Where should we go?

Time for our home study visit and we still do not know what country we want to go to. We have narrowed it down to Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan. The home visit went well and the dogs behaved themselves. We have been reviewing many different International Adoption Agencies and I think our mail carrier is feeling overworked with the amount of materials we have been receiving in the mail. Our stack is continually growing. Our social worker has told us that she can not complete our homestudy until we give her a country selection. Hopefully we will make up our minds soon.

Many people ask, "Why not adopt domestically?" We are certainly not opposed to that route, but after a great deal of research we chose international adoption. You see, private domestic adoptions have changed a lot in the past 10-20 years, generally becoming more open – meaning that the birthparents are often involved, or at least in occasional contact with the child for the rest of his/her life. This can work out great, but it’s certainly more of an emotional risk. There is also a major effort in recent years to keep families together whenever possible which means the courts do not want to relinquish parental rights to quickly. We’ve spoken to many parents who have adopted from both avenues, and we have determined that international seems less risky, which is exactly why it has grown so much in popularity.