Local vs. Interstate Adoption

The Lund Center coordinates local and interstate adoptions. Because the Lund Center works regularly with young pregnant and parenting women, their clients may choose to place their child or baby for adoption with Lund and therefore the child would be adopted by adoptive parents who are adopting from Lund. The Lund Center is also connected to adoption agencies nation-wide and also gets referrals through this network.

A local referral would be made when the birth mother is about 7 month pregnant. We would likely meet the birth mother throughout the remaining time prior to delivery. We could meet her once or multiple times depending on her comfort level and ours, always at the Lund Center. In this case, we would likely be at the hospital during her delivery. We learned that in about 85% of these situations, the adoptive parents are actually in the delivery room with the birth mother! We would get to stay at the hospital and would take baby home from the hospital. In the state of Vermont, birth mothers may revoke their consent for adoption up to 21 days following birth. Talk about a long 21 days! The agency did tell us that this is very rare (phew!) and has happened only a handful of times in the last decade.

An interstate referral would look rather different. The birth mother would choose us, but we wouldn't know this until after the baby was born. After receiving "the call," we would drop everything and fly or drive to wherever in the country the baby was. We would then spend between a few days and a few weeks in the birth city in a hotel with baby waiting for state clearance to bring baby home. This time frame varies from state to state. In this situation, there's no anticipation time, but there is great family bonding time with no distractions during that waiting period out-of-state. Consent would be granted before we left the state, often before the birth mother even leaves the hospital.

We will prepare a life-book or portfolio which will be presented to birth mothers. In both cases, birth mothers choose their adoptive families. Each situation (local or interstate) has pros and cons, as you can see. We can not specify our preference for local or interstate ahead of time. We will be presented with situations as they arise and are free to accept or decline the situation(s) based on our preferences and circumstances. She said we may accept the first situation that is presented to us or we may decline 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 situations before finally accepting one. She assures us that when it's our baby, we'll know. Wild!