Thread: Adoption in the US

My MC's are looking to adopt a baby. She's a newborn and her biological parents are dead. My MFC has been visiting her in the hospital, keeping an eye on her and such, and now they want to adopt her.

I don't know ANYTHING about the adoptions process in the States (the story's set in Washington, DC) so if anybody could talk me through how long it takes and what kind of boxes potential parents need to tick, etc, I'd really appreciate it.

It sounds like your characters are doing a private adoption and are not going through a traditional adoption agency. If they were going the agency route, they would have no contact with the child prior to the agency turning her over to them. They would also have no knowledge of the birth parents. A private adoption is just a process of filing papers with the local court house. I don't know specifically about DC, but most jurisdictions call this part of the court Family Court. In Pennsylvania, it's called the Widows and Orphans Court. There may be a few other names out there in other jurisdictions. The process is usually handled by a lawyer, but anyone who understands the paperwork can do it. There are some individuals or agencies that will handle private adoptions, usually for a fee. If your birth parents are dead, it sounds like this adoption was put together on the fly on very short notice. Usually an adoption has nine months to work itself out. So it would be unusual, but not impossible, to process the paperwork quickly. The paperwork for a private adoption would have to include the birth parents or in this case a surviving family member waiving any and all claim to the child. The adoptive parents would have to sign papers that they accept the responsibility for the child. Giving the adoptive family name to the child is probably a separate process. Adoption is probably a two-step process with the adoptive parents first getting temporary custody of the child and then it gets finalized a few months later. The waiting period is mostly to ensure that all parties will not change their mind. You can probably get away without going into too much detail of the process. Most adoptive parents would just sign where their lawyer tells them to.

Due to a constitutional quirk, DC can have some antiquated laws. If you find that DC's laws are not conducive to your story, consider having the family live in suburban Maryland or northern Virginia. Good luck. C.M.

Thank you so much!! Your reply has been so much more helpful than the info I've gotten elsewhere. Just a couple of quick questions; firstly what would happen if there are no surviving family members? And secondly, how long would it take, roughly, for the adoptive parents to get temporary custody?

Many thanks again!!

If there were no surviving family members, the baby would become a ward of the state just like any other orphan or foster child. Their care would be supervised by child protective services until the adoption was finalized. If there were no surviving family members, it becomes a bureaucratic process while the state decides that the adoptive parents are trustworthy. There would be background checks similar to what foster parents have to undergo. The state would feel compelled to ensure the adoptive parents were not pedophiles or anything like that. That process could take months. If you want to speed it up, you might have whoever is handling the adoption paperwork pre-screen the parents in anticipation of eventually finding a newborn. The state may or may not accept the pre-screening of an outside agency (someone who is not an employee of the state). If you were going through a traditional adoption agency and the adopting couple was pre-approved and on a waiting list for the next available baby, and this baby was a special needs child, then your couple might move rapidly up the list as other couples with more seniority declined this adoption opportunity. Another thought just occurred to me - if your adoptive couple were already certified foster parents child protective services would have no problem turning over a baby to them. Maybe your adopting couple wanted to try parenthood out first without long term commitments so they became foster parents to see how it felt. Now they are ready to make the plunge so they told child protective services that if an orphan baby came along, they would be interested in immediate custody and eventual adoption. Child protective services would leap at the chance to not have to bounce the baby from an orphanage to a series of foster homes.