As you can see from the past couple of blogs, open adoptions are forging new frontiers that the English language has not yet adequately labeled. As open adoptions become more common, we will need to develop terminology that respectfully captures these new types of relationships.

For those of you who are hoping to adopt, some of these discussions might sound a bit confusing. I had never even heard of an open adoption when I started the adoption process. All that I knew about adoption came from watching TV shows. Adoption was always presented as a teenage girl getting pregnant and then “giving” her baby to an adoption agency with no input into who adopted the baby. Then the birthmother would pop up in the child’s life years later, which was sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing depending upon the direction the writers wanted to go to spruce up the storyline. Never in any TV show did an adopted child maintain any type of relationship with his birthmother during his childhood. So, I was completely blindsided when I heard about open and semi-open adoptions. I found the entire idea of open adoption scary, and I was completely opposed to even the slightest amount of openness.

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So, the next several blogs will be a series about open adoption – what it is, the pros and cons, and other issues surrounding open and semi-open adoption. To be complete, we will also discuss closed adoption.

I also want to add a disclaimer to this series. When I am talking about open and semi-open adoption, the context is with a birthmother who lovingly places her baby for adoption. I am in no way saying that open or semi-open adoptions are best for children who have been removed from abusive households. Whether or not continued contact with negligent or abusive birthfamilies is healthy is something to be determined by a child psychologist and is outside the scope of this series.