Private Domestic Adoption Terminology
The adoption process can seem incredibly confusing in certain steps, or things can even be called by different names by different people. I'm going to break down the steps and the terminology that's commonly used by adoption professionals within each step to make it easier for us to stay on the same page.
This is a really great blog post for you to share with your friends, family, and partner so they can understand what you're talking about.
I’ve broken the terminology up into groups to make it easier to digest. We’ll cover terminology for the steps of the adoption process and the terminology within each step.
The Steps in the Adoption Process
Determine What Type of Adoption is Right for Your Family
Find an Adoption Partner
Complete a Home Study
Create and Share an Adoption Profile
Match with an Expectant Mother
Baby’s Birth
Finalize the Adoption
Step 1: Determine Which Types of Adoption are Right for Your Family
7 Types of Domestic Adoptions
1. Foster Care Adoption
In foster care adoption, you are adopting a child that is eligible for adoption after the parental rights have been terminated from the birth family by that intended state. In most cases, you're adopting a child from the state that you live in because most foster care agencies don't allow out-of-state adoptions.
2. Adopting From a Relative
Adopting from a relative is pretty rare and sounds pretty self-explanatory. In this type of adoption, you're going to adopt a child from a relative that may be no longer able to care for the child. Typically, this is done so that the child doesn't go into foster care.
3. Embryo Adoption
In embryo adoption, you are adopting genetic material. An embryo is already fully formed and frozen. You would adopt the embryo through the traditional adoption process and most of them will require you to have a home study.
Most of the embryo adoption agencies will require you to also have the ability to carry a child.
When we talk about embryo adoption, you're going to hear terminologies like home studies and profile books. A profile book is a book that you make about your family that you're going to share with the biological family.
Then you're also going to hear terminology about your ability to carry a child. This is when they’ll want access to your medical records. They’ll also want you to have procedures like a uterine scratch test to determine that the embryo will be suitable to live inside your uterus and that your uterus is able to implant a child and your body is able to carry a child.
They’ll also want to make sure you are fit enough to carry a child.
Some other uncommon terminology that you might hear, as it relates to the embryo itself, would be the quality or grade of the embryos. You might also hear some agencies or some fertility clinics use the terminology of something like grade five which would be like the highest grade or the best quality.
You’ll also hear terminology like fresh or frozen. So fresh embryos mean they were extracted from the biological mother, paired with the sperm, and then made into an embryo. Typically at that point, the embryos are genetically tested and then either transferred fresh or frozen.
When they are frozen, most embryologists will tell you that they only want to thaw them one time to implant them because that just helps the success rate. Typically, you're going to hear that they’re freshly frozen, which sounds kind of contradictory, but that just means they were frozen at day four, after a fresh harvest, or frozen on day five.
You're going to hear one of those at fertility clinics where they keep more detailed records that they'll share with the adoption agency, or with you if you're dealing directly with a fertility clinic.
As it relates to genetic testing of the embryos, you're likely to hear terminology around like XE, which means that they've gone in and they've done an extraction to determine the genetic viability and any genetic abnormalities.
With those embryos, I'm definitely not going to get into the political ethical side of those things, it's just good for you to know the terminology. XE means they would go in and talk about chromosomal defects and about the viability of a healthy pregnancy coming from this embryo, and other things of that nature.
Then after you go through the actual procedure of having your body prepared for the transfer, you're going to hear terminology like the normal drugs that you're going to have to take. The spectrum of possible medicines you’ll take ranges dramatically and depends on your individual medical situation.
At this point, they’re really focused on getting your lining thick enough in order to take the transfer of the embryo. Then you're going to hear terminology as relates to a specific blood test but if you've had any sort of pregnancy, blood test, or anything along those lines, those are all pretty normal and standard.
4. Private Matching with an Attorney
The fourth type of adoption is private matching with an attorney. When it comes to private matching with an attorney, some common terminology that you'll hear will be around what type of an attorney they are.
You might hear them referred to as a family law attorney or they might just call themselves a general attorney. It gets really confusing. What you specifically want to hear from a terminology perspective is that they are well versed and practice adoption law in your state and that they have the ability to practice adoption law in other states.
