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I would love some inside information from a person who works with birth mothers and has worked in the private adoption world.
We are told that the qualities that make an adoptive couple desirable are "totally random" and that "openness" and "luck" are really all it is. I don't believe this. I regret signing up for this because we're 42 and 40 and I'm starting to worry we will never get picked because we're too old and they never told us this because they get our 17,000 bucks regardless of our odds.
I was once a scientist and I know there's no such thing as a trendless dataset. There are always trends. They may not be stark, but they exist in all datasets. Since you can't measure luck, but you can measure openness...what if you had two profiles that were equally open, but had demographic or other characteristics different...what traits of adoptive families tend to get snatched up quicker than others?
AA claims they interview birth moms to ask what made their decision and that their answers are usually all over the map. That's nice and all, but if you really wanted to know the answer to what families are more likely to be matched, you'd grab a dataset of all the couples who matched on the quicker side of the average, and the couples who matched later, and see what those groups had in common and how they differed. I'm SURE you'd find some trends.
My hypothesis is that the easiest family to match is:
1. A same-race couple whose race matches that of the baby
2. Late 20s to early 30s
3. Dual income professional jobs
4. Lives in a "nice neighborhood"
5. Sends children to public school
6. Religious but not fundamentalist or too intense about it
7. heterosexual
8. Not obese, but not too perfect-looking either
Agencies could improve their clients' chances and lower wait times if they would just tell prospective adoptive families the truth about their chances of a match. But they make money off of us trying anyway. They benefit greatly from us thinking that we can be on the winning side of 36 to 1 odds. That's what it is. With 2 million families wanting to adopt 100,000 babies that's roughly 36 families to every one infant.
I'm very angry at myself for falling for this sales pitch. We're going to be screwed financially because of giving American Adoptions our 20K that we can't get back. We're too old. We're interracial. I'm a SAHW. We want to home school, but not for religious reasons. We live on a farm. We're pretty weird people. We're never going to match with anyone.
I waited too long to have children because I was obsessed with a career that was failing and I couldn't admit it to myself. My husband never wanted kids, but then 3 years ago we changed our minds. We realized we'd messed up. We wasted our precious youth and didn't start a family when we had more options. I've always been infertile because of surgery I had before I married him, but I could have done IVF back then when I still had enough eggs. I'm in perimenopause now so the odds are slim to none that IVF would work for me, or if it would even be safe if it did.
I think it's much too late for us to become parents. I wish we had done the older child international pathway but now we're in too deep and we can't change directions.
I wish AA had been honest with us about our chances but they profit too much from people's hope.
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