You have decided that you want to adopt, and you know that you want to pursue an international adoption. The next step is to select a country. It was hard enough for me to choose a local adoption agency for a private domestic adoption: I would imagine that selecting a country for an international adoption could be overwhelming. How do you possibly decide from which country to adopt when you have just about the entire world from which to choose?

My husband and I briefly considered adopting... more

The first decision you will need to make (after deciding to adopt at all, of course) is WHERE you want to adopt. This post discusses some factors you might want to consider for international adoption. I will discuss domestic adoption in the next post.

Many families choose to adopt internationally. There are many good reasons to look into international adoption. Here are some of the reasons that I have heard:

The child really needs a family and will otherwise grow up in an orphanage ... more

There's a really wonderful, sad, and insightful article on Salon.com today: "A Mother's Love," by Sallie Tisdale, about the her son, his wife, and their children. Tisdale's son was adopted at age 9 from Guatemala, he's profoundly deaf (when he came to his adoptive family he could communicate only through signs he'd made up himself), and now, as a young adult, he works only sporadically and lives mostly off the disability checks he and his partner (also hearing impaired) draws from the government. The two of them have several children together, all unplanned (it appears) and they lead a rather shiftless, pointless, unproductive... more

It's leftover time for the turkey, and the same goes for my blogs. This is an entry I posted way back in April about cultural enrichment (in my adoption from Russia blog) and the internationally or transracially adopted child. I think it's worth another look-see.

My son was adopted from Russia. When my husband and I were in court we promised to keep Little J connected to his culture, although at the time we weren't completely sure what that meant. I think this is a common experience for a lot of people who... more

A while back I posted some information in my Russian adoption blog that reported that a recent scientific study shows that adopted children don't, by and large, exhibit significantly more behavioral problems then non-adopted children.

That should be a relief for those people thinking of adopting internationally, particularly people thinking of adopting from countries where the children are in orphanages for any length of time. But before you start assuming that things will be smooth sailing, read all of the report below (or better yet, go to the original... more

Just a quickie -

I just found this amazing list of books on Amazon that will surely be of interest for people adopting from Ethiopia: click here.

I am assuming the woman who created the list is intimately involved in adoption from Ethiopia - or at the very least has a keen interest in the subject. How wonderful that there are so many resources out there.

Now someone needs to write one that's adoption-specific... more

Since our Guatemalan adoption blogger seems to be on vacation from blogger-land these days, I'll hop right in and send interested parties to a good article in the New York Times about adoptions from Guatemala.

Go here to read the full text. You may or may not have to register or see an ad before you read the article.

Now, I am not an adoptive parent of a child from Guatemala,... more

I heard rumors that Bulgaria was closed to adoptions by foreigners and while this is not technically true, it is true that the past year has seen remarkable slow-downs and limitations in adoptions from that country.

Here's the statement JCICS has on their website about adoption from Bulgaria:

Despite persistent rumors to the contrary, there is no moratorium on Bulgarian intercountry adoptions. Last year, the U.S. Embassy in Sofia issued 29 IR-3 and IR-4 visas to Bulgarian orphans adopted by American families, and is currently... more

Yesterday at the SPAFA conference I was talking to a woman who works for Harrah's International Mission (an agency that works in China and Vietnam) and she mentioned a statistic to me:

The number of children in the world who go to bed every night without a parent is the same as the population of New York City, times two.

In 2005, according to the NYC.gov website, the population of NYC was 8,213,839. So that means that over 16 million children have no homes throughout the world.

16 million.

At... more

This is from the U.S. Department of state. It looks like things may change in Haiti, or they're at least going to reassess the current situation.

October 2006

The U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince has reported that a new director was appointed on Tuesday, October 3, to lead the Haitian social services agency, “Institut du Bien Etre Social et de Recherches” (IBESR). Prospective adoptive parents should expect adoption processing to be temporarily slower as the director settles into the position. The Department of State and the U.S. Embassy continue to monitor the situation... more