Open Adoption

On Sunday morning my husband mentioned he’d seen an interesting piece in the morning paper—“Embryo Adoption Plants a Complex Family Tree”—and he asked me to read it because he wanted to know my thoughts. The article tells the story of Pat and Jen McLaughiln, a couple from Missouri who used embryos donated by another couple in California to give birth to twin girls. Instead of the anonymous process more common in embryo donation (also sometimes called embryo adoption), the McLaughlins and their donors are approaching their situation more like an open adoption. The McLaughlins have five other children, four adopted from Russian orphanages and one adopted in their home state. According to the article, McLaughlin has never shied away from knowing her adopted children’s pasts. She and her husband, a lawyer, had… [more]

If you are working with an agency that facilitates semi-open and open adoptions, chances are you’ve learned at least a little bit about it—perhaps you’ve had the opportunity to speak with adoptive parents, first parents, and even adoptees who are involved in open adoptions; been given recommended reading material about the benefits of open adoption to adopted children; and/or taken part in group discussions with other hopeful adoptive parents about open adoption. At some point, your agency will likely ask you to indicate precisely how open you envision your future child’s adoption to be. You might be presented with a grid that looks something like this:

1. Sharing photos and letters after placement (with the agency as an intermediary)
2. Meeting to make personal contact prior to placement (with the agency as an intermediary)
3. Keeping in

To celebrate the first birthday of the Open Adoption Blogroll, Heather at Production, Not Reproduction invited OA bloggers to participate in the Open Adoption Bloggers Interview Project. My partner for the project was Weaver, an adult who was raised in open adoption, who blogs at Communities Don’t Get Built.... Many hopeful adoptive parents seek out the input and experiences of first parents and adoptees in an attempt to understand more about what adoption means to those on the other sides of the triad. (And if you’re not doing this, you should be. But that’s a topic for another post.) But far fewer adoptive parents actively seek to learn more about the experiences of those first parents and adoptees who write from an anti-adoption perspective. It’s human nature, after all… [more]

If you are a hopeful adoptive parent just beginning the adoption process, you’ve probably heard of open adoption, but you might not know exactly what it is, and you might not be sure how you feel about it. Open adoption, quite simply, involves maintaining contact between the adoptive family and the child's first parents after placement. The amount and type of contact in an open adoption can vary greatly, and sometimes a distinction is made between semi-open adoption, in which identifying information is generally not exchanged and contact usually takes place through an intermediary, for example, the agency or attorney who arranged the adoption, and fully open adoption, in which identifying information is exchanged and contact between the families takes place directly. For the sake of simplicity, I use the term… [more]

A few weeks ago I read this commentary by FireMom, and it’s been rolling around in my head ever since, waiting until I had time to write about it. During our pre-adoptive educational classes, we learned that as adoptive parents we have to take care not to overshare, because the story of our children’s adoption belongs to the children, to share or keep private as they see fit. This seems easy enough; somewhere between complete frankness and total secrecy lies a place called privacy, and that is where we walk, talking openly about adoption where it is relevant and keeping our children’s stories private when it is not. Any adoption story is really three stories: one belonging to the first parents, one to the adoptive parents, and one to the child… [more]

The current topic of the Open Adoption Roundtable was a tough one for me: If there's one thing we all might agree on, it's that we'd like our open adoptions to be successful. But what does “success” mean to you, when speaking about open adoption? Do you think it may mean something else to the others in your triad? If I were writing our open adoption into a story, it would go something like this: D, George, and I develop a close relationship, exchanging e-mails, letters, and photos, and visiting regularly. Perhaps we all share some of the more typical special family occasions together, but in any event we make the times we are together into our own special family occasions. JellyBean and Little Guy grow up knowing D and their… [more]

If you read this blog regularly, you might have noticed a pretty big gap in time between my last two entries. The reason for my hiatus is a happy one: On February 7, George and I welcomed our second child—a gorgeous baby boy who hasn’t yet been given a super-snazzy nickname like JellyBean, but who I’ll refer to here as “Little Guy” for the time being. Little Guy is JellyBean’s biological brother, and his arrival took us completely by surprise. The combination of these two facts has elicited a lot of questions from—well, from just about everyone who knows that JellyBean’s adoption is open. Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself having the same conversation over and over again: “I thought you talked to JellyBean’s first mother quite a bit.” “I do.” “And… [more]

I’ve spent several recent posts attempting to answer what turned out to be a much more complicated question than I’d imagined: Why open adoption? Clearly every parent involved in an open adoption has his or her own personal answers to that multifaceted question. Some may be similar to my own; others may be quite different, but the fact is that we all embark on the same sort of journey for a variety of different reasons. Likewise, it’s probably impossible to list all the reasons individuals involved in closed adoptions have for their decision not to embark on an open adoption. Online discussions about open versus closed adoption often degenerate into debates about individual personal reasons for choosing one over the other, and consequently for those who have chosen closed adoption, the… [more]

I had to think quite a bit about how I wanted to approach this edition of the Open Adoption Roundtable, which deals with disagreement about open adoption—between those on the same side of the triad. Initially I thought: I’m completely unqualified to even begin to answer this one. While George and I weren’t entirely on the same page with regard to openness when we first started out, we came to a consensus fairly quickly and easily. And certainly the “classic Hallmark movie of the year scenario” doesn’t apply to us; the few close relatives who had concerns early on in the process proved to be wonderfully open to learning about it, and with good communication we were able to dispel some of the myths and allay some of their… [more]

They say that loss is always involved on all sides of the triad—to the first parent, the loss of the placed child; to the adopted child, the loss of the first parents and of one’s own biological roots; to the adoptive parent, the loss of the biological child who might have been. But only the first two of these are strictly adoption-related losses: Had George and I never adopted, we still would have experienced the loss of our biological children who were never born; conversely, some parents come to adopt even though they are perfectly able to bear children (and often with biological children already part of their families). So while it is often true that there is loss on all sides, the losses of the first parent and the adopted… [more]