My husband has cystic fibrosis. We are in the process of adopting from foster care. The kids have been in our home 9 months, should be setting up a date to finalize soon. A sibling group of 3 kids. They came to us at age newborn, 1, and 3. We couldn't be happier with them. Many of the international programs are setting health requirements that make adopting difficult for people with CF. I called around and was pretty much told internationally our options were older kids from Hungary. So we became foster parents. Had one little girl come at birth and leave after a year, then got our current placement which will be for good about a year after we became certified foster parents. It is great having this option to be parents. We didn't want to do domestic newborn adoption because we wanted more than 1 kid and we wanted to get the process done while my husband was still young so the children would be grown and older when he gets old and dies. Also the cost involved with multiple domestic newborn adoptions would be difficult to swing while making sure we are set up to properly raise them if my husband's health suffers and he can't work.
We told the agency about the CF when we were doing the homestudy and they were like 'that's fine'. Then when they were writing up the homestudy, they read the wikipedia article on CF and became concerned. We just had to have his Dr write a letter explaining that he was fit to raise kids for the foreseeable future, that his FEV was around 80 and had been for the last 7 years (since he was 18).
So I can't say whether CF would have been a problem for sure internationally or domestic newborn. However the CF really pushed us towards adopting a sibling group through foster care due to the relative speed. The youngest will be graduating high school when my husband is 43.
