MELANIE BOLL
Open Adoption: Closing the Door on a Secretive Past
The concept of adoption can be traced back to the ancient Romans when wealthy families with multiple sons would give them to other families of nobility to evenly disburse their wealth and power (Jones, 2019). Knowing that, it may come as a surprise that it took until 1851 for the first modern adoption law to be written in the United States. For the next hundred years, adoptions were what are now referred to as closed adoptions where there is no information or communication between the adoptive family and the biological family. It wasn’t until the 1970s that former adoptees began advocating for their birth records to be unsealed, thus sparking the idea of open adoptions. In an open or semi-open adoption, there are varying levels of communication between the biological and adoptive families. Sometimes, this communication is just done through the agency with no identifying information given. In other situations, the biological family can be seen almost as extended family to the child (Mehan, 2013). It took another 20 years for open adoptions to gain traction, but they have become increasingly common since the 1990s. Despite closed adoptions being more popular in the past, experts are finding that open adoptions, whether fully open or semi-open, are the better option for the biological family, the adoptive family, and the child involved. Traditionally, adoption records were sealed to hide the shame of young mothers who gave birth out of wedlock. The secrecy within the system stemmed from the secrecy within the community as families would pretend that their daughters didn’t have a baby (Mehan, 2013). This caused a lot of grief for those young women who were forced to give up their 139
