Adoptive Family Blog

March 02, 2007

Available Situations Outside Our APQ

Megan,

You have emailed us before to see if we want our profile shown to a potential birth mother who is outside our APQ, (I think the one you asked us about last time was full Hispanic). Can you explain again why you email us about these situations and how we can make sure we continue to be contacted about these possibilities? Also, are these American Adoptions birth mothers or birth mothers from other agencies? You mentioned how you have a resource center, but I couldn't remember the details. Thanks for your help!

I would be glad to try and explain these circumstances. Your Adoptive Family Specialist may contact you anytime we have a potential birth mother who either does not match with any adoptive families' APQs or when we have a potential birth mother who is not satisfied with the family profiles she has viewed whose APQs match her situation. Rule of thumb is that a birth mother will first be shown adoptive family profiles whose APQs match her situation. Then, if there are either no families who match her or she does not want to choose one of the families who do match, we look through our list of families to see whose APQs match the closest and contact them to see if they would be open to the circumstances. If they are, we will show the birth mother their profile, if they are not comfortable, we simply would not show their profile to that birth mother and there is no penalty because it was outside their APQ.

One example of the types of situations that could be outside of your APQ where you could still receive contact from our agency is if the race of the baby is a little different than what you originally listed being open to on your APQ. For example, we have had many potential situations for full Hispanic babies lately so we have contacted some families who are open to Caucasian/Hispanic to see if they would consider having their profile shown to those full Hispanic situations because we have not had enough profiles for those birth mothers to view. Another example of something that could be outside your APQ, but you'd still potentially receive contact from our agency about would be if the estimated budget is a bit off from your APQ. Because we sometimes have high cost matches that are above most family's budgets, we may contact a family and explain the scenario to see if they would consider going above their match budget. Finally, other scenarios might involve a birth mother who has used some amount of drugs during her pregnancy, that could be a bit different than what the family originally listed on their APQ. Often, we are able to share prenatal information and other statistics to help a family decide if they are comfortable with this situation or not.

Typically, your Adoptive Family Specialist would email you about potential situations such as these to ask if you'd be open to having your profile shown to the birth mother so it is important to check your emails regularly. Also, if there are areas on your APQ that you are more flexible in and would very seriously consider them if you were contacted on a case by case basis, it is important to let your Adoptive Family Specialist know that also because that may assist us in finding more potential birth mothers for you who wouldn't normally see your profile because they don't match your APQ. For example, I have had families tell me that they would definitely feel comfortable adopting a baby whose birth mother used cocaine during the pregnancy as long as all medical records looked good and/or baby was already born and healthy. This is good information for me to know so I don't bother families who would not feel comfortable with this, but I do contact those who would.

We use this type of contact for any potential birth mothers we are working with. The Resource Center is another way that we get our families as much exposure to potential birth mothers as possible and create matches with other adoption professionals. There are many agencies, attorneys and facilitators throughout the U.S. who work with birth mothers but do not often have enough families to match with their birth mothers. This is when they contact our Resource Center and we are able to show our Adoptive Family profiles to those birth mothers. This leads to many successful matches and adoptions. So, technically, these are birth mothers who are referred to American Adoptions by other adoption professionals. Just think of it as additional exposure to birth parents for our families. I hope this helps explain why we sometimes contact families to ask about potential situations. Don't hesitate to contact your Adoptive Family Specialist if you have further questions or concerns or if there is an area of your APQ that you know you have great flexibility with and would like that to be known.