About Adoption
When I handled my first adoption in 1960 - over 9000 cases ago - California was the only state in which the law encouraged birth mothers to choose adopting parents personally. In the rest of the country, adoptions were secretive and rare. Adoption agencies insisted that a mother relinquish her child and go away without ever knowing who adopted her baby.

Although I spent many years working to make things easier for adopting couples and birth mothers around the country, that's the way adoptions worked until the early 1980's, when attitudes toward adoption began to change. Until then, there were two distinct adoption procedures in the United States:

Adoption Agency Relinquishments

Agencies accept infants and place them with couples they have approved.

Independent Adoptions

A birth mother selects the adopting parents herself after learning their identities and all the relevant facts about them.

Now there are several additional alternatives, including:

Collaborative Adoptions

An adoption agency performs a home study and takes care of technical aspects of the adoption, but allows the parties to the to find one another, often with the assistance of an attorney, and places the child directly from the hospital into the adoptive home.

Open Adoptions

A co-parenting arrangement between the adoptive and birth parents allowing both to have regular visits and/or active roles the child's upbringing and care.

Nowadays, with a broader variety of choices, there are several different types of Adoption Practitioners who help to arrange adoptions. Some are licensed while others are not, which means that some practitioners are better than others at making things go smoothly and avoiding adoption's various risks.