Adoption Facilitators and Law Centers

While adoption law centers are owned by a licensed attorney, adoption facilitators are completely unlicensed and unregulated organizations. Both of these adoption professionals can provide matching services, but once a match is made, adoptive families will be required to find another professional to complete the legal work and provide adoption counseling services.
Law centers and facilitators also cannot provide many of the other services commonly available through adoption agencies or adoption attorneys, such as adoption plan development or post-placement contact services. Some adoption law centers or facilitators may be able to refer you to other adoption professionals who are able to provide these services.

If you are a pregnant woman looking for more information about adoption facilitators, you can find helpful resources by following this link.

The risks of working with a law center or adoption facilitator?

There are several considerations to take into account before choosing to work with an adoption law center or adoption facilitator. Here are some of the risks you will face if you choose to work with one of these types of providers.

• They don’t provide as many adoption services as other adoption professionals, such as adoption agencies and law firms. Adoption facilitators and law centers tend to bow out of the adoption process once the family is matched, leaving it to the adoptive family and birth parents to find their own legal representation and finalize the adoption on their own. These organizations lack a social services department and do not provide counseling and support services to adoptive families or expectant mothers.
• They are not annually reviewed by a government agency. These organizations cannot be effectively regulated, monitored, or reviewed, and adoptive families often rely on nothing more than client reviews found online when choosing an adoption law center or facilitator to work with. There is no guarantee that a law center or facilitator’s services comply with your state’s adoption laws, and these organizations are even illegal in more than 15 states.
• Adoption costs tend to be high in proportion to the services a family receives. Because you will need to hire additional professionals to provide necessary adoption services after a match is made, you will likely end up paying more for a completed adoption. Families will rarely receive a refund in the event of a disruption, and some contracts will expire if a match is not found in a certain amount of time. Because these organizations lack a social services department skilled in evaluating, educating, and guiding birth mothers, families are often matched with birth mothers who aren’t strongly committed to adoption, aren’t emotionally prepared, and don’t understand the processes, increasing the chances of the adoption disrupting. Their cost estimates rarely reflect that their clients often experience several disruptions and, therefore, can lose thousands of dollars before an adoption succeeds, meaning those losses will be added to the fees for a successful adoption.

Are adoption facilitators the same as adoption agencies?

No. Adoption facilitators are NOT the same as adoption agencies. Adoption agencies are licensed and regulated by the state laws in which they provide services. An agency offers complete support and services throughout the entire adoption process, and well after placement occurs.

Facilitators are unlicensed, unregulated, and focus only on matching birth parents with adoptive families. They do not provide services for the necessary steps of the adoption process, such as legal consultation, counseling services, and more.

What adoption facilitators can and can’t do?

Adoption facilitators are not capable of completing an adoption from beginning to end. Their abilities are very limited. Below are the services they can and cannot provide:

Can: Matchmaking.

Can’t: Legal services, counseling services, post-placement support, financial assistance, or any step in the adoption process that requires being licensed or regulated.

While matchmaking is important, choosing to work with a facilitator means you will have to find several other professionals to help complete your adoption.

Who adopts through adoption law centers and facilitators?

Adoptive families each have their own reasons for deciding to work with their chosen adoption professional. Clients who choose to work with adoption law centers or adoption facilitators:

• Want to adopt quickly
• Are not worried about financial budget or losses
• Are willing to handle several stages of the adoption process themselves and are comfortable in doing so
• Want to be gender-specific
• Want control of the counseling and legal process of the adoption process
• Have been misled by a law center or facilitator’s marketing information
• Want an organization to advertise for them nationally
• Plan on spending evenings and weekends answering their phone to counsel birth parents themselves

Choosing an adoption law center or adoption facilitator

If you have decided to work with an adoption law center or facilitator, there are several questions you may want to ask the facilitators you are considering before making your final decision:

• Is your organization certified or licensed?
• Who is your organization regulated by?
• What services does your organization offer other than matching services?
• After a match, how does your organization stay involved in the adoption?
• How big is your social services department?
• Are your social workers licensed, or do they have degrees in social work, counseling, or family services?
• On average, how much does an adoption cost with your organization?
• If an adoption disrupts, do we get our money back?
• How long does my contract last? What if I don’t find a match within that time frame?

Because these adoption professionals are unregulated and uncertified, each adoption facilitator or law center will likely vary widely in their stability and the services they offer. You should carefully research all of your options before entering into a relationship with an adoption law center or facilitator.

Will adoption facilitators and consultants be able to continue operating?

As of now, it is uncertain. In many states, adoption facilitators are already considered illegal, and the risk of a sudden shutdown appears to be growing each month.

In late 2024, the FTC sent out a letter with their concerns of facilitators and law centers, stating, “It has come to our attention that companies that provide marketing, advertising, or consulting services in connection with matching prospective adoptive parents with birth parents for private adoptions (“adoption intermediaries”) may be violating the FTC Act or the Consumer Review Fairness Act.”

Currently, the federal government is working to pass “The Adopt Act“, which will make changes to adoption marketing and require adoption professionals to be licensed in each state they provide any related adoption services. This ruling could significantly impact facilitators and consults ability to continue to offer any adoption services.

Our Opinion

Adoption law firms and facilitators can help you find a match with a prospective birth mother, but counseling services and support may be provided by unlicensed and untrained staff, if the organization offers these services at all. An adoption attorney will need to step in and take over the adoption after a match is made.

Because of the lack of services and high fees, consider seeking an adoption agency or attorney to help you comp