Black Babies Cost Less to Adopt
We were two months into our search for a baby when a friend of a friend told us how she and her husband had found their daughter a few years before. They’d worked with a facilitator at For Keeps Adoptions in Santa Monica — the facilitator’s name was Carol, she said, and she’d been wonderful.
“We were matched in just two weeks,” the friend of a friend said.
Two weeks?!!! Our lawyer had told us to be prepared to wait one to two years to be matched with a birth mom.
I called Carol the next morning. Her voice was friendly and efficient. When I admitted I had no idea how a facilitator actually worked — how did they find birth moms so quickly? — she launched in:
“Here at For Keeps, using the fees paid by hopeful adoptive parents, we’re able to buy internet advertising on a large scale,” she said. “We can cast a very wide net — much farther than you’d be able to do on your own.”
She said that kind of large-scale advertising took time and money but paid off in a big way.
“Rarely a day goes by that a birth mom doesn’t contact me,” she said.
I couldn’t even imagine. We’d been searching for two months, without a single phone call. Birth moms were like fish in a barrel for Carol.
“Part of what makes For Keeps unique is that we only work with fifty families at a time, so it’s not like you’d be up against hundreds of families. You can start the application process right away,” she said. They happened to have a couple of spots open.
I asked her about the fees. That was going to be the hard part. We were already in for about $7500 with our attorney’s retainer, professional photos, and printing of the Dear Birth Mom Letter. And the match fee, birth mom expenses, and finalization fees would (hopefully) need to be paid eventually, and that’d be roughly another twenty grand.
She talked more about what our $9000 would get us, how they used special programs to ensure that For Keeps came up near the top in Google searches by birth moms looking for adoptive parents. Possibly sensing our lack of pocket depth from my tepid response, Carol offered:
“But if you’re willing to adopt an African American baby, the fee is only $5000.”
Did she just say that out loud? That black babies are basically half-off?
She delivered the fee structure without embarrassment or apology — like she was reading a grocer’s ad in the Sunday paper: strawberries $2.20, blueberries $3.99.
I hurried our goodbyes.
After we hung up, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Carol had said. Why did black babies cost less to adopt than white babies? Was it racism? Was it supply and demand? And didn’t low demand equate to racism? And how, in 2016, were there organizations setting fees according to skin color? (This was pre-Trump’s election, before normalized white supremacy was regurgitated from our collective gut and vomited onto the national stage.) Maybe For Keeps was an anomaly, I thought. I started digging around.
I found an Illinois Times article online that called out American Adoptions in Overland Park, Kansas for setting fees based on the adoptable child’s race. The article was written in 2005, so I figured after being exposed eleven years prior, American Adoptions would’ve changed their fee structure. The sales representative who answered the phone, Mike, broke it down for me:
“For the Traditional Program, the fees range from $33,500 to $50,000,” he said.
If we enrolled in the traditional program, Mike explained, we would be adopting a baby that was white, any race other than African American, or any mix of races that didn’t include African American.
“But fees for the agency assisted program,” he said, “range anywhere from $26,500 to $40,000.”
“What does agency assisted mean?” I asked.
“There’s a greater need for families in that program, so the adoption cost that would go toward advertising and marketing to locate birth moms is a bit less,” Mike said.
“I would love a Hispanic baby,” I said. “Where would a Hispanic baby fall between the two programs?”
(Neither my husband nor I hoped for a baby of any specific descent or skin color, I was playing detective.)
“A Hispanic baby would be in the traditional program,” Mike said. “Any baby other than African American would be considered traditional.”
“My husband would prefer a baby of mixed race, Hispanic and black, where would that fall?”
“That would be the agency assisted program,” Mike said. “Any African American at all — even a quarter — that’ll be agency assisted.”
What Mike said was shocking. It also sounded vaguely familiar. Remember the one-drop rule? When plantation owners raped their African American slaves, children were produced, and whites starting freaking out because it was getting harder and harder to tell at a glance who was black and who was white. So, the one-drop rule — initiated in the South but soon accepted as the national standard — stated that any Negro blood, even “one drop,” made a person a Negro and designated them a second-class citizen. If you learned about the one-drop rule in high school in the ’80s like I did, it’d seemed like ancient history. Pre-March on Washington. Pre-civil rights. Certainly pre-election of Barack Obama. But here it was, 2016, and the one-drop rule was still around.
In 2013, NPR’s Michele Norris founded The Race Card Project in which she invited people to distill their thoughts on race into six words and send them to her via postcard. One listener mailed in a card that read: “Black Babies Cost Less to Adopt.” Shortly after, Norris met Minnesotan adoptive mom Caryn Lantz. Lantz, who was white, had recently adopted her son, who was black, and told Norris about a conversation she and her husband had had with a representative from Heart to Heart Adoptions in Utah:
“And [she] was telling us about these different fee structures that they had based on the ethnic background of the child…The cost to adopt the Caucasian child was approximately $35,000, plus some legal expenses. Versus when we got the first phone call about a little girl, a full African-American girl, it was about $18,000.”
When I talked to Carol at For Keeps, I hadn’t stumbled upon the one facilitator that was pricing their services according to a child’s skin color. It was a known and accepted practice within the adoption industry.
There is out in the open racism in day-to-day life in our country, like when our elderly neighbors were relieved to meet my husband and me when we moved in because they’d seen a black man going in and out of our house (our realtor, Michael). And then there is cloaked systemic racism hidden in the nooks and crannies of our society that only a small slice of the population sees, like in private adoption where black babies cost less to adopt than babies of any other ethnicity.
