Tom's Adoption Journey

Tom Higgins
Norfolk, VA

For the most part, we received tremendous support from friends, family, and most care providers throughout the adoption process. Ours was a parental placement open adoption. The first time we experienced discrimination was when it was time to take our newborn daughter home from the hospital. She was three days old and her birth mom needed to stay hospitalized a few additional days due to minor complications from her epidural. When we arrived to bring our daughter home, the hospital social worker told us that there was a problem with our adoption paperwork and the baby needed to stay with the birth mom until she was discharged. The social worker then added the birth mom would have to be the one to carry our baby out of the hospital when she was discharged. She can only hand our baby over once we were off hospital grounds. The hospital social worker literally told us the birth mom could only hand over our child in the parking lot of the hospital. She made it feel like we were about to partake in an illicit drug transaction.

It was obvious to my husband and I during the birth process that the hospital social worker had religious objections to same-sex adoptions. She tried multiple times to convince the birth mother to reconsider allowing us to adopt the baby, even after we went through the entire process. The birth mother signed away her parental rights the day after the birth of our daughter. We went through a rigorous and invasive process to adopt our beautiful little girl. We went through parenting classes; home visits by a social worker; credit, criminal and medical background checks; individual counseling and with the birth mother; not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars paid to the attorneys, and social workers for the home visits and reports.

We were involved in the process from the time the birth mother was four months pregnant up through the birth. The birth mother, 18 years old, homeless, and living with fetal alcohol syndrome had come to the conclusion on her own that she was not capable of caring for a child on her own. She was the one who decided to place her unborn child up for adoption. It was the birth mother who approached us about adopting her baby. She knew we would give her baby all the love and support she deserves throughout her life.

Sadly, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, no legal adoption paperwork or agreement can be signed until after the birth of the child. My husband and I were emotionally and financially invested for more than five months. At any point during this process, the birth mother could have changed her mind and we would have no say. The birth mother had two weeks to change her mind even after she signed away her parental rights and the social worker did everything in her power to convince the birth mother to do just that.

If we were a heterosexual couple, we could have signed a surrogacy agreement with the birth mother while she was still pregnant. This process would have saved us more than $20,000 in adoption costs and fees. Since we are a same sex couple, in order to make the adoption official in Virginia, we had to marry and wait until after the baby's birth before we could begin the legal process to adopt.

Thankfully the hospital social worker's efforts to thwart our adoption did not succeed. Once the social worker refused to allow my husband and I to take our daughter home from the hospital, our adoption attorney spoke with the hospital's attorneys. A few hours after the attorneys spoke, the hospital president called us directly to apologize for the social worker's actions and told us we could come back to the hospital to take our daughter home.

We celebrated our beautiful little girl's third birthday recently. She has changed our lives for the better, made us a family, and shown us what unconditional love truly is. She is loved, cared for, smart, and the happiest child we have ever met. Although the adoption process is slanted against same-sex couples, and ours was a challenging process that took 14 months to complete, we would gladly do it again to ensure our daughter completed our family.

I oppose discrimination in foster care and adoption based on religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity because:

Love defines a family and children are not born to hate or discriminate against others. Discrimination, racism, etc. is something that is taught, something my child will NEVER learn from her parents.