The Children Money Can Buy

by Anne Moody

  The lesson I have learned from birth mothers and have tried to pass on to adoptive families is that it is impossible and pointless to try to design a profile that will appeal to the broadest possible range of birth mothers. I have learned from long experience that something completely unexpected is likely to catch the right person’s attention. So I recommend that families include all sorts of detail in the captions of their pictures, and that they never pass up an opportunity to provide the name of a dog or an aunt or their favorite kind of cookie. Other than that, I urge them just to be honest and create the profile that represents exactly who they are. There is no single best approach and only a few things to avoid including in their pictures, such as evidence of lots of drinking at social events, crotch shots (believe it or not, I have had to tell people to remove them), and elaborate collages of tiny pictures that make it difficult to actually see the people in the photographs or what they are doing.

  While I am very opinionated about what I think makes a good profile, I also have been very wrong on occasion. I remember one family who designed their profile to be from the perspective of their cat. I told them that I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but maybe they could try it for a while, then revise it if need be. (Secretly, I thought that it was a horrible idea and that they were limiting themselves to cat-lady birth mothers.) Much to my amazement—and delight—they were chosen immediately by a lovely girl who thought cats were fine, but—more importantly—really liked the family’s sense of humor.

  Speaking of a sense of humor, I feel safe in saying that what birth mothers hope to learn from a profile is that it would be fun to be part of the profiled family. This is not to say that a profile should strive to be overtly funny; rather, it should show that the people in this family know how to enjoy life and each other. My favorite example is from a family that was nowhere near the typical demographic for adoptive parents of an infant. The parents had married at a young age, had two children together, then divorced. The woman then remarried, had two more children, and divorced again. The four children shown in the profile ranged in age from high school to their mid-twenties, and there was even a grandchild in the family. The couple had reunited about five years earlier and had recently suffered the loss of a baby at birth, due to gestational diabetes. They were delightful people, but certainly didn’t meet the average birth mother’s parameters for the perfect family. Yet they were immediately chosen by a birth mother.

  For more than twenty years, I have been using their story as a lesson for other profile creators. The picture that caught the birth mother’s eye showed the prospective adoptive dad being pelted by Jell-O in a backyard food fight with his older sons. No matter how one feels about food fights, it was evident that this dad was having a great time, that he could take a joke, that no one was going to get in trouble for throwing Jell-O . . . and that it would be fun to be part of this family.

  Contrast this family with the attractive, obviously wealthy, young couple who created an elaborate silver-plated picture album (it weighed a ton) filled with professional shots of the two of them posed stiffly in various locations around their spectacular home and yard. They did not look like people who knew how to have a good time, and it took several years for a birth mother to choose them. Their opulent lifestyle did not make up for the fact that their home looked like a place where people could never relax. I’ve also had birth mothers reject families whose profiles were full of spectacular pictures of vacations and exciting social events because it didn’t seem credible to them that people who had a life like that would be content to give it all up in order to become soccer moms and dads.

  In the final analysis, there will always be an element of mystery (or fate or God’s will or whatever term you choose) in the way that birth mothers and adoptive parents find each other. I have witnessed and been delighted by the apparently fated nature of these connections on countless occasions. This feeling may be primarily a reflection of the fact that everyone wants so much to believe that this birth mother was destined to find this family because this particular child was destined to become theirs. There may be logical and not at all romantic or mysterious explanations for why a family and birth mother find each other, just as there are explanations for how a particular sperm and egg come together to make a baby, but the mystery in the latter case lies in why—not how—that particular egg and that particular sperm came together. We can certainly explain how these things happen, but why they happen the way they do for any particular baby, whether adopted or not, remains wonderfully in the realm of the unexplained.

  25

  Money Matters

  When Adoption Connections started, it was rare for birth parents to start a phone conversation by asking about financial assistance. Now it is the norm, and many callers are quick to move on if they aren’t promised money. This change is not due to increased financial need; rather, it is a reflection of the fact that most people in this high-demand market for babies no longer seem to want to examine the ethics of providing payment to women in exchange for their babies. Birth parents who benefit financially have little incentive to question the practice, and adoption professionals and hopeful adoptive parents can’t help but feel that they had better go along with it if they expect to compete in today’s adoption market.

