About Our Adoption Some Basics and Some FAQ's
	Shannon and Cole We are a lesbian couple. Shannon is in her mid-30s and Cole is in her mid-40s. We are both college professors, at the moment, (subject to change upon our baby's arrival!). We have been together since February 2002. We had an (extralegal) wedding in June of 2003. In December of 2003, we decided that it was time to bring a child into our family. Both of us had thought about having kids for years, but neither of us had ever been with someone we could parent with, or felt equipped to go it alone. Once we found each other, however, we both realized we had met the right person to be our child's other parent. Shannon has been blogging about the decision to adopt and the process following it, since then. We are both white, adopting a Black or interracial domestic infant at birth, probably through an open adoption. FAQ's I thought that gay couples couldn't adopt? Adoption laws are different in different states. Some states, like Florida, have an outright ban against any gay person—single or coupled—adopting children, although there are many gay foster parents in the state. In some states, "single" people can adopt, and since in most states, queer couples can't legally marry, that means one member of a same-sex couple can adopt as a single person, then both partners raise the child as its parents. Only a few states allow two adults of the same sex to be parents to the same child. This makes life very difficult for the family, as one parent has no legal rights to her child, leaving the child unprotected, should anything happen to the legal parent, or should the couple break up (a non-legal parent could lose all visitation and other parenting rights to her child). In our state (Illinois), we can both be legal, adoptive parents. We are also lucky that in our state, there is a strong judicial precedent for declaring two people of the same sex legal parents to an adoptive child on the same day. Often, even in states that do allow two same-sex parents, one parent must adopt first, then, several months (and more adoption-related fees) later, the "second parent" can adopt too. This leaves a gap in the child's life, of having only one legal parent. We have every reason to believe we will be able to adopt our child as a couple on one day. I thought most lesbians got pregnant using sperm donors. Are you infertile? A lot of the books and websites about adoption we have read presume that adoptive parents are choosing adoption after trying to have biological children without success. We have not chosen to try to have a biological child, although our health insurance would cover a pregnancy, and although some of our lesbian friends have built very happy families using donor sperm. Since we haven't tried to become pregnant, we don't know whether we're fertile or not. So while we are very sympathetic to people who have struggled to have a biological child and not been able to do it, we don't know what that kind of grief is like, first hand. Adoption is our first choice. One reason we chose adoption is so that we can both have the same legal and biological relationship to our child. Another reason is that we already have many wonderful non-biological family members in our lives and we value the concept of building families on love and care first, rather than using biology as the primary definition of who is a family. Throughout our lives, both of us have dearly loved children not biologically connected to us. We aren't able to "make a baby" together of our combined genetic material anyway (which is why many people want to have biological children), and neither of us feels an especially strong desire to be pregnant or give birth, so adoption is a good choice for our family. Isn't adoption really expensive? Some adoptions are quite expensive. Many foreign adoptions require travel to, and sometimes a long stay in, the baby's home country for example. Lots of independently arranged adoptions can get expensive, if the adoptive family pays out-of-pocket for a birthmother's medical or other needs. But our adoption will end up costing us between $2000 and $4000. That's similar to the expense of paying for sperm from a spermbank, and medical inseminations (not covered by insurance without an "infertility" diagnosis, which most lesbian couples are refused) for one to three three months (depending on the details). That's an estimate based on what people we know have paid for similar services. And of course, it often takes longer than three months to get pregnant! The reason our adoption will cost us so little is twofold: First of all, we're working through a not-for-profit domestic adoption agency that keeps costs as low as possible. Also, the federal government offers adoptive parents up to $10,000 in a tax credit (that's cash, not a deduction) in the year in which they adopt. The Uncle Sam rebate will probably cover most of our adoption costs. Why are you adopting interracially? I heard that they don't let white people adopt Black babies. When we started talking casually about it, we discovered that long before we met, we had both imagined ourselves adopting; probably adopting an African American child or infant. We are both white, but we have both lived most of our adult lives in cities with extensive Black populations where most of the children in the foster systems are Black. Both of us have been committed to anti-racist ethics and politics throughout our careers. Black American culture is much more familiar to us than any foreign culture from which we might adopt. It is a culture we already love and enjoy and feel connected to. Because we have lots of extended "chosen" family members who are African American, our extended family is already interracial. It feels natural to us that our immediate family should be, too. It is a coincidence that the wait to adopt a Black baby is usually considerably shorter than the wait to adopt a white baby. That's convenient for us, but quite sad