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Open Adoption
Lisa was 15 and pregnant. She had thought about
abortion, but it was too late in her pregnancy. 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.
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Open adoption means that birthparents and adoptive
parents have some knowledge about one another. The birthparents know
something about the adoptive parents and may even help choose them.
Adoptive parents and their children know medical and genetic information
about the birth family and other information that might help in dealing
with the emotional issues that often accompany 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."
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The concept of openness grew out of discontent by
all parties involved in adoption—the birthparents, the adoptive parents,
and the adoptee—who protested against traditional adoption's neglect of
the importance of the genetic family.
The Birthparents
Traditional adoption gave birthparents no input into
the future of their children. They were encouraged to trust the agency's
judgment, accept the agency's rules, agree to sealed records that would
preclude any further contact with the child, and "get on with their
lives." Like Lisa, many birthmothers had parted with their children
reluctantly, often without the benefit of counseling that would have
helped them make a thoughtful decision. Years later—sometimes after they
had married and raised other children—they would frequently yearn for
information about the child they had placed.
Birthmothers began to reach out to one another as a
way of working through their grief surrounding the adoption, eventually
forming the support group Concerned United Birthparents (CUB) in 1973. In
addition to providing emotional support, CUB began working to change the
adoption process so that the pain many birthmothers had experienced would
not be repeated in the next generation.
Lee Campbell, the founder of CUB, remembers, "My
social worker told me, `Lee, walk out this door and forget this happened!'
The trouble was, I was never able to do that."
"What angers birthmothers everywhere," says JoAnne
Swanson in her book The Adoption Machine, "is that their
`guarantee of confidentiality' was always forced on them, never offered
as an option."
Studies of birthmothers echoed what they had been
telling agencies. They often saw their adoption decision as having had a
serious negative impact on their lives. They continued to suffer feelings
of loss years after they relinquished their children. These feelings
frequently affected all aspects of their lives. Many suffered from poor
self-esteem, troubled marriages, and over protectiveness toward their
subsequent children. If they had it to do over again, many said they would
not choose adoption.
CUB's fight to open the adoption process started to
gain credibility with adoption agencies as the number of healthy white
infants available for adoption began to diminish. With the development of
birth control pills, legalized abortion, and societal changes that removed
the stigma attached to being unmarried and pregnant, birthmothers had the
leverage to demand more input into their children's futures. "Agencies
began to realize that they couldn't just forget about the birthmother
after the adoption," says Maxine Chalker, director of The Adoption Agency,
an adoption agency specializing in open adoption in Ardmore, Pennsylvania.
Agencies acknowledged that they needed to provide
the birthmother with services, like preadoption and postadoption
counseling. Today, most agencies offer group and individual counseling to
birthmothers to help them plan for their children's futures and to support
them once they have decided to pursue adoption. At Chalker's agency, women
are in the same support group prior to and after the birth. After the
adoption, nothing is mandatory, but counselors are available if they are
needed. "When women do call, the counseling is very informal," comments
Chalker. "Maybe we'll meet them for lunch, or just for a cup of coffee
somewhere. They just need to talk to someone every once in a while—someone
to tell them that their feelings are perfectly normal."
The Adoptee
Many adoptees have felt the "disquieting loneliness"
that Roots author Haley described. Not knowing their heritage or
why they were placed for adoption left many with devastating feelings of
rejection. They wondered why they had been placed for adoption, who their
birthparents were, and if they had siblings. They were often troubled
about how little they knew about their genetic past. They were concerned
that there might be some unknown in their birth family's medical history
that would surface later in life. The need for such knowledge frequently
nudged adoptees into a consuming and never ending search for the truth,
sometimes impairing their ability to lead productive lives.
"Adoptees can feel frustrated at their inability to
connect with their roots," says Marshall Schecter, a psychiatrist at the
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "Some have trouble forming
an identity when they reach adolescence. Others may develop fantasies—both
positive and negative—about their birth family. Some adoptees spend a
lifetime never finding answers to their questions. For others, this black
hole which exists where their past should be becomes too much of an
emotional burden for them to bear, leaving deep psychological scars."
Statistics support claims that knowledge about our
genetic past—our roots—plays a vital role in who we are, and that the lack
of such information can be detrimental to the adopted child. Although
adopted children comprise less than 2 percent of the population, they make
up about 5 percent of the outpatients and up to 15 percent of the
inpatients at psychiatric institutions. And according to adoption scholar
David Brodzinsky of Rutgers University, the cause for many is the adoption
experience. "For adoptees, part of them is hurt at having once been
relinquished," says Brodzinsky. "That part remains vulnerable for the rest
of their lives as they grieve at various predictable points for the
unknown parents who gave them away."
