Adopting Abroad: Catherine's Story
By Christina Breda Antoniades
When Catherine Casey first met her daughter, she had reason to be relieved. After enduring infertility treatments and then patiently waiting nearly a year while the adoption process crept along, Casey was more than ready to meet her little girl. Finally, in May 1997, her wait was over. After a long flight to China, a chaotic six-hour van ride and a few nervously giddy hours at a local hotel with a small group of fellow adoptive parents, Casey and her husband, Stuart, met little LiAnn. "My first thought upon seeing LiAnn was that she was even more beautiful than her picture," Casey recalls. "When the orphanage nanny placed her in my arms, I think I felt that a great treasure had been bestowed upon me." Today, Casey, Stuart and 6-year-old LiAnn are happily settled into life as a family. And while Casey looks back on that day as one of the "coolest" days of her life, getting there required making some tough decisions, committing to an unknown outcome and drawing on an enormous reserve of patience. We talked to Casey recently about how she did it and what she learned. Here is her story:
Q: When did you adopt your child and how?
A: We adopted LiAnn in May of 1997. We used a local adoption agency recommended by someone I once worked with. She called me one day and told me she was coming to town to attend orientation for an adoption agency. At the time, I was going through infertility treatments and my husband and I weren't considering adoption. But after hearing how excited my co-worker was about adopting from Korea through a local agency, I stuffed the idea in my back pocket. When my husband and I started getting interested in adoption, I called the agency and got information. They were great. They specialize in international adoptions, and they walked us through all the options before we decided on adopting a child from China.
Q: What made you choose an international adoption?
A: It seemed much less uncertain. I knew two people who adopted domestically — my sister-in-law and my boss at the time — and I had seen them both get kind of beat up by the process. In many cases, you're dealing with a birth mother who is facing an emotional crisis of her own. And you hear about adoptive parents being left in the waiting room at the hospital because at the last minute the birth mother changed her mind. It worked out great for my sister-in-law and former boss, but the whole process just seemed like something I didn't want to go through. And having a white infant really wasn't that important to us, so it was not a stretch for us to look overseas. We'd heard about the China program, and we liked the fact that babies coming from China were pretty healthy. Also, we had decided that we were only going to have one child and we would like to have a girl, which made China ideal — 95 percent of the children adopted there are girls.
Q: Were there any surprises in the adoption process?
A: Well, it took longer than we had anticipated. One of the things that attracted us to the China program was that it took about four months to adopt. But between the time we first started looking at the program and the time we made a firm commitment to adopt, they had changed the rules. So the process went from about four months to a year. There was a lot of paperwork and tons of documentation, on the U.S. side as well as the Chinese side. We used to joke that you had to do everything but walk down the street naked because you have to be so open with them while they look into whether you're going to be good parents. I think we spent about two months filling out the paperwork for the application. Then we handed that over to the adoption agency, which waits until it has paperwork from several families before going to the Chinese agencies as a group. Then you sit and wait. And wait and wait. We waited about nine months from the time we submitted the paperwork to the time we were referred a baby. And then all we got was a little picture that is about 1 inch by 1 inch and some accompanying medical information, which was so vague that it was actually pretty useless. But we had this 1-inch-by-1-inch picture, which we were over the moon about. After that it was another six weeks before they approved us to go to China to pick her up, and that wait was very, very hard.
Q: How about emotionally? Was the process fairly predictable or was it a roller coaster ride?
A: As far as these things go, it was pretty steady. The one thing that you can say about adopting from China is that you don't run into the unexpected snafus that you might in other countries. In China, when they say it is going to be roughly this amount of time and this is what is going to happen, that's generally what happens. But you're still an anxious parent-to-be, and because it is international you're worried about any international incidents that may happen. At one point during the process there was a bru-ha-ha about the state of orphanages in China; there were big articles in
Time magazine and in
The New York Times. So everyone was up in arms and we were worried that the Chinese would shut down the program before we could adopt our baby. They didn't, but it definitely added anxiety And because you're already an anxious parent-to-be almost anything can make you jump out of your skin until your baby is in your arms.
Q: What was the cost of the adoption?
A: It was close to $20,000. It varies from country to country, but I think $15,000 to $20,000 is about what it usually costs.
