I spend a lot of time on a number of adoption forums and there is one situation that has come up enough that I thought it warranted discussion.
The question is usually along these lines:
“A friend of mine called me because she knows we are interested in adopting. Apparently her niece is pregnant and wants to make an adoption plan for the baby. We have talked and she wants us to adopt her baby. How do we proceed from here?”
What this person wants to do would be classified as a Private Domestic Adoption. Basically, they are going to skip the “middle man” by not using an agency or child placing service. Instead, this will be an agreement between the birth parents and the adoptive parents and they need to make sure that they work out all of the legal stuff to be certain that everything is in order.
There are essentially two things that you need in order to get started with a Private Domestic Adoption. First, you need a homestudy. In order to adopt any child, no matter who that child is or what your relationship is with the birth parents, you have to have a state-approved homestudy. In order to get this done, you can simply look in the phone book under “Homestudies” and you should have several choices.
The second thing you need is an attorney. It is best to hire two attorneys – one to represent the birth parents and one to represent the adoptive parents. Make sure that you select attorneys who have experience in adoption and make sure you get references! A good adoption attorney will help make your adoption process run smoothly.
While doing a private adoption does require you to do more of the work than with a traditional agency adoption, the benefit is that your process is much more personal and you can make sure that it runs in a way that is comfortable to both the adoptive parents and the birth parents.