It’s also super expensive.

This is because adoption of healthy infants in the US is a market. A regulated and yet still dysfunctional one, and one with a pretty weird relationship to its supply side, but that’s absolutely what it is. It was even worse in decades past.

As an adoptee from the Mormon system, let me tell you that if I hadn’t already bailed on that bonkers religion, it would have happened after visiting the “Family Services” office by slinking through the side door in the food storage warehouse in the light-industrial park in search of my legally entitled information, only to learn it was a one-page printout of nonsense and very much did not include the letter I was later told by my birth mother that she’d given them. I also grew up knowing that I cost approximately as much as a small speedboat, and later realized that my mom’s conversion from being a died-in-the-wool baptist to the LDS church happened almost exactly a year before I was acquired. Hmmm…

This is extremely rare and focusing on it promotes an unhealthy mindset among potential adoptive parents. No one is entitled to a healthy infant with no strings attached, and adoption inherently does come with strings attached, even if people try to pretend otherwise. I daresay if this is explicitly on someone’s mind, they should consider whether they should be adopting at all. It’s literally a smaller risk than that your kid will die in a car crash, with the added relief of said child not being dead.

So, I was specifically trying to allow for scenarios like yours by saying it shouldn’t be in the “culture of family planning.” It’s extremely sad that people who want children can’t have them. If they feel a calling to build a family and care for a child whom the universe has failed, then wonderful. They should seek out fostering opportunities, get training and counseling to understand their role in the process, and to find the joy in reuniting when birth parents get their shit together. If that doesn’t happen and they adopt or assume permanent legal guardianship, then they are doing a service by mitigating the trauma experienced by a child. Unfortunately, people like this are exceedingly rare.

What happens more often is people are made to feel like they deserve a healthy infant with no strings attached (look at some of the other posts in this thread), and the large number of them creates a culture of pressuring birth mothers (usually indirectly, but not always), putting resources into tracking down babies or jumping the line, or when that fails, throwing money at the international process where their relative wealth brings out the bad actors and the temporarily desperate. In America at least, there are something like 20 qualified birth parent couples (to say nothing of the single folks who also have the means to support a child) for every healthy infant that enters the system. The normal thing would be to go to the back of the line and hope a call comes before you age out.

Instead, you get a scramble and competition and agencies that are nominally non-profit, but certainly have financial incentives to preserve their jobs and status (to say nothing of attorneys in truly private adoptions), pop up to serve the demand, and there are only so many ways to procure and price a supply, and most of them are at least somewhat unsavory. The international market tends to serve people who couldn’t bubble to the top of the domestic process, so it’s even worse.