  It’s not that women considering adoption for their babies did not receive financial assistance in the past. But the general rule of thumb held that all expenses covered by adoptive parents had to be adoption related and—in Washington, at least—court approved. For example, if a woman had a job that became difficult for her during pregnancy, she could request help with basic living expenses during the months when she was unable to work. Judges were sympathetic in these situations, and requests for assistance were typically granted as long as proper procedure was followed. Other pregnancy-related expenses, such as maternity clothing, transportation costs, and any uncovered medical or counseling fees (both before and after delivery) were routinely approved by the courts.

  These financial arrangements were almost always short-lived and for specific purposes. People on all sides—birth parents, adoptive parents, and legal professionals—took great pains to avoid behavior that gave the appearance of baby selling or baby buying. Black and gray markets existed in the adoption world (and no doubt always will), but legitimate adoption professionals could usually steer clear of them. That certainly seemed to be the case in Washington State, where there was strong incentive to avoid any exchange of money that could be considered coercive or possibly even grounds for later overturning an adoption. Other states had different policies regarding adoption finances, and ideas about what was ethical varied widely. Sometimes these ideas were most directly influenced by where a person lived; more likely, they were influenced by a person’s stake in the adoption. Previously held views on the ethics of baby buying, held by both birth and adoptive parents, were subject to modification to suit one’s changing needs and perspectives.

  The Internet has played a huge role in altering the finances of adoption. When families began posting their information online, birth parents suddenly had instant access to the elaborate profiles they created, including numerous pictures and even video. Instead of choosing between the handful of families who advertised in the local newspaper, birth parents now had hundreds of families to choose from. Quite suddenly, adoptive families found themselves competing with one another on a massive scale, with the primary way of distinguishing themselves in a crowded market being financial. Increasingly, profiles began to directly address living expenses for birth mothers but without anyone having a clear understanding of either the purpose for or amounts of money being promised. It pretty quickly became clear that there were many prospective families who would pay whatever they had to pay and do whatever they had to do in order to become parents.

  Despite what we would all like to believe, baby buying has probably always been going on in this country. My first direct experience with it
was in working with Jena, a struggling, pregnant, twenty-three-year-old mother who called me one day in 1994. She was in another state, where she had seen an ad in her local newspaper, placed by a family I was counseling. I spent a great deal of time over the next month in long telephone conversations with Jena, and I came to regard her as a responsible, competent, caring mother to her three-year-old son. This new pregnancy had resulted from a short-lived relationship; the father did not want to be involved, and Jena felt she could not handle two young children on her own. She was managing to be the sort of mother she felt her son deserved but had decided she would be hard-pressed to do the same for a second child.

  Jena was happy with the adoptive family she had chosen—the couple with whom I was working—and everything was proceeding smoothly toward adoption until she met with the attorney in her state to whom I had referred her. I hadn’t worked with this man before, but he had come highly recommended.

  The day after Jena met with him, she called me in tears. She said the attorney had deeply insulted her by offering her money to switch to one of the adoptive families he represented. He had explained that he knew families who would pay $40,000 (an extremely large sum at that time) for her baby because Jena was pretty and blond. She told me that she was tremendously upset by the suggestion that she would take money, and she felt I should know that the attorney my adoptive family was paying for was actually working against their best interests. I told her I was extremely sorry to have put her in such a situation and offered to find her a different attorney. We spoke many more times over the next couple of weeks, but she never took me up on that offer.

  Then she again called in tears, this time to say that she had agonized over the decision but felt that, for her little boy’s sake, she just could not turn down the money. She had looked at the attorney’s families’ profiles, and they all seemed like nice people. Of course, while I was sad for the family I was helping, I could not in good conscience criticize Jena. The money would make an enormous difference to her and her child. The attorney’s families all had court-approved home studies, and I had no reason to think they wouldn’t be good parents. But I also understood that despite the financial security she would gain for a while, Jena now would always have to live with the thought that she had sold her baby to the highest bidder. I didn’t say that to her, however. I just wished her well. After all, she was not the one to blame for this lamentable situation; she was simply trying to take care of her child. But I felt that she would pay a high price emotionally, as would the child to be adopted, should he or she ever learn about the financial arrangements between the birth and adoptive parents.

  The attorney was triumphant in his conquest and told me that Jena apparently wasn’t as ethical as she thought she was. He was utterly unconcerned about his own ethics and assured me that that was just the way they did things in his state. I hate to think about how he treated Jena. Obviously, the adoptive family I was working with was devastated. Even if they’d wanted to or could have matched the other family’s offer, they lived in a state where such transactions were illegal.

