Ideal Adoption Laws?
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dil.ad ...@mhs.unc.edu (Dave Laudicina)
Lets start with (no means final just starting subjects).
1. Non - Profit agency 2. Referral network representing Birth parents interests.
3. All parties understand all options up front.
4. Ground rules for open adoption attempted to be set up front so all parties understand implications.
5. Birth records should be open to adoptees.
6. Mandatory education of open adoption its successes and failures in the adoption process.
7. Input on selection from birth parents.
8. Options for keeping child should be explained to birth parents before birth.
9. Medical, Education, after birth counselling for all members of the triad provided by agency.
10. Only expenses for above plus processing included in the adoption.
11. Love Thx Dave L
an ...@yfn.ysu.edu (Rosemarie Ventura)
1- Unless the birth family poses a danger to the child (history of abuse). Adoption records should be open to all parties and open adoption ahould be pursued.
2- Children should be raised with the knowledge they were adopted.
3- In cross-cultural adoptions, the adopted parents present a plan for raising the child with an awareness and appreciation of his/her background.
4- Children with physical/emotional/learning disabilities will be eligible for state ***istance (eg Medicaid) regardless of the financial resources of the adopting family.
hart ...@crl.ucsd.edu (Jeff Hartung)
And most of these coses are so completely off the scale because of the bloated, inefficient, overpriced bureaucracy that p***es for a health care system in our country. If physical and mental health of all citizens were recognized as a social and moral responsibility of the government in this country, as it has been in virtually every other major industrialized nation in the world, then these sorts of costs would be evenly distributed as part of the overall national cost of health care, rather than being packed into part of the adoption cost.
Instead, with every hospital, big and small, making sure that it has its own MRI machine and other multi-million dollar piece of equipment, regardless of how often it actually gets used, the cost of health care is grossly inflated, and efficiency goes down the toilet.
I also question the efficiency of these private agencies, though.
Though I agree that medical, social, and psychological services are all necessary for a successful adoption service, I also feel that there are lots of lawyers, bureaucrats, and health care professionals making a killing off these adoptions. Sure, the _organization_ may not profit, technically, but the individuals that run the place can have ludicrous salaries. I respectfully submit, Dave, that there is plenty of fat to trim from the private adoption agency budgets. For instance, I bet that one of the ways birthmothers are lured to the agency (and away from competitors) is by offering them expensive, private hospital rooms, right?
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--Jeff Hartung-- Disclaimer: My opinions only, etc., etc., BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!...
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hart ...@crl.ucsd.edu (Jeff Hartung)
I do not agree with manditory open adoptions unless there is some evidence of neglect. I disagree both as an adoptee, in which I am not certain openness would have benefitted me, and as a personal friend of people who are currently involved in an open adoption, which has enlightened me to the very special qualities that birth- and adoptive parents must possess in order for this to work out to everyone's benefit.
Completely open adoptions seem, IMHO, to require special people.
However, some degree of increased openness short of complete openness, such as contact through an intermediary, might be a reasonable requirement in place of manditory complete openness.
Naturally, however, I believe that seals should be removed once the adoptee becomes an adult ... to both the adoptee and the birthparents.
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--Jeff Hartung-- Disclaimer: My opinions only, etc., etc., BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!...
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os2u ...@kdiller.houston.ibm.com (Karen Diller)
I agree, Jeff.
A good friend of mine is a birthmother of a 2 1/2 year-old. She got to select the parents, met them before the birth, and receives a letter or two every year from the adoptive mother. She also has a collection of photos of her daughter. In all the pictures the child seems so healthy and happy. My friend says that without the mediated 'kinda-open' adoption she doesn't know how she'd make it. She's so glad that her daughter has a happy, healthy life so she knows she did the right thing.
She also has said that she wouldn't like a completely open adoption, with visits and all. It would stir up too many emotions. She prays for the day when her daughter will reach 18 and hopefully will want to meet her.
One thing I haven't seen enough discussion about on the newsgroup is the effect of completely open adoption on the mental well-being of children aged 4-18. My belief is that after the age of 3 or 4, the child understands more about what adoption really means, and that contact with a birthmother would be confusing. I also think that once the child gets into the difficult teen years, the tendency to say hateful things like "I'll go live with my real mom" would surface (***uming that the kid is having a difficult time with his/her parents during the teen years).
The concept of open adoption is fairly new and I don't think that there are enough children in that situation are old enough to conduct a good study about what happens later on. Another couple I know adopted a little girl two years ago with an open adoption. They are having second thoughts that it wasn't such a good idea now.
I'm all for open records after the age of 18, and birthparents need to know that their children are healthy and happy, but the completely open process spooks me. I think that not enough consideration is given to its effect on the child during the developmental years. Open adoption does require special people (adoptive and birth parents), but the child may not be able to handle his/her emotions as well as the grown ups...
OK folks, flame away!
Karen
an ...@yfn.ysu.edu (Rosemarie Ventura)
I don't see that the presence of a biological and adopted set of parents needs to be confusing for a child, particularly with "untraditional" families becoming almost the norm with divorce and all. I think some good comments have been made in viewing openness as a continum and not all or nothing.
sx ...@po.CWRU.Edu (Susan Kacerek)
Karen - open adoption is a relatively new practice in the field of adoption; there hasn't been enough time for logitudinal studies to indicate what sort of effect open adoption has on children (as you indicated later in your post). However, I would suspect that looking at the literature on step families would give a clue about how children respond to living apart from their 'nuclear, origina' (or whatever the correct term is) families. Maybe some on this newsgroup have had such experience?
Oops, I cut some off, but....
1) difficult times happen for all teens and parents 2) a) adoptees of the closed adoption type say such things b) birth children say 'I wish I was adopted - then I wouldn't be treated like this (or whatever)!
