"It's bad enough if you're a girl in India, but if you're disabled you're really in trouble," said Jody Johnson, a Richfield, Minn., resident who stumbled on the 8-month-old's picture at an adoption Web site. "You can't marry, you can't work, and you spend your life in an institution."

The 32-year-old woman had been interested in adopting a child since her high school days, when she read a book about special-needs children without families.

"The fees were a barrier for a long time," said Johnson, who has two children, ages 3 and 5, with her husband, Michael Boyer.

Last March, when her family got an Internet account, Johnson punched "adoption" into a search engine to see what would come up.

"I wasn't actively looking to adopt a child at that time -- I was just playing around with the Net," she said. "I came up with a ton of listings."

And then she saw Sonia at a site called Precious In His Sight.

"They had a profile of her saying she was a wonderful, social child, but she has a challenge in that she was born without arms," said the mother. "I carried the profile around in my pocket for two weeks while trying to figure out how to come up with the money."

Just months later, the forms have been completed and the family has been approved to receive Sonia.

Burdened with $15,000 in fees and expenses, the Richfield family has taken out an adoption loan, borrowed money from friends and relatives, and will be holding fund-raisers. (E-mail gungajody@aol.com for more information.)

Meanwhile, Jody Johnson is preparing her home for Sonia, who will be escorted from her Indian orphanage to Minnesota within six months -- something the mother said would not have happened if she had not gone online.

"It makes the child so much more visible for you," she said.

In the very recent past, the adoption process seemed like a never-ending nightmare of red tape, paperwork, studies and headaches. While it can still be an ordeal, the World Wide Web has helped demystify the process. There are Frequently Asked Questions pages, pictures and descriptions of waiting children, and detailed explanations of what one can expect in the required home study.

For adoptees looking to find their birth relatives, there are several sites offering assistance and encouragement in chat rooms and on message boards. "I am a successfully reunited adult adoptee," a woman writes on the Adoption Registration Coalition board. "For the first time in my life, I look like somebody other than the dog."

Birth parents, too, have places to go online for help in finding the children they put up for adoption decades earlier.

For government, the Web has been a way to get more public interest in publicly funded adoption programs.

JoAnn Erickson is one mother who spends much of her time online, putting out messages that she prays will lead her to a son she delivered in Minneapolis on Aug. 3, 1963. Three months later, she decided it was necessary to give the child up.

"In 1968, I seriously started to try to find my son," said Erickson, now 54 and living in Florida. "But what I found is that because I don't have a birth certificate, I've run into more difficulty."

Erickson also has a 25-year-old son, Scott, who grew up as an only child and, as a young boy, often asked if he would ever have a brother.

"When he was 8, I finally told him that he did have a brother, and he was so excited," she said.

Scott knew his mother had spent years quietly searching for her first-born child, and last spring, he gave her a computer and an Internet account as a gift.

"He gave this to me on Mother's Day because he wanted to help," said Erickson. "He kind of led me through the basics (of Internet navigation), and then stood back and let me search. He didn't want to interfere."

The mother has posted information about her Minnesota-born son on several message boards, and she continues to use the Net to come up with new ways to do her search.

"It's amazing how much time one can spend searching different areas of the Net," she said. "One Saturday I spent nine hours online. I probably have 40 adoption areas bookmarked now."

The mother writes in her postings that she does not want to disrupt her son's life.

"The reason for my search is to make any information available to him if he wants it," she said in a phone interview. "But it would be wonderful to hear he's doing well and he's happy and has had a good life."

She is surprised by the number of encouraging e-mails she has received from other mothers who are looking for or have found their children. Some have offered to help in her search.

"With all the assistance that people are trying to give me -- people I don't know -- you never know, maybe something will happen," she said.

Of the hundreds, if not thousands, of adoption sites on the Internet, the one that gets the most reaction is Bastard Nation, which was started by regular newsgroup message posters at alt.adoption who wanted to fight for adoptees' rights.

"This was a group of adult adoptees who agreed that the sealed-record laws violated our civil rights and our dignity as adult citizens of this country," said Damsel Plum, cofounder of Bastard Nation.

The Web site's outrageousness is often criticized by adoptees and birth parents for its radical stance, she said.

"The whole premise of calling ourselves Bastard Nation is obviously to get attention -- for the shock value," she said. Her group members see themselves as radicals of sorts involved in a civil-rights struggle, she said.

"We wanted a site that covered a wider spectrum than what was available online -- all of these sites about happy reunions," said Plum. "I collected true tales of revolting reunions as sort of a balance against the other sites and their happy stories."

She also sees the site as a place for adoptees to be open and express their anger.

"A lot of adopted people are very closeted about it, and in some families it's taboo," said Plum. "For some adoptees, the Internet is the first place where they come out as adopted persons, and we wanted a place where they could unleash those taboo demons."