Tag: Adoption Fees

Targeted Marketing

I’m always short on time to get these blogs done on Tuesdays. Yesterday, an essay from a site I’ve appreciated in the past got my attention and so I saved it to comment on it for today. That site Adoption & Birth Mothers feature Musings of the Lame is what I am sharing with you today LINK>Re-Marketing Adoption. 

Marketing makes use of “a series of calculated moves, designed to appeal to the targeted end users, and reached a desired outcome that benefits the business. It really helps to understand adoption as an industry when you apply the lenses of a marketer. To begin, let’s just remove the idea that adoption is here for some altruistic reason like “proving homes to children that need them” in some vein of social services or community outreach or as part of the metal health field or anything like that. We need to look at adoption like it is; a business that has supply and demand and profits and losses.

An adoption agency pays it bills through the acquisition of “fees“. These adoption fees are paid for by the perspective adoptive couple for the services rendered by the adoption agency. These are various application fees, home study, counseling, court and legal fees, attorneys, paper filings, plus the hospital and doctors fees, travel costs, and various other “birthmother expenses”.

We know that the US average “cost” for a voluntary domestic infant adoption runs anywhere from 10 to 60K.  At the end of the day, a “successful” adoption results in a baby being relinquished by one family and handed over to another family who pays the “fees” for this service to be rendered.

In business terms, that makes the adoptive parent the customers or end consumer who pay for the service of transferring over the parental rights of a baby. The now up-for-grabs parental rights, are, in turn, the product. The writer note’s yes, we can also say very easily that the adoptee is the final product, but I know they don’t like to be treated like that, so I am not going to call them that for this purpose.

Bottom line, without the adoptive parents being willing to pay this money for these services to buy the product, the agencies would not have a business, so they MUST make adoption appealing to the final consumer, the adoptive parents.

You can read more at the link above.

Racially Determined Adoptions

I spent most of last summer educating myself about racial inequality and reform issues. Now I see this advertisement. First of all, $13,000 tax credit for adopters??? Think if poor mothers got $13,000 to keep and raise their own babies. The newborn adoption industry would totally collapse.  In Canada, they pay single parents so that they are not burdened with having to find a job and child care. There are no losers in that scenario. This program lasts until the child is 18. The amount per month decreases as the child gets older.

Note that African American babies are less valuable at Everlasting Adoptions. One could ask – Doesn’t this somehow directly violate anti-discrimination laws? Besides the smell of human trafficking in this brochure. No one regulates this business. It’s truly the wild west at this time in human history as regards adoption. This one isn’t even an adoption agency, its like a “travel agent” for people who want to pay someone to find a birth mom for them. If found, the parties then go to an adoption agency to draw up the paperwork but on Everlasting Adoptions website, they proudly take credit for successfully completed matches.

NPR did a story back in 2013 titled Six Words: ‘Black Babies Cost Less To Adopt’. The title for this one came from a Louisiana woman. Other contributors have also addressed the skin-color based fee structure for many adoptions, NPR noted – The intersection of race and adoption has prompted many people to submit their six words to The Race Card Project. Americans adopt thousands of children each year. And as the nation has become increasingly diverse, and with the growth of international adoption in recent decades, many of those children don’t look like their adoptive parents.

One adoptive parent, remembers a phone call with an adoption agency social worker. “And [she] was telling us about these different fee structures that they had based on the ethnic background of the child. And … they also had, sort of a different track for adoptive parents.” Moving through the process would be quicker, if the family was open to adopting an African-American (not biracial) child, the social worker explained to her. “And that is because they have children of color waiting,” but adopting biracial, Latino, Asian or Caucasian children could be a slower process because there were more parents waiting for them. “And I remember hearing this and just sort of being dumbfounded that they would sort of segregate — to use a loaded term — segregate these children by ethnic background before they were even in this world,”

It is a profit-motivated, supply and demand business. Thankfully, NPR also found that some states and agencies are using a different formula to make adoption more affordable for families, with a sliding scale based on income rather than skin color. In that system, lower-income families pay less to adopt. Some agencies are also moving toward a uniform cost system where all adoptive parents would pay the same fees. (Though I am still not in favor of adoption in most cases.) Still, back in 2013, the cost to adopt the Caucasian child was approximately $35,000, plus some legal expenses. I see upward of $40,000 in Go Fund Me efforts set up by hopeful adoptive parents today in 2021.