Just my 2 cents - SUE
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Susan M. Kacerek (sx...@po.CWRU.Edu) Alzheimer's ***ociation - Cleveland
K. Roper ROP...@QUCDN.QueensU.CA
RE Inheritance: Neil: Inability to inherit from a birth family isn't universal ...
if I recall correctly, inheritance is possible in part or all of Canada (Quebec springs to mind).
The bug in the works is due to the spreading of inheritance laws over miles of red tape spanning more than one government deparment at more than one level (Welfare (federal), and whoever deals with Child and Family Services (provincial)). It's a bloody mess, and it's not restricted to inheritance laws.
Your mileage may vary. Sorry I don't have references handy ... some of my kin shoot lawyers on sight :> Cheers (and Legal reform, dammit!) ... Kim
hart ...@crl.ucsd.edu (Jeff Hartung)
This needed some quotes, commas, or something. I just read my own reply and realized that it could be easily misinterpreted, if taken out of context! It _should_ have read: I do not agree with open adoptions being manditory unless there is some evidence of neglect.
As worded, it sounds like I don't think open adoption should be manditory _unless_ there is evidence of neglect ... duh! :-) (I'll try to read my own articles a little more carefully before hitting the 's' key from now on. :-) )
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--Jeff Hartung-- Disclaimer: My opinions only, etc., etc., BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!...
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sr ...@poe.acc.Virginia.EDU (Samuel R. Kaplan)
Rosemarie, Good point. The most important thing to remember IMO is that what is good for one group of people may not be as comfortable or good for another. Each set of circumstances demands its own solution along the continuum from fully closed to fully open adoption.
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************************************************************************* Sam Kaplan 804 982 5819 University of Virginia 804 982 5524 FAX Center for Public Service kap...@virginia.edu
k ...@netcom.com (Kevin McCarty)
It's my hunch that children will be much less confused about this than parents would be, since the children will have spent their entire lives in such a situation and so would not find it strange or *different from their expectations*. Any confusion they pick up will be learned from their parents. When it comes to difficult teen years, I don't see a whole lot of difference between threatening to run away to live with b-mom Sarah and threatening to run away to live with Aunt Stephanie. Either tactic could arise, and they would have similar significances for family dynamics of conflict & development. I mean, so what if such a thing happens, what's so bad about that? I firmly believe that, when it comes to raising children to adulthood, that is nowhere near the worst thing a parent will have to cope with.
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Kevin McCarty (k...@netcom.com)
pam ...@sscux1.ssc.gov (pamela gurd)
>... However, I would suspect that looking at the literature on step families would give a clue about how >children respond to living apart from their 'nuclear, origina' (or whatever >the correct term is) families. Maybe some on this newsgroup have had such >experience?
At the risk of going too far afield...
I have given birth to 4 children, Donna (whom I gave up for adoption, and with whom I have been reunited), 2 sons from my first marriage, and 1 son from my present marriage. When my first husband and I were in the throes of separation and divorce, I was against his seeing very much of his sons. It was an attitude that was still fairly common at the time, and I read at least one child-rearing book that advocated no visitation at all. But my ex-husband won his right to fairly liberal visits in court - and I feel strongly now that it was best for our boys.
6 years after everything was settled, when my oldest son was 13, he decided to go and live with his father. (His father lived in the LA area, and his best friend was moving nearby... This probably helped my own acceptance of it, that it was not a personal rejection.) I missed him. I was a single parent and very active in my children's activities, so I didn't have time to mope, but I did miss him. I felt a pang when I p***ed the high school.
But I did not feel the same sort of anguish that I still felt about Donna (whom I still had not met or heard of.) I was able to keep myself from interfering with my son's life with his father (although I suspect we still tended to compete with each other with gifts.) And I got to thinking that it didn't seem to be a problem for my boys to have a relationship with their father and their stepmother and me and my SO, or indeed for most of the kids they knew. The closeness of the relationships depended mostly on who they lived with and who they spent the most time with. The kids with the most problems were the ones whose fathers (usually) had completely left their lives, and they often seemed abandoned and lonely. Statistics I've read support this. (But, come to think of it, they probably don't separate lack of financial support.) It was a big problem for me, at the beginning, to deal with my sons' continuing relationships with their father - but beyond effects caused by my problems and my ex-husband's, my sons never seemed to have a problem with it at all.
Adoptive parents seem to me a little like how I was at the beginning of the divorce process: I wanted to deny the tie between my sons and their father. I am grateful that I didn't succeed. It was important to my sons to carry on that relationship. Even for the younger, who was a baby of one when his father left, and does not remember living with him, it has been important to know, in tangible ways, that his father cares about him.
I don't advocate the same kind of visiting frequency for birthparents as for non-custodial parents after divorce - after all, non-custodial parents have an existing relationship which it is painful to disrupt.
But I do feel that some of the same arguments hold, in particular the one that goes, "How can you say he/she still loves me when he never comes to see me?" and carries on with, "If he/she doesn't still love me, what's wrong with me?" No matter how much the parents-in-residence try to help with rationalizations, the questions are still there, and the answers still hurt.
Pam.
sr ...@poe.acc.Virginia.EDU (Samuel R. Kaplan)
Pam, So long as the adoptive parents sign on to this kind of arrangement from the beginning, you will get no argument from me. Some of the recent postings from this group imply that birth parents should seek out the adoptive families and negotiate this kind of arrangement well after the adoption. That kind of unilateral, after-the-fact change in the situation is the kind that I object to.
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************************************************************************* Sam Kaplan 804 982 5819 University of Virginia 804 982 5524 FAX Center for Public Service kap...@virginia.edu
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