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Artificial Twins
Is This Adoption Option for You?
By Cynthia Peterson
"Artificial twinning" has gotten increasingly more popular as potential adoptive parents travel abroad to adopt, or like our family, are offered two or more placements nearly simultaneously. We began the adoption process with a potential birth mother while fostering a 4-week-old infant.
It was my belief that our foster son, Steven, would be reunified with one or both of his birth parents. The social worker, child's attorney and every other professional involved in his case made this intention a fact in my mind. The birth parents were awarded daily visitation and I was giving informal parenting instruction on how to care for the baby during these visits. Rather than concentrating on him and enjoying my role as a foster parent, I considered alternative adoption possibilities.
When Steven was about a month old, we were contacted by an adoption agency that I had registered with months earlier. There was a baby due in September, nearly three months away. Would we be interested in meeting the birth mother? We decided to proceed with the possible adoption, assuming (as we had been told) that Steven could be heading home with his birth parents at any time.
We were forthcoming with Sean's birthmother about us fostering an infant who was in reunification with his birth family. She didn't see the situation as a reason not to select us as potential adoptive parents for her son. The adoption wheels were set in motion. When Steven was 9 weeks old, we brought home our newly placed son, Sean. Close in age but eons apart in development, our two little guys were now brothers, as they resided in the same home and were parented by the same loving, yet exhausted, adults.
On a warm day in August of 2004, the boys, infants with less than nine months of age between them, of different birth mothers, would come to be raised by the same legal parents under one roof. We had inadvertently created a rare but increasingly prevalent family dynamic within the adoption community. I had never heard the terms "artificial twins," "virtual twins," "pseudo twins" or "judicial twins" prior to the placement. No matter how innocent the action, "artificial twins" is now what we had.
