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Standing Apart from the Crowd
3 Tools to Get You Noticed By Kelly Burgess
Gloria Hochman, director of communications for the National Adoption Center in Philadelphia, Pa., says this stems from a disparity between the number of infants available for adoption and the number of families who want to adopt. This gap has widened over the past few decades. She says most families wait an average of two to three years to adopt an infant and those are the lucky ones.
"There is a measure of luck in the process when you're talking about open adoption," Hochman says. "People may take out ads in papers and even hand out business cards, but they can't really know what the birth mother is looking for in a parent for her child."
The problem Hutzel had with her agency is that they didn't communicate with her very well throughout the process, and she wasn't comfortable with that. She feels that another agency could have been just as successful in getting her a baby and may have kept her more up to date on the status of her pending adoption.
"They were pretty impatient with us when we tried to ask questons about the process and didn't really answer us completely," Hutzel says. "Even the woman who did our home study just kind of acted like, 'Don't worry about it. It will all work out.' We would have liked a little more preparation."