Finding an Adoption Opportunity with A Child’s Hope

As an adoption agency, our primary service for adoptive families is helping them find a birth mother to adopt from. We believe that there is a family for every child, and we are committed to helping those families and children find each other.

Here, learn more about the process to find an adoption opportunity with A Child’s Hope.

The Steps to Find a Birth Mother in North Carolina

As a full-service, North Carolina-licensed adoption agency, A Child’s Hope offers comprehensive services to help hopeful parents locate infants available for adoption. We will walk you through each step of the process to find a birth mother to adopt from, including:

Advertising and Marketing

A Child’s Hope is an established agency with an extensive network of contacts in the medical, legal and counseling community. Through this network, our online and social media marketing efforts (Facebook & Instagram), we locate pregnant women who are considering adoption.

In addition, we have created a dedicated website for expecting mothers who may be considering adoption, and a birth mother text/hotline, to make our services as accessible as possible to expectant mothers. We also have a Spanish version of our Facebook and provide pages in Spanish on our website. These adoption advertising and marketing services help us increase the number of available adoption opportunities and limit families’ overall wait times.

Screening and Counseling Services

After a woman considering adoption has found our agency through our marketing and advertising efforts, she will work closely with an adoption counselor to provide background information about herself and her baby. Her counselor will attend prenatal appointments with her and provide the counseling she needs to determine that adoption is truly the right choice for her. The counselor will help her anticipate the grief she will feel and help her create a birth plan that will

follow through with placement of her child.

Because our counselors are able to provide emotional support and adoption services to expectant mothers in person, we are better able to thoroughly screen prospective birth mothers and ensure they are committed to adoption before matching them with waiting families.

Adoption Profiles for Waiting Families

Our agency partners with My Adoption Advisor, a leading expert in adoption advertising and adoption web design, to create beautiful, detailed and unique websites for each of our waiting families. You will work directly with a profile artist to create a profile design and compile pictures and information about your family to be included in the profile.

In addition, this package also includes 5 online classes. Also your adoption artist will create an online version of your profile, complete with your own custom URL, to help advertise your family. You will also create social media pages, including a Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for your adoption journey. These social media platforms allow you to update your family photos and give expectant mothers a snapshot into your day-to-day life.

For those families that are open to placement/match with an out-of-state birth mother, the Agency has partnerships to help facilitate this situation as well.

Birth Mother Descriptions

When an adoption opportunity becomes available and the expectant mother is ready to view waiting families’ profiles, A Child’s Hope will send out a detailed, non-identifying birth mother description to all of our waiting families. These descriptions are about three pages long and include detailed background information about the adoption opportunity, including:

• Physical descriptions of the prospective birth parents
• Background information about the expectant mother’s employment, education and lifestyle
• Prenatal care and family medical history
• Any substance and alcohol exposure during the pregnancy
• Family support
• The expectant mother’s budget, which includes information about her financial needs
• Information about the birth father and
• The type of adoption the birth mother desires

You will be able to review the birth mother description and decide whether you think the adoption opportunity might be a good fit for your family. In most cases, you will have 24–72 hours to let your adoption counselor know whether you want your profile to be shown for an adoption opportunity.

Match Meeting

Once an expectant mother has had a chance to review adoption profiles and choose a waiting family, her adoption counselor will schedule a match meeting with the adoptive parents. The match meeting typically occurs at a restaurant in the afternoon on a first-name basis, with the adoption counselor present to help facilitate communication and ensure everyone is comfortable.

The match meeting gives expectant parents and the adoptive family an opportunity to get to know one another better and see if the adoption opportunity might be a good fit. If the expectant mother wants to move forward, the family will officially be in a match, and their profile will not be shown for other adoption opportunities.

Pre-Placement Contact

After your match meeting, you are encouraged to continue pre-placement contact with the expectant mother, if that is something she is comfortable with. This pre-placement contact can be mediated by your adoption counselor and may include phone calls, additional in-person visits, email exchanges, and more. The planned contact is written up in a formal written communication agreement so that there are no misunderstandings. Although by law North Carolina communication agreements are not legally enforceable, the Agency works hard to keep the communication lines open.

Pre-placement contact is strongly encouraged for a number of reasons.

• It reassures expectant parents that they are making the right decision and have chosen the best possible adoptive family for their baby
• It decreases the risk of an adoption disruption — an expectant mother is less likely to discontinue the adoption process or revoke consent if she knows and trusts the adoptive family personally
• It reassures adoptive parents and helps them become more comfortable with their baby’s birth family
• It promotes bonding and lays the foundation for a strong open or semi-open relationship following placement

Adoptive parents are usually nervous about the match meeting and continuing pre-placement contact, but your adoption counselor will be available to answer your questions, help you prepare for meetings, and provide suggestions for creating a strong relationship with the birth family. The adoption counselor also helps the birth mother prepare because she is also usually nervous and fears rejection.

Following placement, you may continue to keep in touch with your baby’s birth parents through open or semi-open adoption. Post-placement contact often includes picture and letter exchanges, emails, phone calls and in-person visits. Our adoption counselors will continue to be available to mediate this contact and help you navigate your relationship over time. Education on open adoption is offered through the agency at an annual seminar.

A Child’s Hope’s Advantages for Finding a Birth Mother 

A Child’s Hope can provide the information you need to feel comfortable with the matching process, give you suggestions to minimize your adoption wait time, decrease your chance of an adoption disruption, and help you find the perfect adoption opportunity for your family.

As an adoption agency, our priority is helping every child find the perfect home. Our matching process is unique in that it offers families the following advantages:

• Almost all of our adoptions take place within North Carolina. We focus on matching North Carolina birth mothers with North Carolina adoptive families. This allows us to meet and counsel expectant mothers in person, which helps us evaluate their commitment to and feelings about adoption more effectively. In addition, it allows adoptive families to meet expectant parents in person, which facilitates bonding and decreases the risk of an adoption disruption.
• Our matching services take place late in the process. Typically, we notify adoptive families of an adoption opportunity six to eight weeks before the baby’s due date. This gives us time to provide extensive counseling services and ensure the prospective birth mother is truly committed to adoption before matching her to adoptive parents, limiting the chances of an adoption disruption. Although the agency is willing to match earlier if a birth mother has strong feelings about an earlier match, we typically wait so that the birth mother has had time to work through her feelings, set up a birth plan and so the birth father can be contacted, sign and provide DNA if he is willing.
• Adoptive families receive detailed information about each adoption opportunity. Because of the extensive birth mother descriptions we send for every adoption opportunity, adoptive families feel more informed and comfortable going into the matching process. This gives adoptive families more control over the adoption process and allows them to determine what types of adoption situations they are comfortable with. This also gives adoptive families more control over their adoption wait time; the more flexible and open they are to having their profile shown, the more likely they are to adopt within a shorter timeframe.
• Identifying information is protected. In semi-open adoption, adopting parents and expectant mothers may choose to keep their identifying information, such as last names, addresses and other personal contact information, confidential. Pre-placement contact is mediated by an adoption counselor on a first-name basis.

If you would like more information on how to find a birth mother for private adoption, or if you need help starting the adoption process, contact us today to learn more about our adoption services.