In studies of adopted children, Arthur Sorosky, a
psychiatrist, and David Kirschner, a clinical psychologist, have found
that adoptees tend to be more aggressive, suffer from low self-esteem, and
are at greater risk for learning disabilities than nonadopted children.
Although some of these problems can be traced back to a teenaged
birthmother with poor prenatal care, or exposure to drugs or alcohol in
utero, many mental health experts believe it is the result of the adoption
experience itself. Sorosky and Kirschner coined the term "adopted-child
syndrome" to define the most extreme exhibition of personality traits
found in adopted children. These behaviors include rebellion, truancy,
sexual promiscuity, and often trouble with the law.
Open adoption supporters believe many adoptees
encounter these problems because they lack a heritage—what one
psychiatrist referred to as "genealogical bewilderment." Open adoption
eliminates the need for adopted children to fantasize about who their
birthparents are, why they have red hair, where they got their artistic
talent, and most importantly, why they were placed for adoption.
The Adoptive Parents
As adoptive parents started hearing more about this
new openness in adoption, some felt troubled by rules that seemed to be
changing in midstream. The adoption they had thought was confidential—
inviolate—was being threatened, making them feel hurt and vulnerable. They
experienced a rash of emotions—fear, anger, sadness, and confusion. Some
parents worried about what their children would find if they located their
birthmothers. Would their fantasies be better than the reality? Would
their child feel rejected yet again? Would they lose their child to the
birth family?
Some parents tried to talk their children out of
searching and made it clear that they would offer no support. Others
believed it was in the best interest of their child's mental and emotional
well-being to help them gain access to the information they needed to lay
the mystery of their ancestry to rest.
One adoptive mother was so concerned over her
5-year-old daughter's obsession with her birthmother that she decided to
convert her closed adoption into an open one. "My daughter would go up to
total strangers at shopping malls or in parks and ask, `Are you my
mother?' " she remembers. "Finally, I contacted the agency to see if we
could get more information about our daughter's birthmother. They
contacted the birthmother, and she was just as eager to receive
information about the baby she placed for adoption. She sent a picture and
letter which we shared with our daughter. We haven't met in person, yet. I
don't know how I would handle that."
Supporters of open adoption see it as a way for
adoptive parents to have answers to questions that will most surely be
asked by their children. They point to studies that indicate that open
adoption actually improves the relationship between the adoptive parents
and the child. "They have finally been given permission to be the parents,
and they actually bond quicker with the baby, having met the birthmother,"
says Kathleen Silber, co-author of the book Dear Birthmother: Thank You
for Our Baby.
Another study also found that open adoption
strengthens the relationship between the child and the adoptive parents,
because the child knows that his adoptive parents not only accept him, but
that which belongs to him.
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Pamela and Mark are the adoptive parents of Joshua,
age 5. They met his birthmother, a 20-year-old college student, who had
selected them from a picture album at their adoption agency in a
Philadelphia suburb. Pamela felt strongly that the birthmother should have
a place in her child's life—that he should consider her to be a
"relative," but that she should not interfere with the way he was being
raised. They decided together that the birthmother would visit the child,
at her home or theirs, twice a year. For the first 3 years, this
arrangement worked well. Then the birthmother moved to Arizona, and the
visits became more difficult to orchestrate. However, Josh and the
birthmother speak on the telephone several times a year, and he regards
her as a member of his extended family. "I feel the arrangement is a
healthy one," says Pamela. "I think it will eliminate a lot of the anxiety
that adopted children often feel about their origin. My husband and I are
considering another adoption and we would want to do it the same way."
On the other hand, open adoption has many critics.
One of the strongest opponents of the practice is the Washington, DC-based
National Council for Adoption (formerly the National Committee for
Adoption). In its Adoption Factbook, it states that it has "long
championed the importance of confidentiality in adoption."
"We have many concerns with it," says William
Pierce, president of the National Council for Adoption. "We think that
down the line, it will prove harmful to all those involved in the adoption
circle."
Many fear that open adoption will result in
coparenting, which often brings unexpected difficulties. That was the case
for Kathleen and John Hickman, who once supported open adoption but later
regretted their decision, saying they were not prepared for the birth
family's continual involvement in their lives.
