Hands Across the Water

First, I will say the adoption social worker we worked with was incredibly professional, polite, always in contact and very competent. She was by far the best part of our experience. If only she worked for a more ethically run agency!!



Unfortunately, this agency charges exorbitant and unethical fees, which they are not very upfront about. We were told that the fee for birth parent counseling was $3,000, and that in some cases there is an additional charge if the birth parent requires more than the usual amount of counseling. After making an agreement with a birth mother (including meeting her in person, seeing ultrasound photos, etc.), we got our first bill for "couseling services" of almost $8,000, and this was more than a month before the baby's due date! After all was said and done, they charged us for more than 80 hours of birth parent "counseling" at a rate of $150/hour (in addition, of course, to fees we paid for services rendered to us). This "counseling" seemed to be under the guise of any time the social worker spent with the birth mother, which she was encouraged to spend as much time as possible (I am sure to charge us as much as possible). Activities we were charged for included two full days of the social worker driving the birth mom around to find an apartment and multiple visits to accompany the birth mother to the birth father's court dates for his drug-related incarceration (which had absolutely nothing to do with the adoption). I am not even sure how it was legal for them to charge us for this. When we tried to discuss the unexpected fees with the agency director, she refused to respond to any of our calls or emails.