is adopted" conveys an ongoing significance to the state of being adopted. This is potentially dangerous because of the subtle implication that adopted children are somehow different from natural children who do not have labels attached to them. In addition, if Betsy is described as "special" or "chosen," that means someone is less special or valuable as a person. If Betsy is not a "natural child" that makes her "unnatural" or at least not normal. Do these labels all mean that at one point Betsy was not so special because she was not wanted?

Excerpt from Dear Birthmother by Kathleen Silber and Phylis Speedlin, Third Edition, Page 141

This hit home, especially in light of a conversation we just had with my sister-in-law Elise earlier tonight. She expressed the thought that she sometimes was afraid to bring up an adoption-related question or topic because she didn't know the right verbiage for it and was afraid of saying something unintentionally offensive. I can sympathize with that - I feel like we've learned an entirely new vocabulary since we started working with our agency!

I totally get the above quotes from Dear Birthmother, and on the one hand I agree with the sentiment. Our child will be our child, end of story, regardless of how our family is formed. That fact that we will form our family through adoption won't make a difference in how much we love our child, and so describing the fact of the adoption as a discrete event rather than as a characteristic of the child seems right.

On the other hand, the difference between "Betsy was adopted" (as a past tense verb) and "Besty is adopted" (as a present tense verb and adjective) is so slight that I think most people wouldn't even hear the difference. In fact, in the extreme case, the contraction "Betsy's adopted" could really represent either version. Making such a subtle distinction also seems like it's a pretty difficult task, and one we could easily make mistakes on all the time.

Don't you just love semantics?

Alright, that's enough thinking for now - better go off to bed before my head explodes. Next up (hopefully tomorrow) I'll try to post pictures from our visit to Rhode Island with Josh, Elise, and baby Cora!

Do You Have a Home Evacuation Plan?

On Monday we have Katie (our counselor from OA&FS) coming to our house for our first home visit. Needless to say, we've been cleaning up like freaks and trying to make sure everything's in tip-top shape! That giant hole our cats clawed out of the sofa? All patched up :)

In addition to just making sure we've cleaned everything up, the agency prepared us by sending along the checklist of things they have to verify for legal reasons. Most are common sense items, such as:

• The home has safe drinking water.
• Smoke alarms are in working order and located in every room in which a child sleeps.
• Swimming pools, wading pools, hot tubs, and other water hazards are inaccessible to children.

All those requirements? We're golden. We had to do a little bit of work for some of them (we didn't actually have a fire extinguisher, for instance), but they generally all made sense. One of them really came out of nowhere, though:

• The home has a posted home evacuation plan. It will be shared with the child or young adult at the time of placement and will be practiced at least one time every 6 months.

I mean... really? Because it's so difficult to just walk out the door? And we're definitely going to make our newborn do fire drills every six months - I'm sure they'll be really useful. Anyway, this is when it's useful that I'm married to a civil engineer. Brian and CAD to the rescue!

He missed a closet in the bedroom...

I can rest easy now that I know where to go in case of emergency!

Summer's Here!

The baby, that is, not the season.

Our good friends Tatiana and Mike welcomed their daughter Summer back in January, and we were finally able to go and visit them this weekend! Summer's now a whole 2 months old, so we waited far too long for a visit. On the upside, she's aware enough that we were able to capture her attention for at least a few seconds at a time!

Summer came early this year!

Unfortunately, Summer started crying the moment I picked her up. Tatiana was kind enough to teach me her "swinging" trick, so I was able to get her to calm down at least for a bit. And Brian even got her to fall asleep in his arms! We'll be old pros at this in no time flat...

Homestudy Interviews!

Time for a little good news, bad news.  Of course, the bad news is that I should have posted this update a few days ago.  Not too terrible, but I hope all of you can forgive me for the delay!  The good news - all 4 of our homestudy interviews are scheduled!  Our first homestudy interview will actually be at our house with Katie, our counselor, on Monday, April 9th which is just over 1 week away.

So what will happen during our first interview?  Katie will get to see our house and determine if it's safe (read: not a death trap), stable (read: we actually live here and the pictures in the frames aren't of strangers), and healthy (read: all of our furniture isn't coated with a fine dusting of crack).  I joke a lot here, but there are some important and valid legal items that'll need to get checked off.  Aside from the checklist items, I'm sure Katie will chat and get to know us better.

From a counselor's viewpoint, these interviews are actually really important.  So far, we've technically only had 1 meeting for two hours with Katie.  While we've submitted loads of written information, it's important to get to know adoptive parents through face-to-face interaction.  If you were a counselor evaluating and preparing an adoptive family to welcome a baby into their home, how many hours would you want to get to know them and make sure they're prepared?

