Adoption

Since single and LGBTQ hopeful parents often have an array of options to consider as they think about bringing children into their lives, we thought it would make sense to briefly outline the costs of each.

Foster Parenting

One frequent path to consider is becoming a foster parent. Fostering usually comes with subsidies and other support, and therefore doesn’t require the financial resources of adoption. In most circumstances, however, the goal of foster care is to reunite children with their families of origin. We have a detailed course on fostering that we suggest you reference.

Fertility Treatments

The costs of medical interventions such as intrauterine insemination ($500–$4,000) and in vitro fertilization ($20,000) costs can be easy to approximate. But you may need to have more than one of these treatments before they work, so your total expenses and the length of your timeline will greatly vary depending on a number of factors, female age being a major one.

That said, many single and lesbian women have higher success rates than heterosexual coupled patients who are sub-fertile. We have detailed courses for lesbians (here) and single women which you should consult.

Surrogacy

Finally, pursuing IVF with donor eggs and a gestational carrier (often a consideration for gay couples) costs $60,000 to $200,000, obviously well above the typical costs of an adoption.

We have a detailed course on the subject (here) that includes a discussion of state-by-state complexity, which is worth your reviewing.

Almost every state’s laws either explicitly state that “unmarried adults” are eligible to adopt or are silent on the terms “married” or “unmarried” (e.g., say “any adult person may adopt”).

In reality, the likelihood of adoption for a single person depends on two factors:

1. The perspectives of the social worker or agency conducting the home study, who will assess the applicant’s financial, medical, and emotional capacity to parent.

2. The preferences of the expectant mother (and father if he’s involved).

For these reasons, it’s important to work with an agency or attorney who can arrange for home studies to be done by professionals who have previously been respectful of a single person’s wishes to adopt (e.g., certain faith-based agencies may be disinclined to help you).

Similarly, you want your agency or attorney to have a track record in finding and working with pregnant women open to the idea of placing their child with a single parent.

While many expectant parents favor couples as the way to offer their child stability, others prefer single-parent households, which they perceive to be more reliable because they’re free from upheaval such as separation and divorce.

There’s not much data on what the adoption experience is like for single parents. But one survey of single adoptive mothers showed they generally felt like the issues and challenges they encountered were similar to those of women raising children in a two-parent family.

On one hand, as a single parent you get to establish the rhythm of the house and the behaviors you want to encourage. On the other hand, single parents generally shoulder the financial burden of maintaining a family by themselves, so their children may be more affected by problems arise at home or at work.

If becoming a foster parent is an option you’re considering, we recommend taking a look at our course on becoming a solo parent.