Why Consider Adoption?

Would adoption mean I'm abandoning my baby?
What are the different types of adoption?
What is an adoption plan and how do I make one?

Choosing adoption is choosing to give birth to your child and then choosing others to act as parents and raise the child.

Right now, you may not be in a committed relationship and feel unwilling to become a parent without a husband or partner. Or you feel that you are too young and do not want the responsibility that comes with raising a child at this time in your life.

At this same moment, there are hundreds of thousands of amazing couples who are intensely longing to have a child. Many of these individuals and families are Jewish. Many of them have painfully tried for years to conceive but will never be able to give birth on their own. You can examine a selection of profiles of potential adoptive families on our website, but there are many more to choose from than are found here.

If you choose adoption, you are able to give your child a great life with one of these families and return to your own path (education, career, travel, life style) as you previously had been planning or envisioning. As a birthmother or first-mother, you can create a great future for yourself, while also giving life to your child. Adoption can be an extremely loving choice, but it certainly is not easy.

It's important to know that adoption today may not be what you think. "Openness" has changed adoption by giving birthmothers power to select the family that will adopt and the ability to communicate with the family and the child after the adoption. While it's true that with adoption, your parental rights and responsibilities are given to another set of parents, you can still, if you want, have a loving relationship with your child and his or her adoptive parents. This is not necessarily easy, but it can work and we can point you to resources and guides about how to make this work.

On the other hand, if you believe that it would be best for you or your child, you can also choose to have a confidential adoption with your privacy completely protected. Or you might opt perhaps simply to get letters from the adoptive parents on a annual or biannual basis.

Children adopted as infants generally do as well as their peers. The largest study ever conducted of U.S. families with adolescent adoptees - a four-year survey of two thousand people released by the Minnesota-based Search Institute in 1994 - demonstrated that children adopted as infants do as well as their non-adopted peers in terms of self-esteem and grades.

If you're not sure about adoption, it's possible to create two potential plans, one to parent and one to adopt and then spend time choosing what's best. We can help you do both.