Blog Post #4 Option 1:

This week's theme of open vs. closed adoption practices is an intriguing element of adoption that I have never fully considered before. Adam Pertman's book, "Adoption Nation" was a great source to learn about people experiences with closed adoption. He presents many good arguments for the importance of open adoption policies and does his best to sway the reader by pointing out all of the benefits of having open adoption records. Although he is clearly biased in the book, I'm going to assume that his description of events such as 'the Fredericks' story and the variety of inconsistent laws across the United States, are true. Pertman says, "The list of disparate, confusing, and conflicting adoption statutes and regulations runs from coast to coast" (Pertman, p56). He more than provides enough information to decide that openness in adoption is the right way to go. 

The Anita Allen readings provided a similar approach to the Pertman readings; it begins with a story about adoptive parents that ended up in an uncomfortable situation with their daughters birth parents. She follows up by describing two models of adoption called fusion and configuration. The configuration model is one where the adopted child doesn't know their birth parents until they become older, if ever at all. Whereas the fusion model is one where there is a relationship maintained. She says, "Adopting parents gain family members but birth parents do not lost family members" (Allen, p53). In my eyes, the second situation has a variety of ways that it could go wrong and it worries me a bit, for the psychological well being of everyone involved. However it could become a very good thing as well. Allen claims that she, "does not think legislators should outlaw contact between birth and adoptive families, or even discourage it" (Allen, p51). But she also doesn't think that adoptive parents should be forced to maintain a relationship with the birth parents if they don't believe it's a good choice. I also agree with her viewpoint here.

On Tuesday, when the speaker came to tell our class about her adoption story, she seemed frustrated by her inability to seek out her true history through the documents that have been kept from her over the years. She kept her spirits up and had a sense of humor but I felt like I could hear in her voice how much hurt it had caused her in the past. Her story is one that I feel for. I believe she's more than old enough to be able to search out the information that could potentially help her medically, and if she wants to find out who her birth parents are, if they're even still alive, I don't see many terrible downsides. Ultimately I think it's the real life stories that really hit me hard. The two women that have spoken to us thus far haven't been trying to convince the class to go out and work for open records, per say, they've simply shared their painful experiences. This is convincing enough for me to say that I think a certain level of openness in adoption records is important for every state and that they should become uniform throughout all of the U.S. to make it an easier situation to navigate for everyone involved.