My single best piece of advice to pregnant women considering adoption is to make the decision twice--once before the birth, and once again after the birth.

As a graduate student in marketing communications, I’m currently taking a class that covers how people make the decision to take action (in the case of my class, it's the decision to buy a product).The stages of consideration for buying something are awareness, information gathering, pre-purchase evaluation, decision-making, purchase, and post-purchase evaluation.

However, these stages also apply to most other decisions we make. If we transfer them to the field of adoption, we could say that the stages are awareness, information gathering, pre-surrender evaluation (pregnancy), initial decision-making, birth, and post-birth decision-making.

It’s this last step that I want to stress in this post. Any solid decision for adoption must be made twice: once before the birth, and again in the light of your baby’s arrival.

Your baby can sometimes seem a bit unreal to you while you are carrying him or her, but your child instantly becomes tangible and real after delivery. You can be totally sure you want to place your child for adoption while pregnant, and do a complete about-face once your child arrives. Usually this change of heart happens when your reasons for choosing adoption were not so strong to begin with. Things like familial disapproval or your own ambivalency toward motherhood are ultimately weak reasons for adoption, while things like drug addiction, mental illness, or extreme poverty are more lasting reasons to opt for adoption.

No matter how sure you think you are right now, give yourself the option to change your mind after your delivery. This not only benefits you, but also the prospective adoptive parents. If they are ethical and upstanding people, they will want you to be certain of your decision. They won’t want to adopt your baby if you aren’t sure—and you can’t be totally sure until your motherhood becomes real to you.

A good agency will encourage you to stay flexible and remake your plans once more after the birth. A really good agency will encourage you to go home with your baby from the hospital, and try parenting for a little while to see if it is manageable for you. Look at it this way: at least if you do try parenting for a week or two, you will know for sure that it was not something you were able to handle long-term. The peace of knowing you tried it and gave it your best shot is something that will greatly help with your grief.