An article came across the news today about adoptive parents in New Zealand pushing for legislation that would require open adoption agreements to be legally enforceable.
I was wondering if the people here would support legislation that required adoptive parents to honor open adoption agreements, and why hasn't similar legislation been proposed here in the US?
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Here is the text of the article:
Call to give birth parents contact rights under law
4:00AM Friday Aug 21, 2009
By Simon Collins
Adoptive parents are welcoming a call to rewrite New Zealand's 54-year-old adoption law - but say the most urgent need is to legislate for %26quot;open%26quot; adoptions where birth parents can keep in touch with their children.
Acting Principal Family Court Judge Paul von Dadelszen called this week for a review of the 1955 Adoption Act to remove discrimination against de facto and gay couples, who are currently barred from adopting.
But groups representing the country's dwindling numbers of adoptive parents said adoption was now so rare that they had had inquiries from only a handful of de facto and gay couples wanting to adopt.
Simon Kingham of the Adoption Option Trust in Christchurch said the biggest problem with the law was that it was written at a time when adoptions were %26quot;closed%26quot;, meaning birth parents gave up all contact with their children.
Today virtually all adoptions are %26quot;open%26quot; and birth parents actually choose the adoptive parents for their babies - and stay in touch.
Dr Kingham and his wife, Sue, have an adopted girl aged 6 and a boy aged 4. Both children see not just each of their respective birth parents but also their birth grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
%26quot;So in terms of grandparents they have six lots of grandparents,%26quot; Mrs Kingham said.
%26quot;For me, being brought up in an open adoption is no different from a blended family, you just have more people in your life to love you.%26quot;
Not all adoptions are quite so open. Mrs Kingham said some birth parents still wanted to keep their babies secret and just occasionally receive photos.
But Dr Kingham said Child, Youth and Family's adoption service encouraged open adoptions and New Zealand led the world with them.
The only problem was that, because the law had not kept up with changed practice, birth parents had no legal rights to maintain contact with their children if the adoptive parents later tried to exclude them.
%26quot;The law needs to change to give biological parents some legal protection against people changing their minds,%26quot; he said.
Adoptions have declined dramatically since 1955 as both solo parenting and abortion have become more socially acceptable.
Adoptions outside the birth parents' family rose from about 1000 a year in the mid-1950s to a peak of 2617 in 1968, but have plunged to fewer than 100 a year in most recent years. There were just 77 last year.
A group of Christchurch birth mothers are about to launch their own Birth Mums Support Network to support young mothers wanting to explore open adoption.
Michele Daly of the Auckland-based Open Adoption Network, a social support group for adoptive parents, said she had only 150 couples on her database nationally, 80 per cent of them in Auckland.
She said the group included at least one couple who married so that they could adopt, because of the Adoption Act's rule that only married couples or individuals can adopt.
The network also includes same-sex couples where one partner has adopted but the couples cannot adopt children together.
%26quot;My personal view is that the law needs to be changed so that it's a reflection of the society that we have today,%26quot; she said.
But Catholic bishops yesterday expressed concern that the debate about the law was focusing on the rights of adults, with almost no reference to the rights of children.
Bishop Peter Cullinane of Palmerston North said the church wanted to protect the rights of children.
%26quot;We accept the view, held by many researchers, that a mother's and a father's love are different and complementary, and that a child has a right to both.%26quot;
Would you support open adoption legislation?
At least some states do have mandated 'open adoption%26quot; visitation laws, but these usually apply only with older children, adopted out of foster care.
Lawmakers are not fond of open adoption agreements in newborn adoptions. The newborn adoption market is a competitive business, and many people involved in this industry do not want to uphold open adoption agreements.
Open adoption %26quot;agreements' are a 'come-on%26quot; to get vulnerable mothers to sign away their rights.
ETA: the visitation laws which apply to the older children are based on the %26quot;best interest of the child%26quot; standard. This could also be applied to newborns. At least one state, Colorado, has already made a legislative declaration in which pre-birth bonding between mothers and their un-born children is mentioned. This was used to prevent medical personnel from snatching babies from mothers in hospital without a warrant.
