Exploring the intricacies of open adoption

According to reports from U.S. adoption agencies, only 5% of domestic infant adoptions in recent years were completely closed, meaning no contact between the adoptee and their birth parents. Research suggests that some level of openness tends to benefit adoptive families, birth parents and adoptees, but navigating those relationships still presents a host of challenges.

Author Nicole Chung has documented her experience growing up as a Korean American adoptee in a white family in Southern Oregon in her two memoirs, “All You Can Ever Know” and “A Living Remedy.” Her own adoption was closed, but she recently wrote about the intricacies of open adoption for The Atlantic. She joins us to talk about her reporting.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. According to reports from U.S. adoption agencies, the vast majority of domestic infant adoptions in recent years were open, meaning that there was some contact between adoptees and their birth parents. It used to be the exact opposite, nearly all adoptions were closed.

That was Nicole Chung’s experience. She grew up as a Korean American adoptee in a white family in Southern Oregon and had no contact with her birth family in Washington state. She wrote about her life in the memoirs “All You Can Ever Know” and “A Living Remedy.” She recently published an article in The Atlantic about the intricacies and the challenges of open adoptions with a focus on the experiences of birth mothers. She joins us now. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.

Nicole Chung: Thank you so much, Dave. I’m glad to be here.

Miller: What made you want to write about open adoptions?

Chung: Certainly, part of it is my own experience as an adoptee. I am the only Korean American adoptee I’ve ever met who was actually born here, in Seattle in my case. So I grew up in the type of adoption I’m writing about in this Atlantic story, which is a domestic infant adoption. My birth parents were Korean immigrants to this country. I grew up at a time when, as you mentioned, most adoptions of that type were closed, meaning no contact and really no information, especially like identifying information – surnames, addresses, that sort of thing – so no information exchanged.

I grew up very curious about my origins. I didn’t really know open adoption was even a thing growing up as an adoptee in the ‘80s and ‘90s in Oregon, but I did make the decision as an adult to search for my birth family and to try to get more social, medical, practical information for my own sake. I had the experience of growing up in a closed adoption that I later opened up, essentially.

I really wanted to know what it was like for people now, given that most adoptions today, unlike mine, the vast majority are open with some contact and information exchange. I wanted to know what living in these arrangements is actually like, what are the relationships like, how do birth parents especially feel about them – not just at the time of placement, but several years on. Because as we all know, going into a situation, you might have some idea of what it will feel like, but expectations don’t always align with reality in the end. I really wanted to know what sort of work also goes into maintaining an open adoption relationship and specifically what, if any, options birth parents have if challenges arise.

Miller: I want to hear about all that, but I’m interested a little bit first in the history and you get into this in the piece. What was the thinking behind closed adoptions? And as you write, they were the norm for much of the 20th century. What were the reasons for that?

Chung: I do want to foreground, I’m not an expert in this. There are critical adoption scholars. I did a lot of research when reporting this piece, and one report I found, which was published by the Donaldson Adoption Institute, really goes into this history quite a bit. It talks about how the closed adoption of the type I grew up in, again, where original birth certificates are actually sealed to hide birth parent identities, and if you want to get that information as an adoptee there’s usually quite an involved bureaucratic legal process … Adoptions like that didn’t really become super common until the 1930s. According to the Donaldson Institute, this was really when certain cultural developments led to an even greater stigma against single mothers.

So that is the era of adoption that many people are familiar with. And at the time I was placed in, we’re still kind of in a position to expect a more closed adoption where if you relinquished a baby for adoption, you didn’t necessarily expect to have contact. Or if you adopted a baby in an adoption, you wouldn’t necessarily expect to have ongoing contact. But that really started to change in the ‘80s and especially the ‘90s, and by the early 2000s most adoptions were opening up.

Miller: But saying it’s an open adoption, it may imply to folks that there is something sort of standardized about this, but it seems like there’s actually a ton of variability. So what kinds of different arrangements would all fall under that broad term?

Chung: As you’re saying, it’s quite broad, and when we talk about openness and adoption, it’s truly a spectrum. You have some adoptions where, for instance, there are regular photos and letters or updates exchanged. And this can actually happen if people want to still have some degree of confidentiality. For instance, I spoke to some birth parents who used a third party platform, almost like a social media platform, to keep in contact with their child’s adoptive family. And not everyone chose to share surnames or addresses because they had this platform.