From an adoption attorney perspective, you're going to hear terminology like biological parent attorney and adoptive parent attorney. They can practice for both. It's not like they're specialized in one versus the other, per se.
You're also going to hear terminologies like medical records or HIPAA forms. What they're talking about, there are the medical records of the birth mother.
What their objective is to do what they call pregnancy verification. They're just trying to verify there is a viable pregnancy here and someone is actually intending to place a child for adoption.
Next, you're likely to hear terminologies, like support or financial support which is just talking about what type of financial assistance you're going to need to provide for this adoption opportunity.
You're also going to hear things like guardianship papers or legal relinquishment of rights. That's going to refer to the birth family. That’s the birth parents releasing their rights to this child prior to birth and giving you temporary guardianship that will allow you to use those papers to make medical decisions for the child.
I will fully say this doesn't always happen. Sometimes the decisions as relates to the medical areas once the child is born typically will fall with the birth family until the finalization actually occurs.
You'll also hear things around the revocation period. So the revocation period is the amount of time that a birth family has to change its mind. It's important to also note as we're talking through this, they’re an expectant family until delivery. After delivery happens they become a birth family.
The finalization period will vary state by state and you might hear a few terminology differences kind of used as a result of that. The length of time this stage takes will vary greatly.
5. Matching via Consultant
When you're matching with a consultant, you're going to have some of the similar steps or terminology as we talked about with an adoption attorney, but you're going to hear more focused terms as it relates to the adoption opportunity.
From an adoption opportunity perspective, they're going to talk to you about having a verified pregnancy, and the financial requirements associated with that pregnancy. You'll also likely start to hear things like the type of adoption it is (like open, semi-open, or closed).
6. Matching via an Agency
When you match via an agency, you’re going to have similar terminology to the adoption consultant. The consultants are matching you via an agency nine times out of 10. You might hear a little bit more specialized content or terminology coming from them as relates to your profile and how your profile is being shown.
This is definitely an area when you are interviewing your agencies by the way that you need to dig into because this is what they're charging you more for. You want to make sure you're really getting your value. If you ever need help in that area, feel free just to email me. My email is Amanda@MyAdoptionCoach.com and I’d be happy to help you.
As it relates to the specialized terminology, you'll also hear the adoption agency discussing if your profile is a video profile and if you’re using profiles via social media. You’ll want to understand which platforms they’re using to show or advertise your profile.
Will it be Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, or something else? They could also advertise on Google ads.
I will tell you that this is going to be pretty unlikely. Typically, an adoption agency is taking your funds and putting them into the advertising funds for the adoption agency to advertise to get birth parents. In most cases, they’re not advertising your specific profile. They're advertising the agency in general, however, I would still ask questions about how they advertise.
7. Self Matching
The seventh type of adoption is self matching. This is going to be pretty similar to adopting with an adoption consultant and an adoption agency. The big difference is that you're going to need to introduce the expected parents to either a social worker who did your home study or to an adoption attorney.
If you're self matching you know what an adoption attorney is and you're also going to be going through the pregnancy verification step. You will have medical records or HIPAA forms to do the pregnancy verification.
You’ll also want to discuss the communication preferences and types of adoption (open, semi-open, or closed).
Then you're going to pair her with an attorney that is specific for her or use the same adoption attorney. I'm never going to give you advice there as to what works best for you. That is an individual choice. You can both use the same attorney or each have your own personal attorney.
Self-matching is pretty much an accumulation of the attorney, the consultant, or the agency terminology because you are doing most of that legwork that those other third parties would otherwise be doing for you.
Step 2: Find an Adoption Partner
The second step in the adoption process is to find an adoption partner.
Attorney
The attorney is the person that's going to legally finalize the adoption and file all the appropriate legal paperwork. You will have an adoption attorney even if you're working with an agency or consultant.
Adoption Agency
An adoption agency’s job is to go out and find expectant mothers for you to match with. They are typically operating in just the state you're living in (or in some cases), multiple states, or even nationwide.
