The Pros And Cons Of Open Adoption

After grueling labor and a few days in the hospital to recover, most new mothers carefully bring their newborns home for the first time to start their new life as a family. Although this may seem like an expected and natural occurrence, many couples will never understand the joy of bringing their newborn home from the hospital for the first time. For many parents, due mainly to biological factors, adoption is the only way to have children. The idea of adoption is often romanticized as being parallel to the experience of having a biological child, but unfortunately there are many factors that hinge adoption away from this parallel fantasy. Open adoption “offer(s) birth parents and adoptive parents the opportunity to share identifying information

When each of the risks are examined together, it becomes clear that the concept of open adoption is unfair because it stirs many unnaturally occurring emotions, situations, and distress. Open adoption is unfair because it stresses the relationship of adoptive parent and child, and makes vulnerable children cope with unnecessary stressors (Berry 128-129). One of the “biggest risk(s) of open adoption postulated by most adoption professionals is that it will interfere with the process of bonding between adoptive parents and child” (Berry 129). Whether through one-sided openness, challenges from contact, or withholding of information, open adoption cultivates unnecessary stress and worry. In a closed adoption, where the adoptive and biological parents do not have contact, the child does not have the burden of information, meetings, or dual standards that are present in an open

Inquiries and interviews reveal the shattered family view that open adoption adoptees face every day. Adoptees often “fight feelings of being unloved and unwanted, even though [they are] constantly told how much they [are] loved” (Siegel, “One Adoptee from an ‘Open Adoption’ Tells Her Story”). This often occurs because their biological family relinquished rights to the child and gave them to another family, only to infrequently and erratically surface in the child’s life, confusing their feelings of being loved and wanted. Family structure, according to one young adoptee, is “unstructured and ambiguous. It includes legal ties that lack genetic ties and genetic ties that lack legal ties, both of which have emotional ties” (“What Growing Up In An Open Adoption Has Taught Me As An Adoptee”). Adoptee’s feel as if they are a mistake, worthless, disposable, or worth less simply because they have a relationship with their biological family that is unnatural and unreliable (“What Growing Up In An Open Adoption Has Taught Me As An Adoptee”). As seen, the lack of genetic ties or legal ties greatly distresses young adoptee’s view towards family life and compassion from both biological and adoptive parents. By fostering an unnatural family experience supposedly in the child’s ‘best interest,’ participants of open adoption are