Adoption Options: A Fact Sheet for Families

Prospective adoptive parents have many adoption options. The way you choose to adopt will depend on what is important to your family, including how you feel about contact with birth parents, how flexible you can be about the characteristics of the child you wish to adopt, the resources you have available for adoption fees, and how long you are willing to wait for your child. This fact sheet provides some basic information about adoption options; for more information, see the resource list at the end of this document.

The National Adoption Information Clearinghouse (NAIC) National Adoption Directory offers State-by-State listings of public officials, public and licensed private adoption agencies, and support groups for adoptive parents or people searching for birth relatives.

This fact sheet focuses on one way to think about how choices in adoption may flow from one another:

• Where will our family's child come from? (Domestic or intercountry adoption?)
• If we adopt domestically, what type of adoption is best for our family? (Domestic infant or foster care adoption?)
• If we choose domestic infant adoption, who will assist our family with the adoption? (Licensed private agency, independent [attorney], or facilitated/unlicensed agency adoption?)

For more specific information about these choices, see the companion table, Adoption Options-at-a-Glance.

Domestic or Intercountry Adoption?

One of the first decisions many prospective adoptive parents make is whether to adopt a child from the United States or from another country. Some considerations in deciding between domestic and intercountry adoption may be how you feel about parenting a child whose background differs from your own and how you feel about potential involvement of the child's birth parents.