  I never heard from Jena again. I did do a lot of venting over the next few weeks, however, and Erin, who was in the ninth grade, got an earful about baby buying. To my surprise, she wrote a story about the situation for her English class. It was a beautiful, heartbreaking short story, as if a junior Flannery O’Connor had gotten hold of my case notes. The teacher gave her a good grade for her writing but said the story “lacked verisimilitude.” I just shook my head at this, knowing that the story did seem pretty unbelievable. Several months later, at a parent/teacher conference, I had the opportunity to tell him that the story was factual, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. He’s far from alone in clinging to the idea that babies are not bought and sold in this country.

  Baby buying and selling usually come disguised, allowing everyone involved to convince themselves that it isn’t really happening. For most of my career, it was relatively rare for birth parents, even those who were struggling financially, to ask for any significant financial help with living expenses. In fact, a lot of them were pleasantly surprised to find that the adoptive parents were supposed to cover all of the medical and adoption-related expenses.

  Laws, regulations, and accepted practices regarding adoption expenses vary widely from state to state. Washington has clear laws about which expenses can be legitimately covered by adoptive parents. Many other states are less clear, leaving room for finagling, and in some states there seem to be no rules at all. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to conduct most of my business according to the laws of Washington. When either the birth or adoptive parents propose something that Washington law prohibits, I can give them an easily understood reason why I recommend against it and choose not to be involved. But had I been a counselor in the state where Jena lived, I might well have helped broker an adoption that from my Washington perspective would look like blatant baby buying. In the other state, it would have looked as though I was getting the best for both my birth-mother client (her small share of the $40,000, most of which went to the attorney, of course) and my adoptive-parent clients (a child to adopt whose birth mother is pretty and blond).

  There have been plenty of improvements in adoption over the course of my career, but not when it comes to the expense of an adoption. This is due in part to the laws of supply and demand, there being far more families wanting to adopt than infants available for adoption. But I think an even greater factor is the lack of regulation in adoption: the lack of clear, consistent—and consistently enforced—federal and state laws. Both birth and adoptive parents can reasonably plead ignorance and confusion about the rules regarding adoption finances and related aspects of the adoption process. I often feel ignorant and confused myself because proper procedure seems to vary, sometimes not only from state to state but even from judge to judge. It can be very difficult for people to fully understand both the ethics and the laws pertaining to adoption, and it is especially confusing when money changes hands.

  And finally, the moral erosion of standards that were long ago put in place to make adoption something nobler than baby selling has given rise to a particularly insidious figure: the adoption scammer. But that troubling subject deserves a chapter of its own.

  26

  Scammers

  One night early in the life of Adoption Connections, a man who identified himself as Dale called. He told me that he and his girlfriend Jackie, who was due to deliver any day, had seen a newspaper ad placed by one of our families. He explained that he and Jackie had come from Louisiana to Portland, Oregon, in order to meet an adoptive family they had selected for their baby, but that something had gone very wrong, and now Dale and Jackie were stuck in the Portland bus station. They were penniless, no longer wanted to work with the Portland family, and were interested in Jeff and Hilary, the couple who had placed the ad. Dale said that Jackie was close to delivery and that they had no resources and nowhere to turn for help. They were committed to placing this baby for adoption and thought they had made all the necessary plans but suddenly found themselves in these desperate circumstances.

  I called Jeff and Hilary and told them what I had learned about Dale and Jackie. After talking with their attorney to get approval for the expense, they decided to pay for two bus tickets to Seattle and a few days’ motel bill so they could meet with the couple and decide what to do next. There was a flurry of phone calls to get all these arrangements made, and by the next day, we believed that Dale and Jackie were settled in at a Seattle motel. Everything seemed reasonable until Dale said that Jackie didn’t want to meet with the family, so he would be coming to the breakfast meeting they had arranged by himself. Jeff, who is a psychologist, and Hilary, a designer, were an intelligent and sophisticated couple; intellectually, they knew they should proceed with caution. All of us were suspicious about Jackie’s no-show, but Hilary felt strongly that there must be a reasonable explanation, an
d she didn’t want to risk alienating Dale with our mistrust. Jeff and Hilary had what they considered to be a reasonable, if weird, meeting with Dale, and then we just waited to see what would happen next. Since Dale said the baby was due any minute, it seemed that the wait couldn’t be long. Jeff and I were skeptical but hopeful that Jackie would appear soon, while Hilary had thrown caution to the wind and was wholeheartedly focused on the baby she felt would soon be hers.