Gay couples can explore all avenues of adoption, including foster care adoption, traditional adoption, and international adoptions. Adoption profiles are shared with birth mothers and parents who are planning to put their children up for adoption to help them determine which adopting family they want to choose. Your profile should be open, honest, and paint a picture of the life you can offer an adopted child. In the past—and likely still today in some areas of the country—some gay couples have resorted to lying about their statuses so they could adopt. For example, one partner files for the adoption, while the other pretends to be a roommate or a friend. Although it may be legal to omit certain information, it is not legal to lie when you’re asked a specific question. It may be considered fraud and could be cause for an adoption to be denied or for an already established placement to be disrupted. Second parent adoption is also common when one partner already has a child when entering the relationship and the other partner wants to become a parent to the child. Second parent adoptions create another legally-recognized parent for adoptive children, providing all the same parent/child rights and responsibilities that other families enjoy. Second-parent adoptions have been granted by the courts in 16 states. Many of the concerns center around understanding sexual orientation and establishing whether children will develop emotional problems due to having gay parents. Know that there has not been a single study showing that the children of gay or lesbian parents are disadvantaged in any significant respect. Hopefully, you’ll have lots of support in your inner circle, but numerous online resources are available for new gay and lesbian parents to help your recently-expanded family to grow and flourish. Adopting a child is one of the biggest life changes you can make, so openly explore your feelings and expectations with your partner, employing the help of a counselor or therapist if necessary.
