Breastfeeding and Adoption

Women all over the world have been breastfeeding children, and doing so without a pregnancy first for centuries. Some women are wet nurses, others care for grandbabies, some change their minds about weaning after the fact, and some adopt.

I love all that breastfeeding provides for mother and child. The antibodies, perfect nutrition, mother-child bonding, jaw development, digestive tract health, and comfort breastfeeding provides can't be fully replaced. For the adopted child, the ease of bonding through breastfeeding is especially beneficial after the trauma of adoption. Each newborn knows his mother's voice and smell, and knows that he is dependent upon her. But he has no emotional maturity, so even at a day old when he doesn't understand much of anything, the loss of his birth mother is traumatic.

So it's natural for me to want to breastfeed, should God give us a child this year. I won't be able to nurse our adopted baby until after placement, at the earliest 24 hours after birth. This will add a little difficulty to learning to nurse, especially since he is likely to be born earlier than ideal through induction. But this shouldn't create any problems that last more than 2 weeks.

I have found a few good resources on adoptive breastfeeding:
1. La Leche League web pages on the subject
2. The Adoptive Breastfeeding Resourse Website
3. World Health Organization's article, "Relactation"

I was pleased to learn most women who try to induce lactation do so after just a week of nursing and are able to breastfeed exclusively (no supplements) within a month (ref #3 above)! Well, adopting women are a little less successful than the others. Yet I think my chances for exclusive breastfeeding are good since Ben is still nursing and I'm not starting dry.

I plan to pump ahead of time, increasing the "demand", so that my "supply" follows. The replacement parts I ordered for my pump (Medela Harmony) arrived today, so I'm ready to start! A newborn nurses every hour or two and through the night, but I think I'll go with just a few times during the day and once, maybe twice, a night, in addition to Ben's nursing to sleep. These sessions will stock our freezer. If I'm supplementing more than half of our baby's milk a month after placement--after lots of sling time, nursing, and skin-to-skin contact, and after avoiding bottles and pacifiers--I may consider using herbal lactogogues (Brewer's yeast, fenugreek) to increase my milk supply. Some women start months before the adoption with hormones that simulate pregnancy, but that's not for me.

Through all this, I'll have to make sure our baby is getting enough milk. That's easy enough by watching diapers (at least 6 wet ones a day) and weekly weight gain. Just in case, I'll probably start nursing and supplementing with stored breastmilk and then formula. Supplementers--itty bitty straws through which babies drink supplemental milk while nursing--are very affordable and have been around for a long time. They will help increase the chance of me being able to exclusively breastfeed.

Why even try to exclusively breastfeed? Doctors recommend it for at least 6 months, and it would be nice not to have to deal with the hassle of bottles and expense of formula. So it's worth trying the hassle and expense of a supplementer. If it doesn't work out, that's fine, but I'll do what I can to at least give it a try.

Application Mailed!

Ben and I went to the post office last week to mail our adoption application and four copies of our profile. We waited until now because we knew we would not be able to bring home our child until after my brother's wedding (last weekend!) and I completed the year's duty (end of May).

It took Brett and several weeks, two bottles of rubber cement, and 73 pictures to get the profile done. Here's what I've learned: scrap booking requires a lot of space, it takes me a looooong time to lay out just one page, there are a lot of handy tools that make scrap booking easier, and it will never be a hobby of mine.

In fact, I'm confident I will not scrap book again, unless required for our next profile (hmmm...how many of these pages could we use again?). Even then, I think I will splurge for good scrap booking software that lets you do everything on your computer.

Here's one of the pages from our profile.

I owe a big thanks to my neighbor, Leah, who let me use some of her scrap booking tools to polish off what I have put together. See here how she gave me some of her "rub-ons" and let me use her paper punches (the little circles).

If you want to see the whole thing, check it out on my picasa page.

Now that the profile is done, I am going to focus on building my milk supply. More on that as I learn about it!

Why Does Adoption Cost So Much!?!

I have been asked several times why adoption costs so much. While the adoption industry is called an industry for a reason, expensive adoptions are legitimately expensive. But many adoptions are very affordable or inexpensive. Prices vary widely based on agency, state or country, health, age, and race of the child.

We're pursuing a upper-middle of the road adoption--a domestic, infant, African American adoption. Domestic, infant, Caucasian infant adoptions usually cost the most, because the demand is so high. International adoptions can be very expensive too, especially for those countries that require two lengthy stays in country.

There's $1000-$2000 for legal work and for a social worker to check out your family before and after the adoption. There's $4000-$7000 in medical expenses for the birth mother. She may use a month or so of living expenses too--rent, food, child care, transportation. She'll need counseling to help her work through her options, cope with the loss of her child to the adoptive family, and possibly even find a job. Agencies also have to pay for overhead and advertising (finding birth moms and adoptive parents). The living expenses, counseling, and agency costs are usually included in the agency fees, often between $10000-$30000.

Since birth moms can fly to Utah for their births if they choose, and even come out well before the birth if needed, adoption through agencies here usually has higher costs. First, if they come early, out-of-state birth moms stay in agency-paid apartments and eat agency-paid food. Most birth moms choose to wait to come out until the last few days though. Second, Utah does not provide Medicare for birth moms who have no intention of staying, and insurance may not cover a child until he is adopted by the family (at least 24 hours after the pricey birth), so labor and delivery is paid for in cash at the hospital at the time of birth.

The agency we're using subsidizes the adoption of African American and bi-racial infants. AA adoptions are half as much as Caucasian and bi-racial adoptions are two thirds as much. It also does not require any payment until placement for AA adoption--very, very rare. Some take offense to pricing based on race, but I think the agency justifies it as a way to encourage families to adopt where most needed.

In researching agencies for ourselves, we ran into many rip-off, take-the-money-and-run, sucker stories. There are big profits to be had in adoption. Thankfully, the internet and state licensors uncover the less trustworthy agencies for those who take the time to check.

Now, there are adoptions that cost very little--adopting an older child from the state or a special need child from overseas, for example. And special needs has a broad definition; it includes healthy older children and infants with correctable conditions, as well as children with mild to severe permanent disabilities. There are also grants from charities for hard-to-place children or lower income adoptive families.

Most helpful for any adoption is a national adoption tax credit that is applied the year after an it is finalized (6 months after a child has been living with his family)--$11,000, spread out over up to 4 years if needed. Hmm...seed money for our next adoption!

These expenses are prohibitive. Yet in that, we are humbled by God's provision for our family. An inheritance, an award at work, a raise, Reserves pay checks, a tax refund...all in time to add up to an adoption this summer. Thank you, Lord!