Our first decision was whether to stay domestic or go international. From what we found out, domestic adoption is a essentially a legal process. It's very much dependent on lawyers and individual state laws. Some negative features:

• Mostly infants or older children via state-run foster systems (we were looking for a child between 12 and 18 months)
• Lots of "near" misses for infants, where the birth mother decides after birth that she can't give up her child (very natural, but think about the disruption this causes the awaiting adoptive parents)
• Even after the adoption, for normally a few months, birth family members can try to make legal claims to take back the child from the adoptive parents (this almost happened with one of my work colleagues, who honestly was ready to flee the country with her child).

Due to all of this uncertainty, domestic option never seemed attractive for us.

All countries are different, but in general, you learn very quick about the positive benefits of having a foreign government acting as an intermediary. In our case, once the Chinese government assumes custody of a child, the cord is irrevocably cut with the birth parents/family. So, once the process is over, she is our daughter, period, end of sentence. This "certainty" was the best option for us.

This is essentially why we went international. If you are interested in the next step of our decision making, please ask. We looked at Poland, Korea, and China.....and obviously selected China for multiple reasons.