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Parents,not children, wait on the list to adopt babies By
Tiffany Erickson Last year American families adopted about 120,000 children, according to a White House press release; despite that large number, there were still 134,000 children awaiting adoption.. This is a cumulative number and encompasses all types of adoptions. However, Utah has a few faces of adoption that are very different. According to Neal Beecher, director of LDS Family Services, infant adoptions differ from those where the child is older. He said that it is not the children but the parents who are on waiting lists, and that some have waited for up to five years. With LDS Family Services, the only agency in Cache Valley, Beecher said they narrow down the families for a birth mother to choose from, and it is her decision whom the child will go to. He said it could be a matter of years or days, depending of when a birth mother chooses. "Some will wait longer than others, but typically, we've been able to place them eventually," said Beecher. However, adoption has a different face when it is based on court decisions about older children. "Our main goal is re-unification," said Julie Andreasem, resource family consultant and adoption worker for Utah's Division of Child and Family Services. She said their last resort is removing the child from their parents permanently, but if the court finds that the parents of a child are unfit the child will be taken from the home and placed temporarily in a foster home while the parents have a set amount of time to "straighten up." "If after that time the parents still have not passed a state evaluation, the court will terminate their parental rights and the child will be eligible for adoption," said Andreasem. She said that often a child is adopted by the foster home that they are already in. But if not, the court mandates that a child be permanently placed within 12 to 15 months after the parental rights are terminated. "We are trying very hard to avoid the children getting passed around from home to home," said Andreasem. "Our main goal is to provide permanency for children." According to Linda Prince, information analyst for the Division of Child and Family Services, Utah currently has 366 children identified with the goal of adoption. Though not all of them are legally separated from their parents, 109 of them are legally free and are just waiting. Prince said that in the past, an average of 66 percent of all children in Utah, who were taken from their parents by the courts, were adopted by a former foster parent, thus avoiding the passing of children from home to home. She said the average age of children in these types of adoptions is 5, but they have placed children as old as 16 into permanent homes. The last type of adoption is international adoption, which is slowly growing more common. It is the most expensive of all of the adoptions. Beecher said his agency just started going international and has been in China, Russia and India. In China and Russia, which according to the National Council for Adoption Factbook account for 55 percent of all adoptions to the United States, children must be legally adopted in their country of birth before they are permitted to leave. This in most cases requires adoptive parents to travel there in order to bring the child back. Though for most adoptions there are legal fees or medical fees adoptive parents must pay, in international adoptions they are often also responsible for travel costs, translation/government fees, fees to foreign agencies, U.S. agencies' direct costs, as well as the pre-adoptive and post-adoptive counseling -- running the bill to anywhere from $!5,000 to $35,000. Though there are different types of adoption there are similarities that are constant throughout. Lindsay Carter, administrative assistant for the Utah Adoption Exchange, said all agencies have to be state licensed and perform thorough evaluations of prospective adoptive families, which is called a home study. In the home study she said they look at the stability of family income and the capacity for to provide for the child, employment status, health and the ability to emotionally and physically care for the child, child abuse history clearance and criminal history clearance, references, and values. She said this process can often be time consuming and extensive, however it is important to find homes that are suitable for a child in any sort of adoption, thus ensuring permanency.
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