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SALT LAKE CITY — For the next 12 months, LDS Family Services will pay the monthly fee for qualifying hopeful adoptive parents to post profiles on Adoption.com, which birth parents use to select families to adopt a child.

On Monday, LDS Family Services announced the major new partnership with Adoption.com, the world's largest adoption website. A section of the website, Adoption.com/lds, will be a free adoption site specifically for Mormon couples.

LDS Family Services will pay the website's $199 monthly fee for parent profiles from now through February 2016 for LDS couples meeting certain qualifications.

"It's an exciting day for adoptive families," said David McConkie, group manager of services for LDS Family Services. "This is a date we've worked for for a long time."

To help parents who want to adopt, Adoption.com will host an open house in Salt Lake City on Saturday for hopeful adoptive parents who want to create the free profiles, said Nathan Gwilliam, CEO of Adoption.com's parent company, Elevati.

In June 2014, McConkie announced that LDS Family Services would close the doors on its full-service adoption agency at the end of that year. Monday's announcement is designed to continue the transformation. The organization is now focused on providing counseling and consulting for single expectant parents, prospective adoptive parents and local leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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LDS Family Services changing its role in adoptions LDS Family Services will no longer operate a full-scale adoption agency, instead shifting all of its adoption-related resources to counseling for birth parents and prospective adoptive parents.

McConkie said then and again Monday that the church agency's goal is to increase the number of opportunities for LDS couples who want to adopt, helping them to be adoption entrepreneurs. He said the partnership with Adoption.com/lds accomplishes that.

Family Services has operated its own website, ItsAboutLove.org, which will be redirected to Adoption.com/lds on March 31. Adoption.com reaches a far larger audience, with millions of monthly pages views. It is the Internet's most-used adoption service, with more than 230,000 members and 2.9 million posts.

"This is quite a big deal," McConkie said. "Our focus has really been to help more adoptive families create more opportunities, and the best way we could do that was to expose them to people that want to place a baby for adoption. That exposure is everything."

ItsAboutLove.org was available only to clients of LDS Family Services. Adoption.com/lds will be a free website available to all LDS Church members for at least five years, McConkie said.

Family Services will pay for the parent profiles for the next year for LDS couples who have sealed their marriage in an LDS temple, maintain current temple recommends, have an endorsement from their bishop and have a current home study. These are the same qualifications LDS Family Services used when it was involved in adoption services.

Adoption.com was founded by Gwilliam in 1997 when he was a BYU student and is provided for people of all faiths.

By the numbers... In 2001, there were 1.5 million adopted children in the United States, representing 2.5 percent of all U.S. children.

Though U.S. citizens adopted nearly 13,000 children from 106 different countries in 2009, a little more than two-thirds of all children came from only five sending countries: China (23 percent), Ethiopia (18 percent), Russia (12 percent), South Korea (8 percent) and Guatemala (6 percent).

While inter-country adoption may be the most visible category, the majority of American adoptions actually involve children adopted out of foster care. About 135,000 children are adopted in the United States each year. Of non-stepparent adoptions, about 59 percent are from the child welfare (or foster) system, 26 percent are from other countries, and 15 percent are voluntarily relinquished American babies.

Domestically, the percentage of infants given up for adoption has declined from 9 percent of those born before 1973 to 1 percent of those born between 1996 and 2002.

Adoption costs tend to differ according to the origin, race, sex and age of the child, as do waiting times involved, with white American-born baby girls costing the most and older black boys the least.

Adoptive mothers tend to be older than mothers who have not adopted children. Fifty-one percent of adoptive mothers are between 40 to 44 years of age compared with 27 percent of non-adoptived. Eighty-one percent of adoptive mothers are 35 to 44 years of age compared to 52 percent of non-adoptive mothers.

Although never-married persons aged 18 to 44 years are less likely to have adopted children compared with those who have been married, about 100,000 never-married women and 73,000 never-married men adopted children in 2002. Info: PBS

Adoption.com also provides photolisting, lists of thousands of foster children waiting to be adopted.

Changes in adoption trends prompted LDS Family Services to change its program. The number of U.S. adoptions has leveled out at about 50,000 per year, despite a marked increase in the number of unwed pregnancies, to 41 percent of U.S. births as of 2013, according to a report released last month.

Recent statistics also show that just 1 percent of births to unwed mothers result in adoption. That's down from 9 percent in 1973.

Those statistics are similar in the LDS Church population, McConkie said in June. One of the new goals of LDS Family Services is to provide more counseling to birth parents who choose to raise their child.

While it operated as an adoption agency, some LDS bishops and single expectant mothers expressed concern Family Services would work to persuade mothers to place their children for adoption.

Family Services officials said that never was the case; now that it is no longer operating an adoption agency, they hope bishops and birth parents will be more willing to use Family Services resources to find information about options and to connect with appropriate outside resources.

Family Services is partnering with local community resources, including adoption agencies, that will do licensed regulatory work like home studies.

"We'll help you find the best resources wherever you are," McConkie said. "When a couple is ready for a home study, for example, we give them the names of local providers."

Saturday’s Adoption.com open house will be 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, 15 South Temple, on the 10th floor.

The open house will feature four hour-long “build your profile” workshops. Parents are invited to stay throughout the four hours to taken advantage of hands-on stations, including photo and video booths, a station for legal questions and answers, and a computer station where parents get get help with technical questions and upload photos and vides from a flash drive.

Birth mother mentors will provide feedback on parent profiles.

Those unable to attend the workshops who still would like one-on-one help setting up a profile can call Adoption.com’s parent profiles customer service team at (208) 419-3162.

Email: twalch@deseretnews.com

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