Adoption Network Law Center

We did get an apparently healthy baby so they get two stars. There were a number of things really wrong about the way they treated our birth mother and and us. I’ll just give one example here. We were told that the paternal relinquishment would be taken care of during the five months we waited for our daughter to be born. ANLC was very clear that this was how it would work. Thus, once our birth mother signed her relinquishment upon being discharged from the hospital our daughter would be ours. However, we were told AFTER our daughter was born that no steps at all had been taken to take care of the paternal relinquishment. It turned out that we had to wait for just under a year for that step to be completed. Only after that was done could the adoption process even start. So for nearly a year we had a baby at home that may or may not be staying with us. It was despicable of ANLC to mislead us about this and it definitely affected our ability to bond with our baby. Also, after 9 years of struggle and misery and not knowing why almost every aspect of parenting was so incredibly hard, nor why our daughter was just miserable so often, we finally learned that she has a number of neurological disorders. Having the various diagnoses is really helpful and we’re beginning to recover from the many difficult years as well as figuring out how to move into a future with less anguish. We have spent, and will continue to spend, thousands upon thousands of dollars for special therapies and an appropriate private school. The thing is, everything she struggles with runs in families. If we had had good medical histories for both birth parents there would have been signs of these issues. We love her and cherish her and wouldn’t trade her, but being kept in the dark by ANLC about parental status made things FAR more difficult than they had to be. Given the over all pattern of «placement at any cost» we experienced it also seems very possible that ANLC is not incented to help collect the kind of family medical history that would allow prospective parents to make an informed decision, and to know to get help at a much earlier age.