The summer after my second year of grad school, Husband and I agreed that it was time to start planning our family. Actually, what probably really happened is that I cried, begged, pleaded, and acted mildly insane for so long that Husband realized that life with kids would be less stressful than life with a baby-crazy wife. But I choose not to remember it that way.
We started researching adoption options. There are three basic kinds of adoption, as I see it. There's foreign adoption, domestic private adoption, and domestic adoption through the state foster care system. We weighed the pros and cons of each, insofar as we could tell what the pros and cons were. The truth of the matter is, this stuff is complicated and until you go through the process you just can't understand all of the nuances, no matter how much research you do.
Here's how we broke it down when were deciding which path to adoption was best for us:
* foreign adoption: pros= you can get matched with a baby; cons= hella expensive, sometimes the country or orphanage lies about the age or health of the child, adopting from Asia has turned into some weird yuppie thing to do and we don't want our kid thinking they were chosen as an accessory to our priviledged white lifestyle
* domestic private adoption: pros= you can get matched with a baby; cons= expensive, birth mothers can back out at the last second
* adoption through the state: pros= free of cost; cons= could take a really long time in order to get matched with a healthy infant
Husband and I decided to adopt through the state, as we were in no rush to get matched for adoption right away. It's turned out to be an even longer process than we expected, but we're still committed to adopting through the foster care system.
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