Adoption is really expensive, and you have to have a strong heart for the ups and downs of the process. You need an adventurous spirit when this child is born; hopefully, it will be fine and will grow up healthy. I’ve done 2,000 adoptions in my career, and I have kids coming to me now who are in college or in their mid-20s. I know their mom did cocaine 20 or 25 years ago when that was the popular drug, but nowadays, it’s often more heavy-duty drugs, which add more complications. When people come to me saying all they want is a healthy baby, I can put that on my list, but I can’t make any guarantees that you’ll have a match any time soon.
I do a lot of stepparent and grandparent adoptions because, sadly, a lot of parents are overdosing, leaving the grandparents or other relatives with their children. The drug epidemic is still out there wreaking havoc on families.
I even do a lot of adult adoptions. It’s a beautiful thing when a guy who is 60 and who has been raising his daughter since she was five wants to formalize the relationship now that she is 25. Maybe her biological dad passed away or is out of the picture.
Some of the adoptions I handle come from the Department of Children and Families, and those are hard because you have to get them out of the department. We can, if the parents cooperate, but the department tends to give biological parents a lot of chances to straighten out their acts. That means, a lot of the times, that those kids are tied up for years and years in this system in foster care, so it’s really hard to access them. It’s sad because I love doing adoptions and I love making a difference in a child’s life; I still do them, but when people come to me, I have to tell them the truth. I’m not going to sugarcoat it.
International adoptions are pretty much closed down. All of those people who were doing international adoptions are now coming here trying to do domestic adoptions, so you have a lot of people competing to adopt the small number of primarily drug-exposed babies being born. It’s just really sad and really tough. I tell people they’re welcome to be on my adoption list, but if they are really ready to be parents now and they can swing it financially, surrogacy is the route to go.