Price of parenting: Who ever said love don't cost a thing?

•Licensed private agency:

$5,000-$40,000

•Independent adoptions:

$4,000-$40,000

•Facilitated/unlicensed adoptions: $5,000-$40,000

•Intercountry adoptions:

$7,000-$30,000

Source: Adoptions.com

When my husband, Dan, and I adopted our daughter, Jess, through a local law firm nearly six years ago, I felt like an "open checkbook,” to borrow a phrase from an Oklahoma City woman I quoted.

Though our daughter's birth mother chose us within two months of her delivery, which was covered by Medicaid, we spent $21,240, including $9,200 in legal costs, $6,810 in birth mother expenses and $4,257 for the caseworker.

One Oklahoma City attorney I interviewed told me an uncontested Oklahoma county adoption should cost no more than $15,000, including a maximum of $6,000 in legal fees. Moreover, living expenses for birth mothers should be $1,250 or less a month, he said, and limited to needs, versus things like televisions, cars or birthday gifts for their children.

Following a story I wrote in May, I received two heartbreaking calls, from an adoptive father in Del City and a biological grandmother in Tuttle. The former and his wife in 1969 adopted a 9-month-old baby girl, who was returned to her biological mother after three years in their home. The couple for 15 years afterward drove to Poteau every six weeks to collect her for weekend visitations. The child, now 38, eventually lost contact, allegedly because of pressure from her biological mother. It's been three years since they've spoken.

Meanwhile, the Tuttle grandmother continues to help her son fight for custody of his 3-year-old fraternal twins.

"It's like my grandchildren have been kidnapped,” she told me. There are a lot of natural fathers, she said, who would fight for their children, but can't afford to challenge the often-wealthier foster parents, she said. What's more, the legal costs incurred by biological families to retain custody are not deductible, she said.

I hope my coverage will help enlighten prospective adoptive parents to the costs and risks of adoption and ways to afford it. But I wouldn't change a thing. If we hadn't used the firm we did, we wouldn't have the child we do, who I believe God sent to us. The most important thing is to be a parent, which for us, was worth the price of admission.

By Paula Burkes Erickson, Business Writer