Opening Up International Adoption
In the current issue of Newsweek, one mom writes about how she reluctantly permitted her teen daughters, adopted five years ago when they were 10 and 13, to see their birth grandparents. What she learned was that the relationships with the grandparents didn't take away their love for their adoptive mom, and it brought them some peace.
The essay was quite moving, and I don't think anyone reading it would have any doubt that this mom did the right thing. These kids had long memoires of their grandmother, who had raised them through much of their childhood. The grandmother had made it clear that she wanted to have contact, too.
But the question I, and many other adoptive parents, face is far more complicated: Should you try to initiate a relationship with birth parents whom your child never knew? Birth parents who may or may not have any interest in knowing their biological child?
In A Love Like No Other, a book published last year, I wrote about how my husband and I wrestled with that decision once we learned that it might be possible to track down our younger daughter's birth parents. We ultimately decided to go ahead and search for lots of reason.
But having reviewed the research on open adoption, I'm not convinced that openness is always better for kids; being exposed to birth parents who are living on the margins can be enormously disruptive and troubling. After decades of denying adopted kids the right to know that they were even adopted, I worry that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
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posted by pam at 5:54 PM
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