"Open" versus "Closed" Adoptions

My mom's adoption was "closed," meaning that there was no contact between her biological and adoptive family. This has proved problematic for her for a variety of reasons. First of all, that lack of connection has instilled in her a sense of having been abandoned and a fear that everyone she loves will also abandon her, a realization she has only come to terms with in the last few years. Her adopted mother, my grandmother ("Nanny"), also made some accusations about her biological mother that my mother distrusts. One of the most practically challenging issues with a closed adoption is that Mom didn't have access to her family medical history. A friend of hers was also adopted in a closed adoption, and when the courts finally released her family medical history after years of petitions, she discovered that every woman in her family had had cervical cancer. When she had it checked out, her cancer was inoperable.

That lack of connection with one's biological family shapes an adoptee's understanding of herself. I think a lack of connection with one's medical past parallels strikingly with a lack of connection with one's heritage: one's family history in nonmedical ways. I understand that parents who choose to give their children up for adoption (I don't know another term, but I think "giving up" a child has possibly unnecessary connotations about sacrifice or failure--"I gave up on that kid...") should have the right to request some measure of privacy, because there are as many reasons for giving a child up for adoption as their are circumstances surrounding birth. The mother could, for example, be in social circumstances beyond her control, and, though she wants the best for her child, she must also protect her own safety by distancing herself from that child for whatever reason. But there is absolutely no reason why that child should not have access to his or her family medical history.

Luckily, my mom recently got the courts to reopen her adoption file! She has exchanged letters and emails with her biological mother, and has spent the last few weeks sending me updates on what she's found out about our family history. Beyond a practical need to know about the health of her family, she has for the first time gotten to hear about a family member who is a redhead like herself (my brother and I both are blondish). Getting that kind of connection--proof that she was born of real people with real stories and lives--has made her calmer and happier. I don't think all children have the same ideas about their adoptions, of course, but I think the court systems in each state and in the U.S. and hopefully eventually the world should be willing to provide as much information to those children as possible: as much opportunity for them to know that they have some agency in creating their identities.