Things are hard right now. I’m pretty self-aware, but right now introspection and processing is too hard and too much – without an end to the current stressors in sight it’s more about surviving than processing and moving through it. I WILL but I’m not going to RIGHT NOW. It’s the holidays, and I’m trying to keep myself in a lighter, frosted, sweeter, spirit.
So, instead, let’s have a talk about the dirty secret of non-traditional child-rearing; to do this, you have to make a lot of intense emotional decisions which have significant and immediate fiscal considerations. No one wants to be making their family growth decisions based on money but money effects every aspect of non-traditional family growth.
SCIENCE!
Science might get you there – but there’s a reason that the rich are having babies late in life, and most of the rest of us are not. Using science and labs to reproduce is not that cheap. The average cost of one round of IVF is $12,000 – it can easily be $20,000 for a round; and, it often takes multiple cycles, and for someone later in life almost always multiple cycles, with no guarantees. With my particular circumstances, (age, no successful prior pregnancies, and multiple prior miscarriages) the chance of any one IVE cycle being successful was more like 10%-15%. Not a great chance of return on investment; in fact, it sounds like a great way to pay massive amounts of money for additional heartbreak.
JUST ADOPT!
“I’ll just adopt!” I LOOOOVE seeing (usually young) people on FB or the internet generally talking about how easy it is to adopt, how they don’t want to mess up their bodies or deal with the gross, pain, and/or expense of child bearing, and how it’s socially better to adopt. This usually comes with a lot of hand-wringing and moralistic statements about how there are “so many children that need love” and so if they decide to have kids “I’ll just adopt”!. (There ARE so many children that need love- but they mostly aren’t infants, they are hard to love, they come with huge challenges, and they aren’t that easy to get a hold of either).
There. is. nothing. easy. about. adopting. privately. Even if you thought that you were socially interested in adoption, it is generally faster and more cost-effective to produce your own if you are physically able to do so naturally. Adopting (frequently) takes a long time; you either have to match with a birth mother somehow out in the world or work through an agency; in an agency your profile is given to prospective birth mothers and they choose someone. This CAN be fast, but it can take months or even years; and then you wait for that baby to pop out.
Adopting is crazy, absurdly, ridiculously, expensive. I know someone who adopted 18 years ago for $10,000 – from a friend of a friend, with no agency, so a total discount; the cheapest I’ve known. The average cost of a private American adoption is $34,000 – $40,000 (we did not research international adoptions so I cannot speak to the reasoning, but I understand they are comparable in cost). I looked into an agency that is supposedly pretty fast and pretty cheap out of California; but reading reviews it was shady as fuck, with terrible stories of birth mothers extorting hopeful adoptive parents. I met one prospective family who had tried to use that agency with nightmare results…it CAN work, but it’s a super-risky route. The very reputable consultant we were working with was giving us “best chances” in the $40,000 range, with a recommendation that if we wanted to adopt more quickly to have room in your budget up to $50,000 working with their reputable agencies. DO YOU HAVE THAT LAYING AROUND? We def did not. Even if you DO, that’s your child’s future college fund (or travel, or first home, or therapy because they are adopted!) that you just spent JUST GETTING THE KID IN THE FIRST PLACE!
Adoption is also not easy emotionally or time-wise. You cannot “buy” a baby; which means that money you are paying is going for a bunch of birth-mom’s costs BEFORE the birth. And, she has usually signed a contract saying if she changes her mind, she owes those fees back – but if she is about to give up her child for adoption you can assume she is not in a financial place to pay back massive quantities of cash. So, if she changes her mind, and keeps that baby, you are out of luck for a large amount of that money. While we were making this decision, a friend of my partner actually had an adoption mind-change at the hospital while waiting to take baby home.
Different states have different laws; but down south is your best bet for laws that transfer the custody with no take-backs quickly. All of the agencies we were looking at were down south, most in Florida, maybe one in Oklahoma and one in Utah (if I remember correctly). But, to adopt, you have to be present in that state where the baby was born for a certain amount of time; so, you will have expenses of travel (multiple times, likely) to the state, staying in a hotel or other short-term accommodation, in a foreign state, before and then with your new baby…even if you have paid maternity leave, spending your new baby time in foreign state in an unfamiliar space, sleepless, unsure, and worried, is a pretty difficult way to start your new relationship.
FOSTERING (TO ADOPT)
Fostering is BY FAR the least fiscally challenging way to build a non-traditional family; presumably because the emotional cost is so high people literally would not do it if there was no support for a least the everyday pecuniary costs of the children. In many counties, putting the foster child in day care alone can use the entire reimbursement. If you are rotating placements fairly quickly, you can go through A LOT of supplies, kids come to you with next to nothing (my baby literally was handed to me naked) and are required to leave your care with a certain amount of items (I am SO frustrated when foster parents send them with less than the required amount – this might be these children’s best chance to have one full set of decent clothing in their lives, and they need to go to their next step, which is almost always probably scary, and they can have this one support).
A separate post talked about the hoops, hoops, hoops, required of foster parents (visits, transportation, permissions, etc.) which can use up all the time and reimbursement there is, which is likely why people maximize by having multiple placements; it’s most feasible if you are already a SAH parent, and you are pretty money-smart, buy clothes second-hand, use cloth diapers, etc. But children come with costs, car seats, clothes, activities, supplies, presents. I know a foster family that took in a four-sibling group, for adoption, and their friends posted a go-fund-me to get them a van (a family of 6 needs a bigger vehicle!) and they were forced to take the go-fund-me down because it was too public and/or violated the privacy rules of foster care and/or other foster placements stated they shouldn’t have the kids because if they cannot afford a new van then they cannot afford to adopt children and the kids should be moved. Because there are SO MANY foster parents breaking down DHS’ door demanding to take in large sibling groups.
The BIGGEST pecuniary benefit of adopting through foster care is that the kids have HEALTH CARE – usually even after adoption! And that’s really important, because the risks and responsibilities with adopting through foster care are huge. The emotional output required to do it well is obviously enormous. Children in foster care nearly always have one or more mental health diagnoses. Children in foster care are more likely to have fetal alcohol exposure, drug exposure, a history of sexual and/or physical assault, and significant medical problems than infants obtained through private adoption. Every non-infant child in foster care has experienced significant trauma. Even babies straight to your home from the hospital may have pre-birth exposure to domestic violence or other trauma, as well as prenatal tobacco, drug, and alcohol, exposure.
We chose fostering for a lot of reasons, but the very last deciding factor was a cost-benefit analysis. We already had the resources to allow one parent to stay home with a child; with that, we felt that we could put in the emotion and the time and the work for foster children, and it would mean that we had greater monetary resources to invest in our children and giving them mental health support and education and opportunities. We also decided that the uncertainty and difficulty of fostering and then letting go until we ultimately adopted was preferable to the uncertainty and difficulty of waiting to see if a birth mother changes her mind at the last minute and then we are starting over, with less monetary resources, later in life, and after more disappointment. Interestingly, the risks that were hard for me in each of our possible scenarios were very different for my partner – but made us both want the same ultimate path.
People who want children take out loans, raise money through gofundme, hold benefits and bake sales, and cash out retirement accounts to do IVF and to adopt privately. People spend years fostering, search on line for birth mother matches, and give their hearts to a rotating cast of children who might never be permanent family members. But for some reason, the discussions of non-traditional parenting often skip over the monetary penalty of being unable to “just have a baby”.