Networking for baby

Today we received our first info packet in the mail.  I was sorry to see that pretty much everything in the packet was also on their website. Nice folder though, I guess.  This one was for a domestic adoption agency.

This particular agency does not make me feel very comfortable. I've discovered through blogs of parents using this agency that they heavily recommend networking as a method of sourcing out a baby.  Networking seems to me to be a fairly slimy ordeal.  Perhaps I'm just naive, but I almost feel like the exchange of a child, as it were, is more sacred than telling your local grocer that you are hoping to adopt and to keep you in mind if someone mentions to you that they don't plan to keep their baby.  Part of my mind just finds this to be unethical. As if a child should be sought in the same way a used car might be.  Craigslist anyone?  I'm also pretty sure I read that advertising as adoptive hopefuls outside of the agency structure is illegal in my state- I'll have to double check that.

On top of the yicky-ness I feel about this, I also feel like for 25 grand (or 20 or 15), they should be doing my networking for me.  It isn't that I'm not willing to put it all out there for a child. My concerns are that there are a lot of legal, ethical, psychological, and just plain kindness issues that a person should be trained, retrained, mentored through, and experienced at involved in discussing anything of that magnitude with a pregnant woman.  If I were to, say, be contacted by a woman who offered up her child to me directly, I would immediately feel the red flags of scam artist come up.  No. matter. what.  People who are as emotionally involved as an adoptive hopeful should not be the point person for this. Especially not after going to all of the trouble to research and find an agency.

I'm looking for other options this evening. I have a lot of questions though, which I am going to rattle off in case anyone out there knows the answers:   I've seen that in an international adoption, the adoptive parents can choose an agency from anywhere in the country.  Is this true with domestic adoptions as well?  If I were to go through an adoption lawer in my state, or a local agency,  do they have access to birthmoms outside their neighborhood, generally?  And if there was a child in state next door would I need to hire a second lawyer from that state?

I'm a little weary of asking too many questions from the adoption professionals until I am really ready to jump in with both feet, although I know that will eventually be the source of many of my answers.