A private adoption typically refers to an adoption where the adoptive parents and the birth parents have found each other without the use of an adoption agency and want to proceed without the use of an adoption agency.  Quite often adoptive parents and/or birth parents may choose to bring in an agency to assist with the adoptive placement and this type of arrangement is referred to an "Identified Adoption" or "Agency Assisted Adoption". There are many pros and cons to proceeding with a strictly private adoption and they vary significantly depending on each match.

You should arrange for a legal consultation to discuss your options for how to proceed.  Your attorney should be able to explain the financial options of bringing in an agency to assist you.  Typically the agency greatly reduces their agency fee or will agree to work for an hourly fee.  By choosing this method many adoptive parents can access the benefits of an agency adoption without incurring large fees. The most attractive benefits of bringing in agency to assist you include the swiftness and ease in which an agency can take a birth parent's consent to the adoption thereby terminating a birth parent's rights. Not all agencies will assist with an identified adoption and the fees they charge will vary significantly.  Your attorney should be able to give you an idea of what the differences in the financial costs and the differences in the adoption process would be if you proceeded with just an attorney vs bringing in an agency to assist you.

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While Private adoptions may sound like an easy way to go in a general article or book you may read on adoption, in Illinois this is usually not the case.  Illinois has very strict laws about adoption and Illinois law does not make it very easy for people who want to participate in a private adoption. For starters, Illinois law provides that only licensed child welfare agencies can bill for matching services. In Illinois the use of facilitators is NOT permitted. When adoptive parents want to seek out their own birth mother they will find that their options are much more limited than adoptive parents in other states. Illinois attorneys are not permitted to bill for time spent advertising for birth parents and time spent assisting adoptive parents in finding birth mothers or for helping match birth mothers with adoptive couples.  You should speak with a qualified adoption attorney to discuss the details of what would be involved in searching for your own birth parent to work with.

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Answer:  It depends.

• If you live in Illinois and plan to seek out adoption opportunities outside of Illinois you should have a homestudy completed.  If you are matched with a child from another state that child will not be able to come back to Illinois with you unless and until your homestudy is complete and approved by each state's interstate coordinators.

• If you live in Illinois, and are matched with an Illinois birth parent, then the birth mother can place the child with you after birth and the court would require that a homestudy be completed while the child is in your home.

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