Independent Adoption Center Horror Story – Stop Paying Them
- Comments: 23
- Written on: January 4th, 2009
This post has been removed at the request of the IAC. My wife and I spent two hours on the phone speaking with people at the IAC. Since our bad experience, many things at the IAC have changed that could have prevented the problems we encountered.
I am a firm believer in giving firms a second chance, and I am not sure it is fair to have the mistakes of the previous employees adversely impact the efforts of a new and deticated staff.
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- Comments: 23
Just wanted to say how happy I am for you guys that you were able to find Jacob, wish you the best of luck and speed in finding your next birthmom and say how sorry I am that you had such a horrifying experience in your attempts to grow a family. I have “known” Thor since he was doing computer repairs out of his house, as he worked on a couple of my PC’s and just want to congratulate you as well on your successful business as I’ve seen it grow over the years. Again, best of luck to you and your wife and I pray for you that this next adoption goes SO much smoother! Thanks for posting this blog–hopefully you can save some hopeful parents-to-be some heartache and money!
I was hoping to find an email for you. I am an adoptee but I usually enjoy slamming adoption agencies. I was hoping to be able to repost this on my blog. Many adoptive parents are afraid to speak out like you have. If I can help you and myself in attracting attention to bad agencies. I would love to.
@Kely
Thank you so much for your kind words! They mean a lot to us. I hope you had a Happy New Year!
@Amy
Thank you for reading my post. Your blog is VERY informative! Feel free to quote anything you like form my post.
Very good to know. I will be directing people to this post.
Thanks Lori. I appreciate your readership!
If things have gone south at the IAC, it’s a shock to me. Since Bruce passed away, it must not be the same agency. Bruce was literally the “father of open adoption.”
We’ve had two wonderful expereinces with the IAC. We have two great kids and the counseling/support that was provided by IAC was spectacular. Counseling is the key to successful adoption; specificially, grief counseling for the birthparents.
Bottom line, whether you use IAC or not, be sure to have an experienced counselor on your team. As a successful two time adoptive parent, that’s the best advice I can give.
We too had a terrible experience with IAC. They referred us to people they knew to create or web site and birthmother letter rather than help us in house which lead to more cost for us. We should have taken notice to this. but we wanted so badly to become parents that we did not recognize the signals.
Not only did we experience two failed adoption attempts through this agency, they never provided us with the counseling we need/needed after the two failed attempts.
The response we got from the current director was” Do you have a friend you can talk to about the failed adoption”. All this after we paid this agency who has so called licensed social workers who jumped at the opportunity to provide counseling for the birthmother because they could make money and left us with
hurt and frustration about adoption.
Do your self a favor and avoid this agency at all cost because they do not do business they way they use to, nor do they provide the services that are stated on their web site or in their brochures.
Now scared for adoption forever!
Eric and Naomi
My husband and I are considering adopting a child and really feel lost in all the agencies and procedures. Is it really better to hire a lawyer and manage our own birth mother search? I’m completely out of my element here…
We had a horror story with the IAC, too. We adopted a baby through them, and a week later the birthmother reclaimed her baby. We were devastated, which is an expression one hears often but which I had never before experienced. We had our new baby’s grandparents visiting us at the time, friends had given us a baby shower, and we’d been there at the birth. It was a blow to our relationship as well as to our hopes of parenthood, and it has been incredibly difficult in ways that I had not imagined.
Strictly speaking, the reclaim itself was not the IAC’s fault, but it could have been avoided if they’d handled the sitation differently. They say they have just a 4-5% reclaim rate because of the counseling services they provide, but neither we nor the birthmother got much in the way of counseling through the process. We found out *after* the reclaim that our match was considered a “high-risk” one because the birthmother was resisting communication with the social worker. That social worker never made that part clear to us, we never heard from her much at all, and we got a strong sense that her efforts to counsel the birthmother consisted of a phone call or a text message every now and then. When we matched, we got a form letter telling us to limit our contacts with the social worker to once a week or in an emergency, so there was little communication going on between anybody. We brought this to the IAC’s attention before the disaster, and they told us our counselor was doing a good job. They maintained that opinion–or claimed to, at least–after the reclaim, too. For the record, our social worker was very young, seemed inexperienced, and displayed surprising insensitivity to certain delicate particulars of the birthmother’s situation. Afterward, the counseling we received was minimal. At that point, though, some committment to handling future matches more carefully would have meant much more to me than counseling. The IAC maintained, however, that they did all they could to avoid our disaster.
I didn’t mind the sales pitch at the beginning of our association with the IAC, because they’re a business and wanted us to go with them instead of some other agency. That seemed understandable. What I didn’t realize then, though, was how little they actually do for their clients. They fell down on their promise of counseling services in a big way. And there’s little else they provide: they link to your website and send out letters for you, but they don’t work to find you a match, they don’t provide an attorney when you need one, they don’t network for you, they don’t get your website out there on the rest of the internet, etc. If I had known all that at the beginning, I would have gone with a private attorney, or I would have shopped around for an agency much more carefully. We didn’t know nearly as much then as we do now, though, and hindsight is always 20/20. Maybe other agencies are the same? I don’t know, but I hope stories like this can be helpful for people considering what route to adoption they want to take.
@Wishes
I am so sorry for your loss. I emailed you privately. Let me know if there is anything my wife or I can do to help you through this. We have been there, and it is not an easy place to be.
@Laelfin
That is what my wife and I are doing for our second adoption. I would rather spend the money networking than paying the Independet Adoption Center
@Eric Anthony Ivory
Thanks for posting your comment. I am sure others will read what you wrote and avoid much heartache and expense as a result.
I^m birth mother:
Yo soy madre biologica. Me encontre a unos padres excelentes para mi bebe, la aman por sobre todas las cosas pero IAC no ayudo mucho, ni a mi ni a los padres de mi bebe, cuando yo iba a dar a luz jamas atendieron el telefono, jamas se presentaron en el hospital; los padres adoptivos de mi bebe eran los que tenian que estar llamando con ellos les dejamos mil mensajes y no respondieron hasta que llegaron los dias laborales, yo di a luz a finales de año y ellos nunca estuvieron porque estaban de vacaciones.
Los padres adoptivos de mi bebe hicieron todo, todo; mi consejera nunca estuvo al pendiente mi, no tienen personal que habla español u otro idioma y en un corto periodo tuve tres consejeras, una desorganizacion total
Afortunadamente para mi bebe, todo salio bien, amo a los padres de mi bebe, amo a mi bebe.
Yo les digo a todos los futuros padres que no desesperen que Dios es muy grande y cuando las cosas no salen en el tiempo y forma que se desea es porque les espera algo mucho mas hermoso.
Los padres de mi bebe tuvieron tres intentos fallidos de adoptar; pero Dios o el destino hizo que nos encontraramos, que tengamos una excelente comunicacion y que sobre todo mi bebe tiene un hogar lleno de amor y tendra todo lo que yo no le pude ofrecer. Y no gracias a IAC sino a la entereza de los padres de mi bebe.
Is there anyway that you could email me? I was looking over this post and was going to post something on my big blog, Adoption and Its Triad. http://blog.amyadoptee.com. I own that one too. I have dilemma that I don’t know what to do about it.
I’m obviously very late reading this, but I just wanted to wish you well and say that sometimes the birth parents get royally screwed as well. =(
I have had a horrific experience with IAC Pleasant Hill and wished I had researched them more before signing on to them. I’m new to this weblink, so just want to make sure what I write gets posted before I provide all of the details of our story.
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