Private adoption agencies tend to discriminate heavily based on race, religion, and other factors. Public foster care systems have an inordinate number of "special needs" children (85%, based on one estimate I recently saw), many of the remaining children are from multi-child placements with an all-or-nothing requirement, a huge percentage are minority children and are saddled with limits as to who can adopt them and where they can live, and most states prefer that you foster the child(ren) for up to three years and shepherd them through the exhausting rights termination process with their biological parents. Oh, and then you often have to deal with years of state mandated therapy and counseling, whether or not you want or need it.
Most people just want to adopt a child and be done with it. Between the "good intentions" of the state run systems, and the blatant profiteering that occurs with private adoptions, adopting kids in the U.S. has become a huge pain in the arse. THAT is why so many Americans choose to go overseas. It's still expensive, but you can get it done in a fraction of the time and with half the headaches (and heartaches).
My wife and I have spent the past two years trying to adopt a kid. We tried state adoptions first, but quickly gave up on the bureaucratic mess that is the California adoption system. We then spent 18 months trying to adopt privately, and gave up after our third near-adoption was yanked from us (another couple flat-out bought the mothers family off). We've been working with an agency to arrange an adoption from Eastern Europe recently, but were told by the agency, just last week, that the Russian adoption cutoff is going to push a lot of prospective parents to the other Eastern European countries and will make adopting from there far more difficult than it already is. We're pretty much ready to give up on the whole thing at this point.
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