CLOSED VS.OPEN ADOPTION VS. NO ADOPTION

I continue to support open adoption as the only form of adoption that is at all responsive to the persistent needs for information and contact felt by some adoptive parents, and by most adoptees and birth/first parents. However, wooing women away from abortion by telling them a closed or open adoption is the answer is greatly misleading. There is not one shred of proof that any soul incarnates into a fetus early in a pregnancy, and there is substantial evidence to the contrary in thousands of descriptions from the age-regressed psychiatric clients of Dr. Brian Weiss Dr. Michael Newton, and research by Dr. Jim Tucker, to name a few. 

As souls, we incarnate to learn important spiritual lessons, and as should be obvious to any observer, our planet's population of women of childbearing age has never been larger. Any soul who is considering a particular incarnation has plenty of alternative choices if a pregnant woman decides to have an abortion. Adoption‘should NEVER be considered an equal alternative’ to abortion, because the psychological trauma of adoption  for birthmother and child is significantly more severe and long lasting than the symptoms following an abortion. Religions that prohibit abortion are anti-civil rights, relics of a patriarchal social structure that is quickly losing credibility in modern society. For millennia, men have designed laws and religions that gave them more power and privilege than women, and women have consistently suffered because of this imbalance in civil rights. Open adoption, for example, is no gift to women with unplanned pregnancies.

                                     IS OPEN ADOPTION WORKING?

Because it was a relatively new concept in the 1980’s, open adoption agreements were not codified into law. Ample time has passed to create legally enforced rights of first/birth parents and adoptees to some form of ongoing contact. Decades of open adoptions have proven it a model  relatively unburdened by secrecy, but legal consequences for breaking open adoption agreements are nonexistent. Tragic consequences have befallen birth/first mothers who were promised contact in written ‘good faith’ agreements, then were unable to cope with having their child ‘kidnapped’ and hidden from them during the child’s growing years.

People who cite this model as ‘failed’ because the ongoing contact initially desired may not work out in every adoption, would also be advised to look at the model we have for marriage, which has a fifty-percent divorce rate, yet still serves as a meaningful, viable family   relationship with legal and social obligations for visits and support. However, this “marriage” analogy falls short from the adopted person’s point of view in that many feel their civil rights were violated because they believe they did not choose to be adopted.

Some adoptees, on the other hand, have considered the vast amount of research on children and adults who recall previous incarnations, and have a belief that they chose to incarnate knowing they would be adopted. Some people who were adopted have expressed significant disagreement with the adoption industry in general, and with adoption laws in particular. They rightly resent the loss of ancestral information because it robs them of medical history as well as ancestral identity development.

Open adoption offers reassuring “proof of life” to birth/first parents, and opportunity for contact, but it is no guarantee that birthparents will not experience significant grief. Adoption abuses, such as lies, betrayal, coercion, manipulative ‘counseling’ and intimidation, have wrongly removed children from birthparents throughout history and continue to happen every day. Adoptees in open adoptions who have adverse experiences during visits with their birth/first mothers may refuse to see them in future without the adoptive parents present. 

Adoptees are the only citizens in the US who are denied (in 43 US states) the civil right to obtain their original birth certificates, and they deserve to have this right. At the present time, open adoption is the only way to provide this document prior to the adoption being legalized and the original record sealed by the court.

Open adoption may provide full information at the time of the adoption, but in most states, adoptees cannot obtain their court-sealed original birth certificates from the state in which they were born, if the document provided earlier were lost or destroyed. A federal law, recognizing this civil right for all US adoptees, is the only way this right can be guaranteed.

Blood (genetic) relationships are important, and so are adoptive relationships. They are so important, that people hold very strong opinions and beliefs about every aspect of genetic and adoptive relationships.

When I first entered the adoption reform movement in the 1970’s, the landscape of terminology (adoption triad, birth parents, adoptive parents and adoptees, closed adoption, open adoption) was being developed along with a demand for an end to secrecy. The term triad is being challenged because it implies three equal sides, and from a legal standpoint, only the adoptive parents have power, and the adoptee believes he or she had the least choice in the matter (precluding the situations in which adoptees believe they did make a choice).

Those of us who became mental health professionals in the adoption field called for reforms and created new models for adoption that acknowledged a woman’s right to choose adoption for her child, while at the same time, insuring that the adoptive parents processed their infertility-related trauma and made every effort to support the adopted child’s connection to his or her family of origin. In theory we know what a healthier version of adoption practice looks like, but it is likely that the majority of adoptions are not meeting this standard.

Some current adoption reformers with broad access to internet information, have scoured the adoption world with a fine-toothed comb and identified the amount of human trafficking associated with adoption. They have also extrapolated the similarities of some of these blatantly harmful illegal trafficking practices to pseudo-legal practices within the adoption industry itself. What they have found has enraged them, and understandably so.

Every reform movement has its radicalized members, but each organization has to be aware that radicalized members can retraumatize adoptees, birth/first parents and adoptive parents by bullying them to change their current perceptions, concerns, and associated terminology. Some radicals resent adoptees who want to move cautiously to bring their parents into an awareness of these issues, and often cast the adoptees’ bond with their adoptive parents as a false bond, a sham, with no inherent developmental value in its own right. Gross oversimplifications and generalizations like this are patently inaccurate, and, it appears, the accusers resent adoptees who are close with their adoptive parents. They appear to take some satisfaction is nullifying the value of bonds between all adoptive parents and adoptees because their own adoption bond was a disappointment.

Adoptive families can absorb new ideas better when they aren’t punished for choices and beliefs they formed under a different adoption paradigm. The people who manage and work in institutions associated with foster care and adoption require education and training, but when we demonize people they react with resistance. If we want them to be open to new ideas, we need to treat them with respect.

There was a reason that Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King became agents of sweeping cultural and political change: their commitment to peaceful non-violent protest. Granted, the civil rights reformers were informed by the opinions of radicals and even inspired by their refusal to kick the civil rights issues down the road, but they achieved success because of their dignity and civility in the face of opposition.

Were there tragic and politically-based abuses in India’s final transition to independence from Britain? Most definitely. Are there tragedies and abuses against women and people of color regardless of civil rights protections that were won despite tremendous odds? Yes. Is there something about the way human beings form democracies that are constantly under threat by criminal organizations, corrupt politicians and the agendas of racists, patriarchal fundamentalist religious zealots? Unquestionably.

Dignity, civility and non-violence are hallmarks of health. We need to take responsibility for our frustrations and impatience and channel those emotions into constructive ways to persuade and educate. As long as pregnant women are shamed or coerced out of abortions, as long as women have no substantive help with child support, day care and higher education, a number of them will choose adoption to avoid having themselves and their child trapped in poverty.