The author, Randall B. Hicks, is an attorney in private practice in Southern California. He limits his practice to adoptions and completes more than one hundred adoptions annually. The trend seems to be drifting towards more independent adoptions than agency adoptions. Chase joined our family through independent adoption. You and the birth mother choose how involved you want to be with each other.
Independent adoption allows the birth mother to personally meet and select the adoptive parents.
It also gives the adoptive parents a chance to learn important information about, and develop real feelings for the child's birth mother. We feel this will be helpful to Chase as he grows up and begins asking more questions about how he became part of our family. We have first-hand information to answer his questions because we spent time with his birth mother. Another advantage of an independent adoption is that it allows the adoptive parents to use their own initiative and enthusiasm to quickly locate and meet a birth mother, rather than perhaps wait several years or more for an agency to do it for them. Adopting in America provides a whole chapter of techniques to quickly locate a baby for adoption.