really, because the statistic is a reflection of the harsh degree to which white supremacy prevails in U.S. adoption practices. There are no laws against white parents adopting Black children, but some people frown on transracial adoption. We care about what these people think, and we have done a lot of reading about their concerns. In the end, we have decided that we feel good about what we are doing and have no misgivings about our ability to raise a child with a proud sense of self and ability to cope with our society, including American racism. How long does it take to get a baby? We started this process by sending away for the application from our primary agency in December of 2003. We estimate that our homestudy and all other requirements will be finished in the fall of 2004. Once all those preliminary requirements are met, we will start waiting for a baby to be placed with us. This most likely will mean waiting for a pregnant woman to choose us to be her baby's adoptive parents. It could also mean waiting for the agency to place a baby with us, that has been relinquished to them by its birthmother. They tell us placement usually takes between 6 and 18 months, but we have heard many encouraging stories about people who've found their children sooner. Of course there are stories of it taking longer, too, but we aren't paying attention to those right now. What's open adoption? Open adoption is a term used to describe many different things, from a birthmother having some choice in who her baby goes to, to a birthmother becoming part of the adoptive family herself, and being a regular part of the child's life. We are planning to have an adoption that is at least somewhat open. Not every birthmother wants it this way, of course, so we are willing to compromise, but we hope that not only will we be able to know the birthmother before the baby is born, but that she will remain in touch with our family throughout our lives. We are also hopeful that our baby can know some of its extended birth family, like grandparents or aunts or uncles, for example. Many people think that knowing the birthmother can be a very healthy experience for an adopted child, and many birthmothers don't want to lose touch completely with the child they gave birth to. As for us, we'd like to be able to say thank you on a regular basis to the woman who will be giving so much of herself to our family. Aren't you worried that the birthmother will try to take the baby back? No. But even if she wanted to, once the adoption is final, there is next to no chance that she ever could. In fact, even before our adoption is final, her parental rights will be waived. There is a window for a birthmother to decide to keep her baby, however. In an open adoption planned before birth, the birthmother has the right to change her mind at any point before she signs the form relinquishing her parental rights. In our state, this form can't be signed until 72 hours after the baby's birth. So the birthmother is required by law to spend at least three days after her baby is born, making sure this is the decision she really wants to make. We have been told that in about 40% of cases, the birthmother indeed decides, after the birth, that she wants to parent her child afterall. If that happened to us, we would then go back to waiting to be chosen by someone else. We would probably be very disappointed, but a baby belongs to its birthmother until she signs that form, and we certainly wouldn't want to adopt a baby whose birthmother didn't really want to relinquish him or her! In spite of occasional, hysterical stories in the news media about crazy custody battles in which adoptive parents lose their children, it is really the birthmother who will be the most vulnerable party in our adoption. Because even if we draw up all kinds of agreements about how often and when she can see or hear from us or the child, those agreements are typically not one bit legally binding. Adoption agencies will help mediate troubled relationships between adoptive parents and birth parents, but in the end, if the adoptive parents decide not to honor their word and stop allowing visits or sending pictures, the birthmother is simply out of luck. That is just one more reason why we are really in awe of birthmothers. They take huge risks, entrusting their children to adoptive parents. If both of you are moms, what will your child call you? We're not sure yet. Some of our friends go by first names to their children, some lesbians we know go by Mommy and Mama or Mom and Mima, or some other combination of mother names. Sometimes we think Mama Shannon and Mom Cole would work, but everyone tells us the child would just default to our first names in the end. Cole is not very girly and doesn't feel that mother names suit her very well. Shannon has a pretty persistant fantasy of being called mama. So it's all a bit up in the air, and if you have any great ideas, feel free to run them by us. Isn't all of this confusing to a child? It's true, our child is destined to be very confused. Someday, we will have to sit down and have a heart-to-heart about how, in spite of failing to win the popular vote, GW Bush was ever president of the United States. We think we can prepare our child for this, however, by reading bedtime stories from Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States and James Lowen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. We plan to teach our child that countries have many different forms. Some have fascist dictatorships, some have socialist democracies, some are exploited for cheap labor and natural resources and some use military and economic dominance to control the lives of people all over the globe. With enough love and family security, we are sure our child will build the self-esteem needed to grow up to lead a revolution to overthrow the corporate control that holds this country in a vice-like grip. But nonviolently, of course.
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