Their job is to advertise their agency to attract expectant mothers and then pair you with the right expectant mother based upon your criteria and their criteria.
Adoption Consultant
An adoption consultant works with multiple adoption agencies. Some adoption agencies will be paired with an expectant mother who will approach them that maybe doesn't meet any of the criteria of the hopeful adoptive families that they have waiting, or maybe they don't have anyone waiting, which is going to be incredibly rare.
Then they're going to present your case to an adoption consultant to say I need some help finding the right adoptive family for my baby. Adoption consultants also work with adoption attorneys, because sometimes they will get approached by expectant parents that need some help to complete their adoption.
Maybe the adoption attorney doesn't have someone that meets the criteria the expected family is looking for and therefore the adoption attorney needs to find someone to match with. Thus, a consultant is born. Consultants work with multiple agencies and attorneys in order to find the right match for you.
Adoption Coach
And an adoption coach is not a typical type of adoption partner. But I have been getting a lot of questions about what is My Adoption Coach and what do you do if you don't pair me with an expectant family?
I teach you how to adopt. I give you the tools, resources, and support that you need on your adoption journey. Do I offer one on one support? Yes, but on a very limited basis because I'm a busy mom of two and I have a corporate day job.
My one-on-one time is incredibly limited and typically happens super early in the morning. Primarily I focus my support for you guys in the form of the podcast and my Facebook group where we have one-to-one interactions. This gives me the flexibility to talk to you guys on my time which is really limited.
I have podcast episodes, blog posts, and a couple of products to help you along the way. I have courses to help you create your profile, review your existing profile, or help you build your profile from scratch.
I have matched all three times I’ve adopted in less than six months. I've spent over 20 years marketing for some of the world's largest brands. That experience becomes pretty rich when you're building your profile. I also offer courses about social media, like how to get started with Instagram, how to use Facebook groups to match for your adoption, and things of that nature.
For more information on any of these forms of assistance, click the box below.
Step 3: Home Study Process
During the home study phase you're going to get a lot of questions from a social worker. A social worker’s entire job is to review your paperwork and to counsel you through the adoption process about what’s coming next.
I hope your heart did not skip a beat when I said the word home study like mine did. Don't be scared and make your heart calm down just a little bit.
They're going to do the home study visit, and come in to check the home to make sure that it is safe for a child to live in. They're going to verify the mountain of paperwork that you have to overcome in the home study portion.
You're going to hear terminology that relates to your ability to care for a child based upon a medical questionnaire. You're also going to have to get references from family and friends. They will give you a letter, video, and/or photos that go along with their story they write for you as a reference of being a parent.
They're going to review all of your social medical history preferences, which typically comes on an adoptive parent questionnaire.
Social medical preferences will be things like what type of drug exposure do you feel equipped to parent?
What type of medical issues or opportunities do you feel equipped to parent?
The social worker is going to review that with you to make sure that you've done your due diligence and research to make sure you feel equipped to parent those types of situations.
If someone's going to need long term care or will be born medical conditions, how are you able to provide for that child? How are you going to provide for this child after you're no longer on this earth? They're going to ask you those types of questions.
Don't be scared and calm your heart rate.
If you're really nervous about the home study phase you can always post in the Facebook group or if you feel really private about it and you want to email me that’s totally fine too.
The other thing they're going to ask you is about the contact effort after birth. Do you want the adoption to be open, semi-open, or closed? Then they're just going to talk to you about whether or not you pass and let you know if you have some areas that you need to focus on.
Typically, they're not going to fail you in an adoption home study. Just know that up front.
Relationship Options
Open
An open adoption typically means you have each other's phone numbers, email addresses, maybe even physical addresses, and definitely follow each other on social media.
The definition of open is that you're entirely open. You share information back and forth about this child, about their biological family, etc.
It doesn't necessarily mean that you're open to visits, though, in most cases it does. There's definitely still a little bit of wiggle room for discussion as it relates to what that exactly means for you.
Semi-Open
In a semi-open adoption, you typically communicate through a third party or through some anonymous platform. You can get a Google Voice number, have a special social media account, or a special email address that is specifically just for the birth family.
