So this is how it all went down. There are sites that agencies use to post situations. This situation was unique in that this girl was looking for a family from a specific religion...in which I was raised and am no longer. This is a very small religion so to find those in this religion #1 is hard, and #2 is hard to find who want to adopt. So I took a chance and sent my profile and indicated I was raised in that religion but no longer practicing but I am a Christian. They forwarded our information to the BM and she indicated she was interested in working with us. That was Tuesday. Now keep in mind - we ALREADY paid our agency their fee which wasn't cheap so we would be out that money and have to pay this Adoption Attorney a whole separate fee. But this situation seemed ideal. She was due in a few weeks, having a boy and her medical history was clean. I wouldn't be honest if I didn't say there were red flags with her and her attorney for reasons I'll explain. She claimed she didn't know she was pregnant until 24 weeks and that is when she found out she was having a boy and started taking her prenatal. She had just had an ultrasound two weeks prior. Seeing she is in her early 20s I asked if he was healthy because it seemed odd that would be doing an ultrasound at 34 weeks unless there was an issue. I was 39 years old pregnant with Lucy and they gave me a dating ultrasound and an anatomy scan and that was it. She indicated they had detected an irregular heart beat but it would resolve itself. So I filed that away. On the 10 minute call with us she was talking to us as if we were buying a bike off of her. No emotion, she liked us, she wanted a closed adoption and she wanted us at the hospital because she essentially wanted nothing to do with him. Again, for us all too good to be true. And of course made me sad for him. Then she indicated she was unsure of the father. It was one of two men. One was white and one was 3/4 white and 1/4 black. She doesn't know either of their names and never exchanged identifying information. We had no issue with this but also didn't quite believe the story. But now let me tell you about her...she raised in a very strict Christian faith, she has a 3 year old already and they both are living with her parents who are middle class people. Again something wasn't adding up. Why wouldn't her parents want to help? She had a 3 year old little boy...why would she want to take his half brother from him? I know situations like this happen but it just added to our uneasiness. I kept telling my husband there is more to the story than this. So we asked what hospital she would be at (the attorney is on the phone the whole time). She tells us. This attorney by the way, was not a nice man to us from the beginning. After we had this nice conversation and got off the phone we spoke with him. He gave us the fees which were pretty significant. Significant as in twice as much as we would pay with our agency and would significantly hurt our savings. So I'll be honest that was keeping me up at night. Did I want to be child poor? Where do we draw the line? So we took the contracts and got in touch with a RI attorney who took a day to return our call. In the meantime, we learn in her state, using a facilitator like the attorney working with her is against the law unless he can prepare paperwork to state certain language. Now finding an attorney in her state to work with us was easy HOWEVER the two we spoke to- one was going out of town next week and the other the week of 4th of July. Two weeks that she could potentially go into labor in. So neither would take a retainer but they of course charged us hourly. Finally yesterday, both law firms said they would work together. So we got on a conference call with all three parties. They indicated they were nervous of her state's laws. That we could pay all this money and potentially not have the adoption get approved. What that means is we lose the money and the baby goes to the state to be adopted out to a family in that state. Additionally, because she isn't stating who the father is, they will have to put an advertisement online and in the paper for 3 weeks, with her name and the situation asking for any fathers to come forward if they want to lay claim to this child. The father would have 40 days to contest the adoption. And that's not all. Yup there's more. The attorney representing her would require an additional non refundable $10,000 advertising fee, they want us to pay her June and July expenses and 8 weeks postpartum. We get the latter within reason...but all these expenses are adding up above and beyond the fee the attorney wants us to charge us. And this could all get paid and she could change her mind and keep the baby or god forbid that baby is very sick and has to stay in the hospital and we would lose every penny we paid. So as I'm reading the contract I see that we are signing off we have received all medical documentation from the birth mother etc. I inquire about this. They send paperwork over she provided. One is on the birthfather. It was filled out weird and there was only one birthfather form. I inquired about it. In talking to the BM she had filled the form out incorrectly and it was really one white father and one black father. It didn't matter to us but it was showing that everyone was moving too fast. But it also made me think back to our 10 minute call when she talked about the birthfather situation. I asked her specifically what the races were because it conflicted depending on what ad you read. She also on that call indicated something different. I just kept internally questioning everything. The story kept changing. We didn't care what the baby would be but why was everyone telling us a different story and how would this come back to haunt our situation later. We worried she knew who the father was but was keeping it from him. So anyway, long story longer...each day we checked in and gave an update indicating our intentions and what we were accomplishing. My DH told them we were able to speak to the hospital etc. We weren't keeping anything a secret. I guess that infuriated the BM attorney. What information did they think we would get? She hadn't even gone there yet. And we were glad we called, they needed us to submit an adoption plan to the Hospital attorney ahead of time. So yesterday afternoon, the BM attorney told us they found another family for her, that we were untrustworthy people and how dare we question them. So they wanted us to blindly pay and take all the risk. I went through the stages of grieving for 30 minutes and then just became angry at the attorney representing her (but not really representing her). He didn't even want us to tell her that her name would be in the paper. He just wanted his fees and move on from both of us. I did inappropriately reach out to her on FB, but just to make sure she knew we weren't backing out. I don't know if she read the message but he told her to block me and she did (he left my husband a message and told him to tell me to back off.
) I reached out out of love for that baby. I know he probably told that birthmother all sorts of lies. We were the 4th family. My mom made a good point and said with all the people who want to adopt, why couldn't she hold a birth family? A lot of things weren't making sense. I guess the old adage, if its too good to be true, it probably is, rings true here. I of course am packed, bought little boy stuff, even bought the birthmother a gift...and here I am telling our story. As much as I think we have people looking out for us by bringing this situation to us...I equally believe we are being looked over and we could have avoided a lot of heart ache and financial despair. We found articles about this guy (he's out of California) where he was selling an infant to the highest bidder...he is not a good man. It doesn't matter if you have Esq. after your name. He's a greedy greedy attorney.
