Adopt: Ask Our Expert: Patricia Irwin Johnston

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Issues related to Infertility and Launching an Adoption
Continued....

Question about beginning to look into adoption:
We're just getting started looking for adoption options (after 3 years of trying to conceive). Any advice?
Tim

Response from Pat:
Tim, exploring adoption after infertility treatment is a whole new ball game! You regain some control and give up another kind of control. You feel less at the mercy of one kind of process and bureaucracy and find yourselves at the mercy of another one. Those folks who advise that "you can always adopt" were thinking entirely too casually. Adoption can be wonderful, but it takes some dedicated decisionmaking and follow through. Why, I devoted a whole book to the process of moving from treatment to family building through adoption...Adopting after Infertility.

The first thing to be certain that you understand is that adoption can end the pain of being childless, but it can't and won't end all of the pain of infertility, which for some people is produced by the loss of control or the loss of their genetic continuity, or the loss of the emotional and physical expectations of being able to create a pregnancy and give birth to a child conceived with a much-loved partner. But if being parents is what you want most, adoption will give you that!

Having made the decision that parenting is what you want, you have a series of adoption-specific decisions to make: Are you interested only in a newborn baby or would you consider a toddler or a school-aged child? What does the concept of "healthy" mean to you--how flexible are you prepared to be? Must your child "match" you and your partner ethnically/racially or not? Are you interested only in domestic adoption or will you explore international adoption? Do you want to adopt through an agency (public or private) or in a non-agency (independent) adoption most often handled through an attorney or an "adoption facilitator"? Do you want your service provider to be local to you, or do you feel comfortable working with an agency, attorney or facilitator in another state? Will you consider open adoption (communicating directly with the birthfamily) or are you set on traditional, confidential adoption?

Obviously you need quite a bit of raw data in order to discuss these questions together and make decisions. There are several places to get such data. First, READ. My own Adopting after Infertility is a "should we adopt" book. Lois Gilman's The Adoption Resource Book is a great example of a general "how to adopt" book. Sharon Kaplan Roszia and Lois Melina's The Open Adoption Handbook is an example of the kind of book that is narrowly focused on a specific adoption issue. Several excellent magazines and newsletters (such asAdoptive Families,Roots & Wings, and Pact Press offer current articles on a variety of adoption-related issues. Next, PLUG IN. In addition to the many links from this web site to others, you should plug into a local support group. Your local chapter of RESOLVE is one place to find families who have recently adopted after infertility and can answer your questions about local resources. They will also know about nearby workshops or seminars that may provide you with a way to explore options without making any kind of commitment.

As you explore adoption it's important that you divide up the work of making phone calls, reading books and newsletters. Whereas in most cases wives felt most of the pressure of treatment (even if the problem was male subfertility) one of the advantages of adoption is that you can share the work and the pressure equally, getting ready to do the same with parenting!

As you sort through all of this, of course come right back to this site and ask more questions! We're all happy to help.

Question about an Adoption ceremony:
I am searching for a pre adopt ceremony to acknowledge the link between the birth parent and adoptive parent; the transfer of care from one parent to another parent.

Response from Pat:
More and more agencies and families are seeing the value of using adoption-related rituals. The pre-adopt ceremony you are describing is most often called an Entrustment Ceremony. Mary Martin Mason has written a helpful book called Designing Rituals in Adoption which can direct you to many poems, pieces of music, clips from various religious ceremonies, prayers, symbolic gifts, etc. that can be pulled together to create a personal Entrustment Ceremony for your child and his two families.

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