Finding a match through an attorney?: U.S. Newborn Waiting Parents Adoption Group Discussion Topic

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Finding a match through an attorney?

Posted by Mandeeb13 to U.S. Newborn Waiting Parents on Aug 08, 2019 at 4:03am | 1 Comment | Post a reply

Hello,

My husband and I are pursuing domestic infant adoption and have been working with an agency in our state for the last 2 years. Although we like the agency, we’ve become discouraged by the (lack of) results we’ve seen: since our home study was approved in 2017, we’ve only received maybe 7 or 8 opportunities to submit our profile for consideration. The agency keeps saying that there’s a lot of work going on “behind the scenes,” and that profiles are often being shown to EM’s, even when a situation hasn’t been sent out to the HAP’s, but that information doesn’t provide much consolation, since there’s no way for us to verify its accuracy. Lately we’ve begun considering the possibility of locating an adoption attorney who handles matching, in the hopes of increasing our chances of a successful outcome. I’m wondering if anyone here has had experience with this? In my mind, I picture an attorney in that situation spending a little more time actually trying to locate a match specifically for us, but maybe that’s not really how it works?

Replies

Some of this depends on what state you live in, and whether you are willing to adopt from another state.

We adopted in Florida through an attorney, and in Florida attorneys can seek out expectant moms who are considering adoption. In some states, like New York, the attorney gets involved only after the EM and PAP have found each other.

Adoption attorneys have a bad reputation on this site, but in our experience, the adoption attorney was respectful of EP, provided counseling, and was overall better to the e-mom’s in our case than the agency we initially started working with; in fact that agency was closed years later due to some of their practices.

Because our initial experience with the agency was so poor, I can’t tell you if our experience was better because we used an attorney, or better because we had found a reputable adoption professional. I can tell you that we brought home our oldest 6 months after signing up with the attorney (we already had our home study), and we had one failed match with the attorney before that. We had been with our agency for 18 months by then, but, as I said, their practices were so out of the norm that I cannot say the issue was agency vs attorney, as much as horrible professional vs good professional.

Posted by jszmom on Aug 08, 2019 at 3:17pm