This was a question I had back when I was in elementary school. I had asked my mom but she had no clue. In my little brain I thought it was wrong to buy children, but now I’m wondering if that’s not actually the case. What is that money being spent on?
In: Economics
Along with what everyone else is saying, it also shows that you are finically capable of having a child. Same kind of thing as dog adoption fees, some of it is to cover costs but alot can be to weed out people who wouldnt take care of the pet.
That’s only if you’re adopting from a private institution or person. Adopt a kid from foster care and the state will pay you.
Adopt from foster care for very little cost
Or
Adopt from a private service for tens of thousands of dollars
Short answer: Adoption is a legal process and therefore involves attorneys. Attorney fees are exorbitantly expensive.
Long answer: Private adoptions from an adoption agency, especially one that is bringing a child to the U.S. can be very expensive because it is essentially two court cases. First, is an immigration case. Second is an adoption. Depending on the state, the adoptive parents need an attorney, but so does the child. And they can’t be the same attorney. Estimated cost of an attorney is $300 per hour. With no less than 10 billable hours spent by each attorney, you are looking at no less than $6,000 just in attorney fees. Add in the cost of social workers, medical professionals, any fee charged by the adoption agency, travel, etc. and the average cost of a private adoption in my state comes to $60,000.
In law school they taught us that adoptions are so expensive because there is a tremendous amount of state oversight and due process for what could be characterized as the legal sale of a child from one parent to another (your little brain was in the right place) and de facto termination of the parental rights of the biological parents. As you can imagine there are a lot of ways that transaction can go wrong and the state has a huge interest in ensuring kids are safe and that everyone involved receives due process.
Because of the financial barriers many people do not adopt, but there is a path to adoption that doesn’t cost so much. Namely, volunteering as a foster parent. Foster parents who have a child in their home for a year or more can petition the court to adopt the foster child. All of the attorney fees are paid by the state, and the process is expedited because the child is already in their home.
As an attorney who practices family law, their is nothing better than being in the courtroom when an adoption is finalized. Every day I see families broken apart by the court, but on those days I get to see one put together.
It’s only expensive if you do it through a private agency or independently. You can adopt a kid through the orphanage system but there’s a lot of problems. The main issue is that most children in foster care are small children, not babies. These are mostly kids that were taken away from their parents through child protective services. Not only can you adopt these kids for free but in most cases you’ll get a stipend from the government. But much like when you adopt a dog, people don’t want to adopt a 5 year old kid. They want a baby/puppy.
There’s two key ways to go about this. You can find someone with an unwanted pregnancy who is looking to put their baby up for adoption. You generally pay for all of the mothers prenatal care and medical expenses etc. But there’s a supply and demand issue. More infertile couples looking for babies than teen mothers looking to give their baby up for adoption.
So then there’s the third option: going abroad. This is where most couples adopt babies from. Poor countries have a lot more pregnant women looking to give their kids up for adoption. The question is how do you find them? You go through an adoption agency. This is why it’s so expensive. These agencies find and match up adopters and adoptees from different countries. They also navigate the very complex legal process of adopting a child from another country and getting all the proper documentation to bring them to the US. So that’s why it’s expensive. You’re paying big money to an adoption agency to find you a baby and facilitate a complex international legal process.
It’s an industry. There is financial corruption, political lobbying groups, and businesses that position themselves as charitable orgs that typically favor the adoptive parents over the adopted child and the birth parents. I spent about a year researching the ethics of adoption and I started with this eye-opening book: The Child Catchers, by Kathryn Joyce. There’s way more info available it now though. Including books by adult adoptees. It’s extremely complex partly bc of how adoption messaging is romanticized (and it’s a rare bipartisan issue) but you are correct to ask about the money. Be skeptical.
There is a difference between adopting from foster care vs adopting from overseas. Having adopted from foster care the costs of adoption were 0, we receive a stipend from the state, and receive a tax rebate. Adopting from an agency overseas which is where I think most of the idea of adoption being expensive comes from, is expensive because there are court and attorney costs, travel costs, immigration costs, and all sort of middleman fees.
You can understand this better from a market perspective. Most people looking to adopt want to get a young child, preferably a baby, to avoid all kinds of possible issues: legal complications from biological relatives, behavioral or development issues from abuse or neglect, etc. Basically these people want to ensure their child has the best odds of having a happy childhood with minimal complications from life before adoption. Unfortunately, these kids are like unicorns. The vast majority of kids who are up for adoption are in that situation because their original parents fucked up badly. These kids are a lot cheaper to adopt in dollar terms but they are expensive in a lot of other ways.
You could just get your name on a list and wait years for one of these unicorn kids to become available for adoption. This is a risky bet. You might never get the chance to be a parent if you get unlucky. For most people this is a dealbreaker; they don’t have the patience and/or lifestyle flexibility to make it possible so they choose to go a more expensive high time preference path.
From an economical perspective you have a market with limited supply and unlimited demand. Combine this with tons of complicating legal and political factors and the price goes up up up.
Here’s a breakdown of costs associated with an adoption with a large US agency this year. Prices change a lot and this doesn’t include some things like travel.
Healthcare coverage for birth mom (already on Medicaid, this is to cover extras): $1000
Attorney placement fees: $11000
Birth mother attorney fees: $1000
Attorney fees post adoption: $5000
Birth mother counseling: $1000
Agency administration fee: $8500
Support and education fee: $7500
Risk sharing fee: $5500
Additional marketing fees (sending out adoptive parent profiles to birth moms for them to choose adoptive parents): $4000
Court reporter fee: $500
Estimated total: $47,500
This is all after fees for creating a marketing profile for adoptive parents, $1500, and fees for enrolling as adoptive parents with the agency. Oh, and you have the home study fees. Probably $2500 for that.
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