Our Adoption Process - Choosing an International Program

Once we knew we had decided on an agency we had to decide which country to adopt from. Another thing we appreciate about Lifelink is that they are the only agency we found that laid all the specific requirements out in an easy to understand fashion. They gave us a chart showing all the countries that they work with, and the requirements that each country has for adoptive parents. Most of the requirements are: age of the parents, age difference between spouses, length of marriage, age difference between children and parents, income level, etc. The chart also tells you which type of children are available from that country (age, gender, and whether or not there are usually health issues.) Also you can see what the costs will be to adopt children from that country, and what the travel requirements are. Finally, you can see what length of time you will have to wait for your child after you begin the adoption process.

Some people have asked us why we did not want to adopt from Russia, as that closer represents our ethnic heritage. We considered Russia, Bulgaria, and the Ukraine (along with Guatemala, Hong Kong, and the Phillipines.) However, there were several factors regarding these European countries that caused us to decide against them. First, adopting from these countries is considerably more expensive. Also, we have heard of high incident rates of fetal alcohol syndrome in these children, and that is one health condition that we wish to avoid. We also didn’t think that we would be able to handle making 2 trips to the country – one to visit the orphanage and meet the child, and then a couple of months later going back to finalize the adoption and bring the child home. We had also heard of adoptive parents arriving in the Ukraine and being told that they could not adopt the number of children that they had been expecting to adopt (going home with one child instead of 2 or 3.) We hear none of these types of stories about China. Also, we do not mind having children that don’t resemble us physically. In the future, we may want to adopt a boy, so if our first child is a girl, we may end up going to another country for our second adoption.

We initially chose to adopt from Korea because the children are very young at adoption (only a few months old) and they are mostly boys. However, we found out that Korea would not accept us due to Jim's Cystic Fibrosis. We took a few days to think it over and decided to try China, as they have the next youngest children available (our baby will probably be between 8-12 months when we get her.) We want a young child for 2 reasons: first because bonding is so important in the first 2 years of life, and second because we want to experience having an infant. Maybe for our next adoption we will get an older child; we'll see.