Adoption-Ed 101: Open Adoption

In today's post, I'm going to write about open adoption.  There are two main kinds of adoptions, open and closed.  In a closed adoption, everyone's identities are hidden.  Adoptive parents do not know the names of the natural parents and the natural parents do not know the names of the adoptive parents or the adoptee.  In open adoptions, the natural parents and adoptive parents know the identities of all the members of the adoption triad (adoptive parents, natural parents, and adoptee).

These days, more and more domestic adoptions are becoming open, so it's important to understand what it means to have an open adoption.  I would recommend further education on this subject as this blog post is merely an attempt to outline some of the issues with open adoption.  The main idea is that open adoption offers the same solution to the problem (outlined earlier) but that the adoptee and the natural parents can still know each other and possibly avoid some of the issues that come with adoption, such as the lack of identity that some adoptees feel, and the loss of a child that some natural families feel.  It's the idea that everyone can be one big happy family, unconventional perhaps, but everyone is happy in the end.

Usually, the parents come to an agreement where they decide how much contact the natural parents will have with the adoptive family and child.  However, in almost half of the states, these agreements are not legally binding.  Open adoptions can close where the adoptive parents can sever the link to the natural family.  It happens more often then people realize.  Once legal rights are trasfered to the adoptive parents, it can be nearly impossible to enforce agreements (some states do have laws that protect against this, but not all do so you need to check the laws of your state).

Open adoption has it's own host of issues.  I'm not sure how I would have felt if my adoption had been open.  I'm not sure that if I was a child I would be able to understand why I couldn't live with my natural mother.  I would have known that she was married to my natural father, and I would have been hurt when they had more children because as a six and a half year old I wouldn't have understood.  I wouldn't have liked having a sister I couldn't play with whenever I wanted.  And I don't think I would have been able to understand.  I would have been hurt.  It wouldn't have solved my problems.  It would have been great to know some of my missing pieces, but I'm not sure if that would have been the best thing for me.  Then again, who really knows?