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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 “safest” route is to say simply, “We chose closed adoption for personal reasons” without giving any insight into what those reasons are.
So this is a somewhat controversial topic in adoption circles: a sort of adoption-specific version of bottle- versus breastfeeding or spanking versus not spanking. And as with most controversial topics, potentially lively discussion is often hampered by those on different sides of the discussion retreating firmly into their own camps, complaining about the refusal of those on the other side to really hear their rationale—but all the while doing exactly the same thing.
I think this is a shame, because whatever our different choices in adopting, we all can learn something from each other. And so I’d like to invite some discussion of the topic here. Please be clear: I am not interested in debating the relative benefits of open versus closed adoption here; nor do I wish to dissect anyone’s personal reasons for choosing one or the other in an attempt to prove one way “right” and the other “wrong.”
What I do want is to better understand the more general reasons why some people choose closed adoption rather than open; I would also like to understand the more personal reasons individual adoptive parents have for not choosing open adoption. And I would love to be able to use this blog to occasionally discuss these issues in a respectful way, mindful of the fact that we all approach adoption from our own perspectives, informed by our own personal experiences, and that those experiences might, for perfectly valid reasons, lead us down slightly different paths.
So if you are an adoptive parent in a closed adoption, I’d like to hear from you. If you’re not comfortable posting a comment here, feel free to e-mail me privately; I will share as much or as little of your story as you’d like, and hopefully foster a little lively yet respectful discussion so that we can better understand each other.
