Open Adoption

Lisa was 15 and pregnant. She had thought about raising her baby, but her mother and father had already told her they would not support her and her child. Without their help, she knew she could not raise the baby, especially if she planned to complete high school and go on to college to study music.

Adoption seemed to be the most logical and available option. But Lisa was scared. She could not bear the thought of turning her baby over to someone she did not know, of never seeing her child again. She knew she would be haunted by the memories she would never have a chance to share—her child's first birthday party, the first day of kindergarten, grade school graduation. She was anxious, too, about the psychological effects on her son or her daughter. Would he, as he grew into adulthood, yearn to see a face that looked like his? Would she wonder why her mother placed her for adoption?

Lisa spent many restless nights wrestling with the decision she must make. "In my heart, I know that adoption is the best thing for me and my baby," Lisa told her counselor at school, "but I'm not comfortable with just handing her to somebody and trying to forget she ever existed."

Like Lisa, most people see adoption as closing a door to which there is no key. And until the early 1970's, that was an accurate perception. Adoption was cloaked in secrecy. Adoptions were arranged by an agency or other intermediaries, such as doctors or lawyers, who chose the adoptive parents. A birthmother had no control over who would adopt her child. Sometimes she saw her child once or twice after delivery, sometimes not at all. She was rarely given the opportunity to hold her baby because it was believed that she would then find it too difficult to place him for adoption. Adoptive parents were assured that the final adoption records would be sealed by the courts and that they need not fear future intrusion from the birthmother.

Today that scenario can be dramatically different. There is a new openness in adoption that is seen by a growing number of child welfare and mental health experts as a long- awaited solution to problems created by the traditional secrecy.

Through open adoption, birthmothers like Lisa are able to play a role in what happens to the children they place for adoption.

There is no universally accepted definition of open adoption. While informal open adoptions have occurred for centuries, whereby grandparents, aunts and uncles, or godparents raised children not born to them but whose parents were known to them, the concept of formal open adoption is quite new—less than 20 years old. Open adoption can take many forms. In some cases, a birthmother may leaf through a book containing photographs and descriptions of prospective adopters and choose a couple or person she feels would give her baby a good home. She may never meet the adopters, and this may be her only contact with them. At the other extreme, a birthmother may meet the adoptive parents, visit their home, and have ongoing contact throughout the child's life.

Formal open adoption is a controversial idea. It raises questions to which there are not yet clear answers. Will a child raised with knowledge of two sets of parents grow up confused? Will adoptive parents feel threatened by the intrusion of the birthparents? Will the child/parent relationship be able to develop in a healthy and normal way? Will the birthmother want to reclaim her child? Will she make unwelcome visits and phone calls? When the child is older, will he choose his birthmother over his adoptive parents? Can open adoption really be successful?

Those experienced in working with open adoption say that problems are likely to occur when the birthparents and adoptive parents have an ambiguous agreement as to how open the adoption will be, or if they have a clear agreement, and then one party oversteps the bounds. The degree of openness usually depends on the comfort level of both the birthparents and adoptive parents. Some adoptive parents have no problem with a birthparent who coparents. Others desire much more limited contact.

Adoption social workers also disagree about the degree of openness that is desirable in adoption. Some agencies encourage the birthmother to play a prominent role in the child's life. Others limit the amount of personal information (i.e., telephone numbers and addresses) exchanged between the prospective adoptive parents and the birthmother. There are also agencies that allow the birthmother and the adoptive parents to decide how much and what kind of future contact they will have with each other.

In Lisa's case, she was comfortable with being able to help select her child's parents from a book that included their photographs and descriptions and to meet them once. But she did not feel it was appropriate for her to participate in raising her child.

"Being able to know a little bit about who would adopt my baby made my decision a lot easier—not that adoption can ever be easy," says Lisa. "It took away a lot of the `unknowns,' things like, What do they look like? What will my child know about me? Where is she living? But most of all, Will they love my baby more than anything else? Meeting Joan and Bill made me more comfortable with my decision to place my baby for adoption."

Open adoption is not just for newborns. Families who adopt older children are provided with information about the birth family that they might not receive in a traditional, confidential adoption. If there was abuse or neglect in a child's background, the adoptive parents need to know the specifics about the situation so that they can deal with any behavioral or emotional problems that might arise because of that abuse or neglect.

Because an older child lived with his birth family members for a time, he has memories of them. Those memories are a part of him, and the adoptive family has to understand this. "You inadvertently become participants," says Christine Jacobs, exchange supervisor at the National Adoption Center in Philadelphia and an adoptive mother of two sons, one of whom joined her family at age 5. "The history is there. The child's life did not start when he moved in with you, and he can't be expected to forget everything that happened to him earlier in his life."

Because of this, some families who adopt older children decide that it is in the best interests of the child to maintain contact with those individuals who are significant in his life, such as birthparents, siblings, grandparents, or foster parents. "You become almost distant relatives," says Jacobs. "Even if you don't keep in touch regularly, you are still a part of each other's lives."

Adapted from a piece by Gloria Hochman and Anna Huston of the National Adoption Center for the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, 1993. Revised, September 1994.

Truth Helps, Inc. 2003
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