We've been asked about our adoption agency a few times so we thought we'd write up a post on them - who they are, what they do and why we went with them over other agencies.
We went with an agency called Angel Adoption based out of Illinois. We would love for you to take a few minutes and look around their site (just click on the name in the previous sentence), including the stories of adoptive parents that have had their families grow through adoption. We hope to be one those families someday soon! (Related: if you want to see how you can help us along in that part of our journey, click here to head over to our support page).
We chose to go with Angel for several reasons, but the primary reason was their size and therefore their ability to give us the personal care that we know we need. This is a long process and there are a ton of questions and worries that we have and will have; we needed an agency that we knew would take intentional care to make sure we had those questions answered and those worries addressed. Angel Adoption will do just that.
Additionally, since we are starting our family through adoption, we wanted to experience our child's entire life. We hope that we will get to experience growing our family through a foster-to-adopt program in the future, but we sensed that we just aren't ready for starting our family when we hadn't experienced any parenting at any level. Since Angel specializes in pairing birth mothers with adopting families well before the baby's birth, that made it a natural fit.
Lastly, but certainly not least, we were blown away with the high placement rate for adoptive parents - 95% of parents are paired with a birth mother and go home with a full family. Angel does this by being intentional about which states and agencies they work with: if they've had a bad experience with a birth mother backing out they are unlikely to work with the agency that they found the birth mother through; if a state has a relinquishment law more than 72 hours, Angel doesn't work with them at all; they assign a coordinator to birth parents who will walk through the process with us AND walk through the process with the birth mom once she's picked us - this advocate keeps encouraging the birth mother along, reminding her of what a great choice she is making by having her child and giving him or her the very best life through adoption; choosing Angel had as much to do with knowing that the birth mom would have an advocate as we would.
You'll hear much more about Angel as we navigate this journey with them holding our hands, but hopefully this gives you a good snapshot of a our adoption agency, our primary hand-holders in this process.
By His grace, For His glory,
Bethany and Wayne
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