The first poster of there, FP, is dead to rights; the agencies involved have a great financial interest in PREVENTING adoptions.

I know a couple of who worked for a children's home; when they decided they wanted to adopt the 6-child family group which had been under their care for some time, the home FIRED them and put accusations in their employment record which would prevent that from EVER happening. The interests of the children (whom I know personally)? Don't make me laugh!

Of course, such terrible accusations don't prevent the state from asking them to be foster parents (something at which they excel).

The system is utterly broken. There's a reason that those who can scrape the money together adopt from abroad.

Tony, here's a comment that is not mean-spirited. A Christian co-worker and friend asked me one day if we ever considered adoption, knowing that we were childless not by choice. She adopted a daughter through a black church initiative (One Church, One Child) and did not spare me the downside of her experience as her daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager. As a result of her prompting (and the prompting of the Holy Spirit), we adopted twin five-year old boys about 18 months later.

You are right about the support of the body of Christ. Our church family surrounded us and these boys from the first day and continue to support us through their teenage years. The boys are classified as "special needs" but you wouldn't know it if you met them.

The bottom line, though, is that most of the foster children with parental rights terminated are extremely difficult to place because of special needs, such as severe physical handicaps, emotional handicaps due to years of abuse, profound mental handicaps, or even a large number of siblings which must be placed together. And then finally there is the race issue. We are white, so disqualified from adopting ethnic children.

So how many of these foster children are in Christian homes? My sons' foster parents took care of critically (mostly terminally) ill infants as their "ministry". I continue praying for my sons' foster parents as they literally saved their lives.

It is indeed broken, but you can work through it if you are truly motivated. We are it he process of adopting from the state but it is wearing us down and we are praying for the day when it is complete and we are free from the microscope.

Our new daughter is a climber and every injury is another opportunity for the state to jump in, remove the child and investigate the home. (Yes, we've been through that too - completely exonerated but man - it makes you feel horrible throughout the process.) We are contemplating wrapping her in bubblewrap for the next two months just to survive until the adoption.

I understand the need to find safe homes where these children can thrive, but the hoops you have to jump through are crazy. I'm convinced that the licensing process successfully eliminates 90% of the decent parents that just don't have the wherewithal to stick it out and pay all the money for inspections, etc.

We have had some very good caseworkers as well as contact with several that have very unique ideas about how to parent and what is best for children. All the workers we have worked with are not married and have no children. That itself presents some challenges, and remember that if the state has a kid, they were mostly likely removed from a damaging environment. So even if the state was not a hindrance in any way, it is still a long rocky road to bond and raise these kids. Worth it, yes. Difficult...absolutely.

It has been a very eye-opening experience and I'm constantly amazed at the speed and efficiency of government. It is worse than I had ever imagined. The only good thing about bureaucracy is how it limits how much damage can be done.

It seems to me that there's a veritable 800-lb gorilla in the room here that's just hinted at above: race. White friends (I, too, am a person of pallor) of ours just adopted a 10 or 11 year old black boy who was a refugee from Katrina and whose mom had proven unable to care for him. What was striking to me was how rare it was for a white family to adopt a black child. I know there are lots of barriers and problems with domestic adoptions (including some institutionalized reluctance to let kids go to families of other races) but how much of our reluctance to adopt and willingness to go to literally the ends of the earth (Ukraine, China, Korea, etc.) hinges on the questions surrounding race?

Wow... You're a braver man than I am, Charlie Brown. I appreciate your gracious responses on both sides of the issue, but the Dr. Strangelove commenter really summed it up for me.

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."

Someone recently told me about a church in Oregon that has adoption assistance as one of its ministries. The people involved have accumulated connections and knowledge of local and international bureaucracies, and the church provides funding, all with the goal of making it as easy as possible -- given the admittedly byzantine rules and capriciousness of governments in this area -- for parents to adopt. Perhaps that would be something more churches could emulate, though I imagine the impetus would have to come from people in those churches who have already navigated those waters themselves.

How do I get to WORLD on the web? Or WORLD webzine? Tried to google it and got sites with world maps. thanks.