Changes Afoot

The Oklahoma legislature is doing some things to unsnarl the mess regarding the adoption process and adoptees' rights. One item they've been working on regards the grey market in adoptive children, which scared my wife and I off of the adoption trail 6 or 7 years ago:

The measure was the result of a state grand jury five years ago that found some adoptive parents had been forced to pay for vehicles, car parts, traffic tickets, television sets and other items that were masked as adoption costs.

The haphazard regulation of adoption expenses created an atmosphere in which some women and their attorneys effectively sold children, the report states.

I never wanted to deal with the State itself, and we were interested in infants at the time, so this was a big issue for us. If it's illegal to sell children, then why does it cost $20,000 to adopt?

Well, it turns out that it doesn't cost that much to go through OK DHS, but DHS, as I've seen so far, is a bit on the slow side when it comes to things like returning phone calls or emails. The State's slow response times and snail-like pace has created a massive opportunity for less-than-savory characters (read: lawyers) to cash in on navigating the process for people desperate to adopt (infants).

While the process is pretty adversarial no matter your stated goals, it appears as though adopting older sibling groups is probably one of the "easiest" ways to go. I just wish the legislators were also looking at the day-to-day operations of DHS and searching for ways to improve their customer service.