But many of the birth parents I spoke with had extremely open adoptions, on sort of the other end of the spectrum. They had regular visits, they would go on vacations with the adoptive family. They were like a regular presence in their children’s lives. So it really is a determination that’s made on a case-by-case basis. At the time of placement, what is the arrangement that the birth parents believe they want and that the adoptive families are comfortable with?

Miller: And what’s the form of these agreements, or what are the different forms?

Chung: I want to stress too, adoption policies are kind of always shifting practices, and then adoption laws and policies can also vary state by state or even in terms of practices, agency by agency. For instance, I spoke with some birth parents who had very informal agreements, like if they had anything in writing, they could not remember or weren’t aware of it. They might have gone out for a meal or spent time with the prospective adoptive family and they discussed what arrangement they wanted, and that was the agreement, essentially, a handshake sort of agreement.

Then on the other end, again, in about half the states – and I wrote about this in the piece – there are post-adoption contact agreements that are in writing, can be quite detailed, and about half the states they are actually court enforceable. Again, there’s just kind of a broad spectrum of options that are used across the country in determining open adoption contact.

Miller: Oregon is one of those states that has these court enforceable, post-adoption contract agreements. But what does enforceable mean if, as you point out, in the end it’s the adoptive parents who are a child’s only legal guardian, which gives vast amounts of control?

Chung: Right. So, in looking at the post-adoption contact agreements – the ones that are court enforceable, to be clear – and how they might be enforced, after being filed with the court, the idea is that the birth parent, or I suppose the adoptive parent, if there’s some breach in the contact agreement, they could take the other party to court. I should stress that that is generally seen, for good reason in many circumstances, to be not necessarily an extreme, like the last resort. You might try mediation first. Certainly, for people who adopt through agencies and trust their agencies, they might go to those agencies to help them facilitate or work through contact or communication challenges.

But if it does get to the court, the birth mother faces quite a few barriers. And I learned in reporting this, many birth parents cite, for instance, financial precarity as one of their reasons, often one of the main reasons, for placement. And yes, a birth mother’s circumstances could really change, but adoptive parents tend to be, on average, just better resourced financially. The cost of a private infant adoption in this country is quite high, so there’s that imbalance right there.

Also, just the emotional impact of choosing to get litigious in order to enforce an agreement like this. Many of the birth moms I spoke with, for most of them, they didn’t have these court-enforceable agreements. But for one of the mothers I interviewed for this piece who did have one, I think she used a phrase with me [that] it would break her heart to have to involve a court to enforce this agreement, because she does care a great deal about this relationship. And birth parents often would describe to me this sense of having to walk on eggshells. They don’t want to do anything to upset the adoptive family.

In addition, I’ll just conclude by saying a birth mother would typically really have to prove in court then that her presence in her child’s life is in that child’s best interest, and you might have adoptive parents saying that’s not the case. The adoptive parents might genuinely believe that that’s not the case. It’s not a simple thing at all if a birth mother wants to enforce a court-enforceable agreement.

Miller: What were some of the reasons you heard about why adoptive parents chose to either effectively close their adoptions after the fact or bring serious new limitations to a relationship that had had more contact?

Chung: In my reporting … I’ll say too, I spoke with many people who work, for instance, with families that are adopting – so adoption agency staff and adoption attorneys – and some licensed therapists and social workers who’ve worked with adoptive families. All of these experts were sharing that in the cases where they saw contact decrease on the adoptive family side – to be clear, sometimes it is the birth parent who steps away for various reasons – they said sometimes it’s just often a case of people not being aligned on expectations about what an open adoption will look like, how much contact there will be, what it will actually feel like to live with that arrangement.

Then speaking with birth parents who shared really openly and honestly their trauma post-placement, the grief they were dealing with, how hard it was for many of them, even who desperately wanted to have that ongoing contact with their child, how difficult it could actually be to have those visits and then leave. I think sometimes – and this is some speculation on my part, I should say, and it’s not in the article – it’s a little bit understandable. I think when you see a birth parent really struggling, however they’re struggling, especially if they’re struggling with the relationship itself and maintaining contact, that could sometimes make an adoptive family uncertain.