You will use these means to share updates with the birth family that the rest of the world doesn’t see.
If you're communicating through an agency it means that you're agreeing to send pictures, letters, or videos through the agency. Typically with semi-open, there aren’t any in-person visits.
Closed
In a closed adoption, you don't have any direct contact, but you might still be actually communicating through an agency.
This gets into that gray area, because to some agencies and adoption consultants, definitely means a little bit of contact. The contact is typically facilitated through the agency or consultants.
On a by the book closed adoption you don't have any sort of contact, you signed the paperwork, you walk away, then there's zero contact afterwards.
I am never going to be one that's going to tell you what is best for your family. I know that there are some folks out there that would want me to do that. But this is a highly individual choice.
I would encourage you to research the different types of adoption contacts after adoption and consult a child psychologist to determine what is best for your family and for your child.
Step 4: Create and Share an Adoption Profile
No matter what type of adoption you're going through, the adoption profile is critical to the success of your adoption journey. Your family likely will not understand why you're stressing out about your adoption profile, or how you're sharing it, or why you're asking them to be a reference, but this is the most critical step.
There's not a ton of tricky terminology here as relates to creating your profile and sharing your profile.
When you start creating your profile you need to decide how you will be sharing your profile. You will need to keep that in mind when figuring out which type of profile you want to create.
Here are some examples:
PDF to email to someone to share about your family
Physical book
Social Media posts
If you’re creating your book for social media, you need to think about what types of social media you're creating the profile for.
Instagram
Your personal Facebook page
Facebook group
Tik Tok
Are you creating a physical book or PDF or are you creating for Instagram Reels or Tik Tok videos? You need to be specific about how you’ll be sharing the profile so you can create the best type of content for sharing the book that way.
If you’re sharing your book in person…
Are just simply going to hand out your profile book that you're going to hand out?
Are you going to create things that can be passed along from one person to another that are a bit smaller and more discreet like a brochure or business card or things of that nature?
Your adoption profile is just incredibly important to the overall success of your adoption journey.
Step 5: Match with an Expectant Mother
The fifth step of the adopting journey is to match with an expectant mother.
When we're talking about matching there are some tricky terms that come into play. It is equally important here to be sensitive to not only where you are in the adoption process, but just to adoption in general.
This is a really good inflection point to have a conversation about adoption with your family and really define what terminology is acceptable or not to your family.
Acceptable terminology
Prior to birth, the acceptable terminology might be expected parents, expected father, expectant mother, birth parents, birth father, and birth mother.
After birth, the expected parents become the birth parents. It is also really important not to forget about there being two parents in this situation.
Not every time is there a father in the picture, but just be sensitive to that be sensitive to the fact that the birth mother wants to talk about the birth father or not.
Be sensitive to talking about birth parents together because there are two here. It is also something to be sensitive about as your child grows up. I'm going to put away the soapbox, but it's just important to think about what is right for your family.
Unacceptable terminology
You want to make sure and avoid these terminologies when you're announcing your adoption or when your family is responding to your adoption announcement.
Real parents, real father, or real mother
This terminology is just highly offensive. So you want to focus instead on expectant or birth instead of real or natural. These really kind of struck the core of who I am as an adoptive mom.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. I would definitely encourage you to research this more. Think ahead of time and do some research. Generally, this is a good time to establish some ground rules about how you will talk about adoption with this child, how you will tell their adoption story, and then reinforce that with your family so that they can get on board with supporting you in the way that you want to be supported.
Step 6: Baby’s Birth
The sixth step in the adoption process is the baby’s birth.
There really isn't a lot of terminology around the birth process itself. That isn't commonplace, though, you might want to explain to your friends, family, and partner, the various things that could happen during this time that are different than a traditional birth.
Here's what I focused on with my family as far as prepping them from the beginning when we were talking about it.
Will you be present for the birth?
What will happen when the baby's born?
Who makes the decisions for the baby?
What happens when you leave the hospital?
