the most controversial shifts is the introduction of open adoption as standard practice among many adoption agencies and attorneys."
Open adoption stands in direct opposition to traditional closed or confidential adoption practice, where birth parents did not know the identity of adoptive parents and could not engage in contact with the child or adoptive family after placement. Open adoption is defined as "the sharing of information and/or contacts between the adoptive and biological parents of an adopted child, before and/or after the placement of the child, perhaps continuing for the life of the child" (Berry 126). Adoptions can be open before placement, for a specific amount of time after placement, or for the length of the child's life. Openness can involve mere sharing of information during the placement period to meetings of both sets of parents or agreements concerning ongoing sharing of information after adoption.
Adoption experts today recommend that "matching adoptive and biological families partly on the basis of their choice of open, semi-open, or closed adoption" (Berry 126). Many adoption professionals advocate open adoption because of the heightened identity confusion felt by many adolescent adoptees, related to the secrecy surrounding their birth parents and past. A decline of available healthy infants for adoption has also empowered birth mothers or birth parents to have more control in the adoption process. Long-term research on families who engage in open adoption placements reveals several substantial benefits to openness:
. Adoptive families generally report that they do not feat that the birth parents will return to claim the child.
. Parents report that their children do not display confusion about who is the parent.
. Children can ask the difficult questions directly about the reasons they were placed for adoption.
. Bir...