Honestly, everyone’s circumstances are unique, so it’s hard to say for sure what it was or what it is that leads a given family to step back.

Miller: What did you hear from open adoptees about their experiences here of contact, say, with biological parents being limited or just what openness meant to them?

Chung: I spoke with just a handful of adoptees for this story. One of them was actually a birth parent herself, but she was adopted in the same era I was, so did not have a very open adoption. And then I spoke with a couple of younger adopted children for the piece. The quotes didn’t end up making it in the story. I spoke with them with their adoptive parent present. And it was just really interesting to hear about their circumstances. The ones I spoke with did have ongoing contact with their birth families. One of the children referred to her birth mother as “mama” and knew not only this person, but also their extended family. The adoptive family would make visits to them a couple times a year. For this child, this was their default. This was all they knew. In the same way when I was growing up, I knew nothing except for this closed adoption with no contact, no information, this child had the exact opposite experience and didn’t really question it.

I want to say too, to your earlier question, some of the birth parents I talked with whose contact had decreased, they speculated that maybe adoptive parents were concerned when their children were getting older and asking more questions. To some degree, I think I can sort of understand that, but I will say like with the young adoptee, especially that I’m thinking of here, there really wasn’t much confusion on her side, just because this is what she had always known. She told me, and then also her adoptive mother told me, just how much it meant to their family to have been able to have and to still have this ongoing connection.

Miller: Well, you do note, and to go back to your own story, that your birth mother reached out to your adoptive parents when you were young to see if they were open to her getting to know you. Your adoptive parents declined. Why?

Chung: It’s one of those things where, honestly, they never really gave me a full explanation. I think it would be difficult to offer one because by the time I learned that my birth mother had made this outreach, it had happened over 10 years ago. They didn’t tell me about it at the time. I do know that in my adoptive parents’ case, it would be far too simplistic to say they were threatened by my birth parents or afraid of my birth parents. But again, it was not the norm in adoption at all at the time for there to be openness or ongoing communication. I really thought they probably worried, actually, that I would be confused. And it’s possible that I would have been. For me, that would have been a big change, right?

Then I believe my mother had told me something about having read of a case or two where birth parents contested custody. She didn’t really give me more information than that, so I can’t speak to it, but these things were on their minds. And again, it would have been the opposite of everything we knew and of everything they expected our adoption to look like when they adopted me. I think it was just too much for them, really, to consider at that point in my life.

Miller: You basically say in this new piece that as you learned more as a young person, or maybe even into your twenties, what other people had that you didn’t have, there was a part of you that idealized, I guess, open adoptions. Now that you’ve done deeper reporting into this and have talked to a lot of birth parents, adoptive parents, people who had, in various ways, created open arrangements, I’m wondering if you think about your own life any differently.

Chung: Oh, that’s such an interesting question. Opening up my adoption when I found my birth family in my late twenties certainly changed my outlook on adoption. I do think reporting this piece and getting to talk with … in the end, I spoke with over two dozen birth parents, birth mothers. And I don’t know, I wouldn’t say it radically shifted my perspective on adoption, but I was so grateful to have gotten to listen to these stories and hear from these parents. Partly because I think that birth parent narratives are very underrepresented when we think about adoption conversations, especially those sort of in the mainstream, not just within the adoption community itself. It’s very easy to find adoptive parent perspectives. We are fortunately hearing more and more adoptee narratives. I feel that birth parents … I mean, research on them is hard to find. There needs to be more discussion, more listening to their stories.

I was just struck in the interviews by the fact that, in the same way that I’m familiar with adoptee communities that have formed, there are so many communities for birth parents and birth mothers trying to support one another and help each other through the hard days. There are communities out there partly because there’s kind of a lack of ongoing, post-adoption support for these parents who’ve placed, and they’re sort of doing it for themselves and forming these networks of support.

I was just very grateful to everyone who trusted me enough to speak with me because it definitely did provide me with such an important, valuable perspective on this issue that I’ve been thinking about my whole life.

Miller: Nicole, thanks very much.

Chung: Thank you so much, Dave.

Miller: Nicole Chung recently published an article in The Atlantic about open adoptions.

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