‘Black Babies Cost Less to Adopt’

During the process, the family received four calls about potential children to be matched with them — three from states that used this race-based cost structure. “One was a full African-American child, one was a biracial child and one was a white child,” Lantz says. “And when they told me the fees for the white child, I was in a Babies R Us [store] and I remember having to sit down in the aisle and say to myself, ‘I don’t think we can afford to adopt this child if the expectant mother chose us.’”

The cost to adopt the Caucasian child was approximately $35,000, plus some legal expenses. “Versus when we got the first phone call about a little girl, a full African-American girl, it was about $18,000,” Lantz says. The cost for adoption of a biracial child was between $24,000 and $26,000.

NPR’s The Race Card Project has received thousands of six-word stories submissions, and one of them, “Black Babies Cost Less to Adopt,” showed how some adoption agencies use different fee structures based on a child’s race. The fee structures aren’t really open to the public, but Caryn Lantz, an adopted parent provided a screen grab from an agency of what those fees could look like:

[Thanks to Cindy for the pointer.]

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