In my last post, I shared our experience in choosing to adopt domestically after two international adoptions.

We found both international and domestic adoption to be a wonderful way to expand our family, and also found each type of adoption to have its own set of benefits and challenges.

Here are some of the differences we found and experienced when comparing our international adoptions and our domestic infant adoption.

- There was much less paperwork with our domestic adoption, and we did not have to deal with (or pay for) immigration.

- While preparing our family profile was easier than preparing a dossier, it felt “funny” to me to be in a way, “selling” our family to a pregnant woman.

- I liked that with our international adoptions (not counting our attempt to adopt from India) before we started, we knew we “qualified” to adopt from that program and would be approved. I found it nerve-wracking that we had to be chosen for a domestic adoption.

- It was also nerve-wracking and emotionally challenging to know that even after a “match” was made and we were chosen to adopt a baby, that it could all easily fall through if the mother chose to parent. While that is the nature of domestic infant adoptions, and is something all adoptive parents have to accept and respect, it is still hard to be “cautiously excited” and prepared for loss at the same time.

- Our extended families worried that the baby would be “taken back”.


- The fees were about the same, however all of the money was due at once with our domestic adoption.

- The process moved very quickly with our domestic adoption, and yet I found the process more emotionally difficult, because there was very little “process” to follow. We turned in our paperwork and were then officially waiting, and could get a placement at any time. There was very little predictability to it all.


- While we expected the travel to be easier with our domestic adoption, I ended up being stuck in South Carolina for two weeks waiting on the ICPC, which was a day or two longer than my trip to Vietnam. Hotels, food, etc are a lot more expensive in the U.S., but the plane tickets were a lot cheaper.

- Working directly with a birth mother is much different than adopting a child that has been abandoned or whose parents have died. While we know that our son that we adopted domestically needed a home and family as much as our other children, it was extremely emotional in many different ways to be given a baby by his mother.

- Having an open adoption was also a new experience for us. With both of our international adoptions before our first domestic adoption, the biological families of our girls were unknown.

There were many aspects of open adoption that I found to be a blessing, such as getting to know and bond with my son's birth mother, learning his family history and getting information that will allow me to answer many of his questions when he is older, being in the room when he was born, etc.

There were also aspects of open adoption that were very challenging, such as our son's birth mother calling and asking us for money after the adoption, her not returning our calls when our son was very sick and in the hospital and her moving and not giving us her contact information.

To sum up, I could not say that either international or domestic transracial adoption is better or easier. I know families who have had wonderful experiences with both international and domestic adoption, and I know families how have had extremely challenging experiences with both types of adoption.

As I said, we found benefits and challenges to both domestic and international adoption, but most importantly, we were able to use both types of adoption to find our children.