• Application & Intake Interview
• Homestudy Interview #1 - April 9th
• Homestudy Interview #2

While I've discussed the first meeting, we'll have 3 others that are tentatively scheduled to take place by April 25th.  This is great for us as all four of our interviews will be done before we leave to go to Europe for 2 weeks in May.  That timing will allow Katie to wrap up our homestudy and write the 10+ page report while we're gone.  It's really exciting to know we're still on track for entering the pool of waiting families in June or July!

The Financial Impact of Adopting

Adopting isn't cheap, as we're learning along the way, but there's also a lot of ways to recoup fees that we have to pay. We thought it'd be interesting to write up a post about what the various costs are for adoption, based upon our experiences. (Of course anyone else's experience could vary greatly, depending on whether they use an agency or an attorney, which agency, the geographical location, etc.)

Adoption Costs

With our agency, we have the following standard costs for various parts of the process:

Service/Event	Fee*
Pre-Adoption Seminar	$490
Application and Intake Interview	$1,160
Homestudy and Family Preparation	$3,850
Pool Entry, Program and Marketing	$7,345
Adoption Planning I	$4,730
Adoption Planning II	$2,780
Placement	$4,730
*These amounts are based on what we were quoted, are subject to change, may not be valid for others, etc.

These fees are "standard" because every adoption through the agency will incur them. The total standard fees are then $25,085.

In addition to standard fees, there are some additional fees that can come up on a case-by-case basis:

• Travel Costs for Counselors: If it's necessary for the counselor to travel during any part of the process, travel is billed at an hourly rate of $30-$55 per hour, depending on the situation. We'll assume $250 in travel costs for this post.
• Agency Attorney Fees: For adoptions finalized in Washington (our agency can finalize either in Washington or Oregon), the law requires the agency to be represented in the termination of birthparents' rights. A retainer of up to $2,500 is required. For this post, we'll assume the adoption is in Washington and requires the retainer.
• Attorney Fees for Finalization: Finalization of the adoption in court requires attorney involvement. We'll assume an average $500 attorney fee.
• Twins/Siblings: In the event of a twin or sibling placement, an additional $1,000 fee is assessed. We will assume only a single placement.
• Birthmother Expenses: The adoptive family can be expected to pay for reasonable pregnancy-related expenses, such as pre-natal care or maternity clothing. We will assume $2,000 for this post.

There will likely be other miscellaneous costs that I've missed, but hopefully they aren't large-ticket items. With these fees, the total expected amount for us will be $30,335.

Financial Assistance

There are two very large sources of financial aid that we can take advantage of when adoption. The first is from the federal Adoption Assistance Program. The program offers a $12,170 tax credit for all adoption-related expenses. It's important to note that this is a credit, and not a deduction, so it will literally be a dollar-for-dollar reimbursement of our adoption expenses.

Additionally, Brian and I each work for an employer that offers $5,000 towards adoption expenses for a child, which can be used in addition to the federal credit. (It turns out that a large number of employers offer similar programs in various amounts.)

Between these two sources, we hope to receive reimbursements for $22,170 of our adoption expenses. (The federal tax credit is set to expire after 2012, but is likely to be renewed as it has been for multiple years now.) That means we expect to pay approximately $8,165 out of pocket.

Why So Much?

Open Adopt as an agency focuses very much on providing a full range of free options counseling to pregnant women. Only about 20% of the women they work with end up making an adoption plan. To that extent, much of the fees we pay the agency goes towards their counseling program. They're a non-profit agency that receives donations as well, but that only makes up some of their operating expenses.

Additionally, each counselor spends a significant amount of time working with both pregnant women and waiting adoptive families, so fees also go towards paying for their salaries. To that extent, I'm actually surprised the fees aren't higher - the counselors have to take a large number of hours to complete our interviews and homestudy!

Any variable fees that directly benefit a birthmother (paying for pre-natal care, for example) must be approved by a court before they are paid. This step is designed to make sure that there is no coercion happening, and to ensure that even the appearance of buying or selling a child is avoided.

Where We're At

The agency operates on a "pay as you go" system: whenever we move forward from one stage to the next, we pay the fee for that stage. We've currently paid for the pre-adoption seminar and the application/intake interview; we'll have to pay for the homestudy and for pool entry before we actually go into the pool of waiting families. All the remaining expenses after that will not be paid until we're chosen by a birth mother.

So there you go! Adoption can be quite expensive, but there's also assistance available, and the costs seem manageable in the end. I'm curious how this compares to a pregnant woman's healthcare costs - anyone out there have anything to add about that in the comments?