That's great! Many congrats on your expanding family! Are you adopting newborns or kids a little older and if you don't mind my asking, what country are you adopting from? It amazes me that the adoption process takes so long! I understand that they need to carefully screen potential parents but I think of Haiti in recent months as an example. With all those kids orphaned, you'd think they'd be shipping them out to any country willing to pay. Yet the adoption process is as gruelling as ever, even as the makeshift orphanges overflow. Doesn't make sense to me.
Both will be toddlers. We are both a little older and we're simply not able to care for an infant. We will be going to Ethiopia first and then to China.
International adoption is hard to describe, and I suspect most people think it's pretty much a matter of putting up the bucks and the host nation motivated by dollars and need. It's not. Even nations with situations as dire as Ethiopia or Haiti are not motivated by an urgent wish to unload their children.
Try to understand it by flipping the situation around - how would you feel if thousands of children from the U.S. were being adopted by, say, Arab nations? Or by China?
A lot of factors come into play. In a lot of nations, there's a strong undercurrent of resistance to international adoption even if it means a poor future for the children involved. For example, a substantial portion of the Russian population objects to their children adopted abroad, but at the same time, they won't adopt them, themselves. Culturally, it's still considered strange to adopt "someone else's child" (the first question we were asked in court - why do you want to raise someone else's child?). Same goes for Ethiopia, and there's a lot of misinformation, as well. (One book we read, many people thought their children would be raised to be household servants or maids). Some of it is national pride - why should our children be raised by foreigners? Thus, in some nations, the rules heavily favor adoption by persons whose ancestry traces to the host nation, and sometimes rules are established to encourage this (e.g. some nations require several months of in-country stay, which is more likely if the adoptive parents have relatives in country).
A few nations, their referrals are almost entirely children with serious birth defects. Others, their government is not a Hague treaty member and they are trying to crack down on what amounts to baby-selling by unscrupulous lawyers.
Some have extremely stringent requirements, which played a part in our selection - for example, some nations will not allow adoptive parents who are above a certain age. China presents an enigma - they are mostly the most efficient program, their people are highly supportive of adoption by foreigners, they are reasonably inexpensive and are the largest program - but as the years roll on, they have added more and more stringent requirements - regarding divorce, number of children in family, amount of total assets, length of time married, length of time youngest sibling in family, medical history, *weight* (BMI), age, ANY history of cancer, ANY history of mental illness - it's long. But once the conditions are met, they probably have the easiest dossier to assemble.
I know people like to think - oh they have so many children without homes, they must be very willing to "unload" them. Almost no nation for whose program we've seen takes such a cavalier attitude about children. They all want their children to have very good homes.
