Daughter Adopted from Ukraine

The Jackson Family

Our concerns before we went to get our daughter were very much like yours…we were very uncomfortable even thinking about trying to make a decision without medical support. Because God's Families was particularly concerned about bringing home healthy children (one of the reasons we chose to work with them), they put us into contact with an English speaking, western trained, Ukrainian doctor who made himself available to go with us to the orphanage once we had tentatively selected our daughter (she chose us, by the way, but that's a whole other story)!

And because she was older (5-1/2) and we have two biological kids too, we also asked God's Families to put us in touch with a child psychologist. We took both doctors with us to the orphanage and they poured through the medical files and interviewed the orphanage doctors, the caregivers, directors, speech pathologist and their own psychologist. The Ukrainians were very open with their records and talked to these doctors for hours. We were very lucky. We also had them take blood and we ran our own tests for hepatitis, aids, VD (the records indicated that she had tested negative an all these, but we needed to be sure). We had the results back before our court date, thanks to these great doctors.

I would NOT personally be able to evaluate adequately without this professional help and I would urge all adoptive parents to use medical resources prior to making a decision.

Janet