Monday, November 26, 2012

Screening Calls/Emails


One of the forms you fill out when you're moving forward with open adoption is a form that asks you what type of demographics you're comfortable with in the birth family and the baby.  You select ages, races, mental health characteristics, drug and alcohol history, and so forth.  For the mental health and drug and alcohol history, you select whether you are okay with none, mild, moderate, or severe.  It doesn't really matter what Rob and I selected, but this form ends up being important in one of the more interesting parts of the process - screening calls and emails.

A screening call comes in when there is a birth parent who is *just* outside your comfort range.  Let's say you put in that you want a newborn, but they have a baby who is a week old.  It's likely that many people would not rule out a baby of that age.  So, those people who put down "newborn" would receive a call or an email explaining the situation and asking whether they wanted to be considered.

If the potential adoptive parent says yes, then their materials can be presented to the expectant birth parent.  The thing to keep in mind is that even if you receive a screening call and you say yes, that doesn't mean that anything new or exciting is actually happening.  Your profile information is presumably going out all the time to people who fit within your parameters without you even knowing.  The only difference with a screening call is that in those situations you do know.

We have had several screening calls.  One of them was out of the question for a professional reason with my work.  The next one was too far out of our comfort zone.  We said yes to a couple more, but those birth parents selected someone they knew personally or decided to parent.  Then one person decided to place her child in foster care so she could get stabilized and parent herself.  We support all of those decisions - we don't think that just because we are in the pool of hopeful waiting parents that we have any claim on someone else's child.  Each person has to make the choice that is best for them and their family.

And then "Ida" came along.

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