There are two important aspects of choosing an adoption agency. There is “ethics” and there is “fit”. Both are equally essential to your adoption experience.

Ethics is a big one. All adoption agencies have nice names, pictures of beautiful children on the websites and magazine ads and claim to be in the business to help children and families. The truth is, unfortunately, that adoption is a big business, and any time there is money to be made in a business, you risk unethical people and practices. Adoption is no exception.

All adoptive or perspective adoptive parents owe it not only to themselves, but to adoption in general, to only work with an agency that they know is 100% ethical. I had an adoptive parent reply to me the other day when I asked if she was confident that the agency that she had used was ethical, “Well, we got our kids home and that is all that matters, right?”

Uh, no. That is not right.

Getting your kids home is obviously important, but it is also just as important to know that the children you adopted are legal orphans, that they came to be orphans in an “honest” way, that the adoption agency you used both in the US and the staff in a foreign country (if any) did everything ethically, etc. If poor parents in a foreign country are being offered money for their children along with the promise of a “better life” for those children, or if a birthmother in the United States is pushed by an agency to chose adoption for her child just because that agency has adoptive parents waiting, or if the adoption process happened a little quicker than normal in the foreign country because a little extra money was put in the right pocket…any of these situations and countless others compromise the overall integrity of the institution of adoption. And in those situations, no…getting the children home is not all that matters.

All adoptive parents need to care, and need to demand, good ethics in adoption. Doing so will not only ensure the quality of their adoption, but the adoptions involving children and parents down the line, and the future of adoption in general.

Every time an adoption happens that is not completely ethical, it negatively affects adoptions everywhere, and threatens the future of adoption.

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