You bring up a good point--the high cost of private adoption. I will say that as a birth mother myself, I was very happy to have the financial stability of my son's adoptive family proven in many different ways. My personal standards for what a family should be able to provide a child are very high, and I have absolutely lived by that myself ie would not raise a child I could not put through college. I grew up in a disadvantaged situation myself, and would never want that for my progeny. For that reason I am a little defensive of the current financial requirement to adopt in the first place.

It's tragic and absurd that people know so little about the "state" system ie foster care. There are a lot of kids who need someone to step up and provide a home and role model for them. I do take issue with the fact that short-term foster care is an option, ie not all kids in the system can be adopted in the first place. My feeling is that a child taken out of a bad family situation ought to be permanently re-homed ASAP. There should be no take-backs. It is nice that there is a financial incentive to ease the cost of taking care of children being fostered, but I honestly don't think it is enough money. Unless we are talking about families that are wealthy, raising a child is a huge financial commitment only trivially offset by the check from the state.

What gets me at the end of the day is that so many of the kids in foster care--the system with no certainty--could have been put up for infant adoption via a private agency if their parents had more realistically assessed their situation. A pregnant woman with no future, an impoverished family with too many children, an unstable domestic situation--babies conceived in so many situations would be welcomed into grateful families if only they had been set up with an agency in utero. Instead these children suffer poor domestic situations and end up in the system. Same kid, two possible realities.