Topics Prospective Adoptive Parents and Birth Parents Must Discuss

Part 1 of 4: Your Commitment to Openness in Adoption

I enjoyed Heather’s post in her Crisis Pregnancy Blog about questions to ask prospective adoptive parents. All of her questions are excellent and I strongly encourage adoptive parents-to-be to review them and consider how you’d respond.

Several of the questions Heather poses require ongoing conversation (and sometimes negotiation) among birth and adoptive families. In the next series of posts, I’d like to address several of them from the perspective of an adoptive parent:

1. How do you define open adoption? What is your commitment to openness, and why? Are you willing to sign an agreement to that effect, and to seek mediation if things break down?


2. In an open adoption, what will we call the various grandparents? What will I be called?
3. What do you plan to name the baby? Do you plan to keep any part of the name I give my child?

How do you define open adoption?
“Openness” means very different things to different people, so it’s essential to define together what it means to you.

• Does it mean a one-time meeting with your child’s birth parent(s), before the child is born?
• Does it mean sharing last names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses?
• Does it mean exchanging the occasional letter and picture?
• Does it mean yearly visits at a neutral location?
• Does it mean regular, anytime visits among the entire extended birth and adoptive families?

What is your commitment to openness, and why?
Once you’ve ironed out what openness means to you, you need to discuss your commitment to it. It makes me crazy when adoptive parents promise a completely open adoption and later renege on that promise, simply because they now hold all the legal cards in the adoption.

It makes me equally crazy when birth parents vow to be involved in their child’s life and then disappear into the sunset.

If both parties are truly committed to openness, they need to be so for the long haul, and that means during their child’s entire lifetime. Yes, there will be periods during which interaction will wax and wane, but the point of openness is to ensure that both parties in the adoption have ongoing contact with the child. It’s not fair to anyone to make promises you don’t intend to keep.

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