The Hickmans first looked into open adoption after
years of seeing infertility specialists, followed by years of waiting with
a State adoption agency, only to have a possible placement fall through
because of bureaucratic bumbling. "My husband and I decided that open
adoption seemed to be the way to go after that. Now we would have control
and would not be in the dark as to what was going on," says Hickman.
The Hickmans registered with an agency in California
that practices open adoption. They were told that the amount of contact
between themselves and the birth family would rest solely with the parties
involved—the birth family and the prospective adoptive family. After
filling in the registration form and completing a short video biography of
themselves, they waited to be selected by a birthmother. When the call did
come, Mrs. Hickman was surprised to learn the meeting would not be with
the birthmother, but rather with the birthmother's family. She was
informed that the birthmother was in a psychiatric hospital, so her
parents would be the ones making the decision.
"At first, we were somewhat relieved," says Mrs.
Hickman. "The grandparents were closer to our age. We had, I thought, a
lot more in common with them than we had with their teenage daughter." But
after a few meetings with the family, Hickman began to have concerns about
their desire for future contact. "The baby was biracial," says Hickman.
"This was the reason they gave for not wanting to adopt the baby
themselves. They were ashamed! They didn't want anyone to know that their
grandchild was biracial—as if, somehow, this made the baby inferior."
Still, the grandparents wanted future contact. At
first they agreed to letters and photos for the first year only. As time
went on, however, they began to demand visitation rights. Eventually, the
baby's birth family began stopping by the Hickman's home unannounced and
uninvited. "It always had to be our house—remember, they didn't want their
neighbors to know," recalls Hickman. The constant interference from the
birth family became too much of an emotional strain for the Hickmans and
the adoption disrupted. The grandparents later decided to adopt the baby.
"I still worry that the grandparents' attitude
about their biracial granddaughter will affect her as she grows up,"
says Hickman, "but things just couldn't go on the way they were. The
tension around our home began to take its toll on our marriage."
Kathleen and John Hickman decided not to give up and
pursued open adoption again. This time they were going to stand firm in
the amount of contact they wanted. Unfortunately they had another unhappy
experience. This time it was not the birthmother who set the terms of
future contact—it was the social worker. "She told us that the adoption
had to be completely open, with the birthmother having continual contact
with us, or she wouldn't let it go through," says Hickman. "None of us
could believe it. I thought `open adoption' meant that it was our
decision."
Hickman has found she is not alone among people who
have tried open adoption and failed. She has met many other couples in
similar situations. They thought they could handle something they were not
comfortable with because they had no other options.
Conclusion
It is clear that the secrecy that has been the
hallmark of adoption throughout its history is giving way to a new
openness. Research that will track the effects of such adoptions is
underway, and some has been completed already.
One recent study of birthmothers and adoptive
parents who participated in open adoption found that open adoption is
often substantially beneficial for the birthmothers. They feel more
comfortable having input into their children's futures.
Adoptive parents, too, are coming to believe that
open adoption is a "more humane way of dealing with the birthmother,"
according to a survey of parents who have participated in open adoption.
When adoptive parents were asked about how they personally felt about open
adoption, most were positive in their reaction. Some had completely open
adoptions in which the birthmother actively participated in the child's
life. Others remained in contact with the birthmother through letters and
photos. A few of the respondents were uncomfortable with even a yearly
letter. For the most part, the adoptive parents were happy with their
decision, but acknowledged that they had no other options if they wanted
to adopt a healthy baby.
Most experts believe that before becoming involved
in an open adoption, prospective adoptive parents should make clear how
much contact they wish to have with the birthmother. All parties involved
should draft a contract stating the terms of future contact. Recent court
decisions have ruled that contracts of this sort are legally binding
documents, so the terms need to be clearly thought out.
The jury is still out on the effect of open adoption
on adopted children. Today, the first children to experience it are
entering adolescence. As they move into adulthood, researchers studying
them will learn more about how this new kind of adoption has impacted
their lives and influenced their family relationships.
In the meantime, the definition of open adoption
continues to evolve as those who participate in it fine-tune the concept
to meet their changing needs. It remains a controversial issue that
promises to keep challenging traditional thinking about the ideal way to
adopt a child.
Written by Gloria Hochman and Anna Huston of the National Adoption
Center, for the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, 1993.
Revised, September 1994.
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This material has been provided by
the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse. |