Alcohol, Drugs, and Disease......Oh My!!

Jon and I accomplished one of the hardest tasks we were faced with in this entire process.  Due to the amount of birth parents who have or currently are using/abusing drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, we had to fill out a screening tool which tells that agency what level of exposure we would "allow" a potential adoptive infant to be exposed to before we no longer consider ourselves fit parents. 

This is an extremely difficult task considering all infants/children react differently to different substances.  Secondly, it is amazingly hard to purposely exclude a child who needs a good home based on something they had no control over from the beginning.  However, like everyone else in the world, we don't care the sex or race of our baby, but we ultimately would like it to be healthy.   

We were asked to take a scale of drug/alcohol use and tell how far up that scale we would be willing to go (by accepting a child) before we said no.  The scale was:

None - No exposure to drugs or alcohol. 
Mild - Used up to 4 or 5 times throughout their pregnancy. 
Moderate - Used consistently up to 4 or 5 months of pregnancy.
Severe - Used consistently more than 5 months of pregnancy.

The categories were:

• Alcohol
• Marijuana
• Cocaine
• Methamphetamines
• Prescription Drugs
• Heroin
• Tobacco

And then we also had to categorize our desire to take a child from any of the following scenarios:

• Parents with mental health illness
• Children with "known" physical or mental abnormalities. 

Jon and I talked and researched for hours and hours.  Jon and I were on the same page for almost all of our answers, but there were a few in which we had some nice, healthy debates. 

This was just another hurdle in a process full of twists and turns we weren't expecting.  Though we know from the bottom of our hearts that the outcome will make it ALL worthwhile.