American Adoptions is committed to giving you the best possible pool of adoptive families from which to choose, which is why our screening process is often more extensive than nearly any other adoption agency in the country.

Every adoptive family you see on our Web site is “active,” which means they are ready to be matched. Unlike many other adoption agency web sites, however, all of our adoptive families have already completed all of their criminal background checks and their adoption home study, both of which are required by state and federal law to adopt.

This safeguard gives you the peace of mind that no surprises will arise once you have your heart set on an adoptive family. For example, with some other agencies there have been scenarios where the prospective birth mother has chosen a family based on their online profile, only to be heartbroken months later when they failed a background check or their home study was denied.

If that wasn’t enough, we require all of our adoptive family’s background checks and documentation to comply with the adoption laws of all 50 states. This is important to you because some other adoption agencies only require the adoptive families to do the minimum documentation required by their home state, meaning adoptions in two separate states may hit a snag if the appropriate amount of documentation was not collected to satisfy the state laws in which the baby is born.

Therefore, feel free to browse our adoptive families while knowing that all precautions have been taken to ensure that every family lives up to American Adoptions’ high standards.

The Different Stages of the Screening Process

The American Adoptions’ screening process is broken down into two separate phases: The adoption home study and the Adoption Planning Questionnaire (APQ).

The adoption home study is a glimpse into the adoptive family’s past and present, so you know what the future of your child will look like. This is when we collect criminal background checks, FBI clearances, child abuse record checks, medical documents, financial documents, birth certificates and reference letters. These documents are reviewed by American Adoptions, as well as attorneys, judges and government officials.

The second portion of the adoption home study is the home inspection, where a social worker physically visits the adoptive family’s home to ensure us as well as you that it is safe for the addition of a baby. The social worker will look for items such as a fence around the pool, firearms locked up in a gun cabinet, and fire escape routes and fire extinguishers present on every floor.

The home inspection is finalized with an interview process between the social worker and each individual living in the home. These interviews are the final step to ensure that the parents are upstanding people, emotionally and physically stable, and are ready to become parents via adoption.

Along with the adoption home study, every adoptive family must complete the Adoption Planning Questionnaire (APQ), which tells us everything else there is to know about the family, ranging from how often the couple attends church to whether or not either of them smoke. This process helps us organize and match our adoptive families who best fulfill the birth parents’ desired characteristics and interests.

For example, if it is important to you that your newborn son is raised in a non-smoking, highly religious family, we can easily review the our APQs and send you the adoptive family profiles of only the families who meet your requests.

Finally, you will perform your own screening process by personally reviewing the packet of adoptive family profiles that the Adoption Specialist sends you, based on the family’s APQ responses. The birth parents always have the final say in determining who will be the family to raise the child.