You're also likely to encounter each of those questions or topic areas. They again will be coming out from a mindset focus of a traditional birth like when you go to the hospital, I'm going to show up and shower you with flowers and gifts and all of these things, though, I think COVID might have changed that a bit.
That would be the general expectation. They're not going to be thinking necessarily out loud about how adoption is different. Some of them might think that adoption changes it up a bit, but they don’t know because they’ve never adopted a child.
Be prepared to talk them through the differences and how you're going to handle the hospital time and especially things with the birth family.
In our cases, it wasn't a time to come and celebrate at the hospital, it was a time for us to respect the privacy of the birth family and respect their wishes. When we left the hospital, that was our family's time to celebrate and enjoy those moments.
It was different and I did prep, my family, ahead of time for that. Boy am I glad I did, because of course, they were so excited to welcome another child into the family and I just didn't want to do anything to be disrespectful or to not appreciate the moment and the feelings and the hard time their birth family was having by our super excited, exorbitant family showing up at the hospital, that just obviously would not have been a good thing.
Step 7: Finalize the Adoption
Once you leave the hospital, we move into the final step of the adoption process, which is revocation and finalization.
Revocation is the time period that the birth family has to decide whether or not they're going to continue with the adoption. The length of time the revocation period is will vary by state. It will vary based upon where you are finalizing the adoption versus where the child was born.
So what happens legally during this time is that typically you'll be discharged from the hospital, and you will have guardianship papers that will give you the ability to make decisions for this child’s medical decisions among other decisions.
But it will also only grant you the ability to stay within the state boundaries that the child was born in. If you live in a different state, then you wait through the revocation period. So if your revocation period is five days, you would wait your five days, and then you would go through what's called ICPC (The ICPC is the Interstate Compact Placement of Children) before you could go back to your home state.
So revocation period, and ICPC are two of the next steps if you're adopting in a state other than the state where you live. If you're adopting from your home state, it would just be revocation period.
The ICPC is where the state that you are adopting from contacts the state that you live in, and says, do you agree to follow up to ensure that they do all of the necessary steps to finalize the adoption in both of our states?
They communicate back to the birth state, the birth state would then communicate either to your adoption partner to give you permission to go home. During all of that time, you have the paperwork. It's important to keep up with that paperwork so that you can make legal decisions for this child medical, etc.
It is it's really important that you're the one that's kind of in charge of this child at this time, because you're their parents.
The finalization is going to be highly dependent upon the state that you have chosen to finalize. And let me take just a second to talk about that because you do have a choice between the birth state or your home state, (dependent upon where you live because some states don't give you that choice).
This is the moment where I wish there was some sort of like adoption reform that would make all of this standardized and a whole lot easier for us all to understand because I think there would be a whole lot less adoption scams and disruptions and general hard feelings as it relates to the law.
In most cases you're going to have either a 30 or 60 day period. In some cases, it's even be up to six months or in one state it’s actually a year. You basically have a set of requirements that you have to meet at different times in order to finalize the adoption.
Finalizing the adoption is when you're done with the legal portion of the adoption.
I know this may seem really weird for finalization and revocation to be two distinct steps, but basically, you have to complete all of the requirements by the state in order to finalize.
If you don't meet the requirements by the state to finalize, your adoption could disrupt and the child (in most cases) end up going into foster care in the state that they were born in.
Obviously, this is super important that you make sure to dot all your I's and cross all your T's to make sure you're following all the steps correctly for the finalization.
You can share this blog post (or podcast episode) with your family to get them familiar with the adoption terminology and process.
It's really important you start an open and honest discussion with them about how they can support you at the various stages of the adoption process. Support in the adoption process is really critical. You need to be surrounded by people that understand what you're going through and that have been there so that they have the experience to share with you.
If you haven't already jumped into the free Facebook group, please do that. We really allow anonymous posts in there and you can message me in there anytime. It is really important that you have the support and you really need that.
I want to do anything I can to help you because you don't have to walk this journey alone. I am here to help you and I've totally got your back. And remember you can do anything with the right plan and support.
Hi, I Am Amanda
I help women build their families through adoption by giving them the step by step guide to adopt a child and support them on their journey
