pat loughery

Last night we attended an informational meeting at Antioch Adoptions. We’re beginning the process of adopting another child into our family. With Kaileigh now 19 months old and mesmerized by babies, we figure it’s a good time to start.

Antioch is an interesting agency. They make a lot of headlines in the adoption world for controversial issues on two fronts: First, they don’t charge any fees for adoption. (Industry standard, and our experience, is that most adoption agencies charge $10k – $15k to advertise and place a child). And they don’t think anybody else should charge either.

I’m all for that.

More controversially, they make some loose analogies based on that model – they consider that paying for adoption is like buying a child, a practice that was outlawed and whose practice lost favor after the slavery era. Frankly I can’t tell if this is rhetoric in order to make a point, or a truly held belief for this agency and its sponsoring megachurch.

An extension of this is that they also fight hard against differing fee rates for the race of the infant. We haven’t seen this happen, but they’re adamant that in general, the fees for white children are higher than the fees for brown children, which are higher than the fees for black children. In our last adoption we paid a fee up front, and then filled out a questionnaire about the children that we would consider, and the fees didn’t change when we said caucasian, african-american, hispanic and asian.

They’re also strong supporters of transracial adoption, and they do a lot of training around that issue. Last night they had one of their previously adopting families come in – a white couple with three kids from 8 – 16, who adopted an african-american girl.

They adopt children out in three forms:
1. Birthparent adoptions of infants – similar to what we did with Kaileigh. They match expecting mothers or parents with prospective adoptive couples.
2. Foster to adopt – Prospective adoptive couples initially act as foster care parents within the DSHS/etc system, and then have the option to adopt the child they’re fostering.
3. Adoption of “legally free” children – This is adoption of children in foster care whose parents have terminated their legal rights, or their rights have been terminated.

Our task now is to pray and understand whether or not they’re the agency for us, and to consider what ages/races of children that we’d be willing to pursue. we’ve thought quite a while about adoptiong another infant, and then later to foster-adopt older siblings. But maybe we’ll change that order around. A lot depends on whether we think it would disrupt Kaileigh to have somebody older than her added to the family.

And as for race, last time we were pretty wide open. This time I’m sure we will be as well. I harbor in my heart the desire for a rainbow family – 3, 4, 5 kids all with different skin colors, living as one family.