ETA2: no babies should be removed from mothers unless it is determined that the mother is a clear danger to the infant. No babies should be raised by other people unless it is clearly in the infant's best interest. Pre-birth matching should be illegal. This presumes too much, and creates %26quot;entrapment%26quot; situations which result in too many natural parents losing children unnecessarily.
Would you support open adoption legislation?
I don't support any adoption legislation, as I don't believe adoption should exist.
I would support it. Women who surrender need laws to protect the promises made to them. My concern is, what happens if a surrendering mother finds it too painful to be around her child after surrendering? It has happened.
What I find really amazing about open adoption debates on YA are that people on here seldomly recognize that adoptive parents who try to keep an open adoption open----and many many many times it is the first parents who disappear or don't respond or who don't show up. If I was an adoptive parent who had first parents who disappointed their child and didn't show up when they were supposed to, that would be it because it is about the child. I would support it if it was a two way street and mandated that the first parents honor their part of the agreement.
Everyone who is an adult should put aside their personal feelings and pain to support his child. That is what I support.
Most every adoptive parent I know are extremely committed to the first parents.
I just don't see how a relationship can be required by law for either party. It's different than say a custody agreement in divorce because, in adoption, birthparents no longer have any parental rights. You'd have to change the whole definition of what adoption is to mean that adoptive parents don't have the right to choose who is a part of their child's life like other parents.
That being said, I think that it is completely dispicable for adoptive parents to NOT live up to an open adoption agreement, and I can't imagine, as an adoptive parent, not wanting as much contact as possible for my daughter.. I also TOTALLY do understand that it is being used as a manipulative tool to make a pregnant woman considering relinquishing more likely to do so and that some adoptive parents (not all) have no intention of living up to it after promising it, and that needs to stop. I would favor making pre-birth matching ILLEGAL before making open adoptions legally enforcable.
Yes, I would. As an adoptive parent myself I really think that %26quot;open adoption agreements%26quot; should be enforcable. Ofcourse there should be exeptions if ongoing visits or contact in someway puts the child in danger or is deemed by an outside party to not be in the child's best interest, but I imagine this would be only a in small percentage of private adoption situations. I don't think that legislation should dictact the level of %26quot;openness%26quot; in the agreement, but I do think any open adoption agreement made before the adoption should be honored if possible, and legally enforced.
I really believe that this is merely a ploy to increase the numbers of adoptions in NZ, as they have in the US. It is a marketing scheme, and it worked quite well here, promising the mothers anything to get the babies and then closing it, %26quot;in the best interest of the child.%26quot; I would have to see how successful mothers here have been in the handful of states that make them binding, after mothers are able to find, hire and pay an attorney who will handle their cases.
The only adoption legislation I would support is the opening of all sealed records to the respective parties involved, mothers, fathers and adoptees, and the elimination of the legalized lie, the amended birth certificate.
There really are very few closed adoptions anyway, since the mothers know the names and often the locations of the adoptive parents. That is not a closed adoption, as the ones in the BSE, where the children were taken by social workers and disappeared into a black hole, with not an iota of information given to the mothers.
Yes. Genealogists have found a way to help ancestors of former slaves trace their family tree but still adoptees and birth-parents are treated like non-events or sub-human without a past. It is criminal..
Yes, I would support legislation for open adoption agreements to be honored. I think it's horrific that some PAPs would lie through their teeth to get their hands on an infant...only to move away or simply not honor their verbal agreement.
Since I don't support adoption anyway unless there is no other family member willing or able to take a child, I would not support this legislation going forward. I believe legalized guardianship is in the best interest of a child whose parents are unable or unwilling to parent them.
What I might consider supporting is a retroactive law to reopen the supposedly open adoptions that were closed by adoptive parents once they got the child.
I know dozens of first mothers who surrendered believing that they would have an ongoing relationship and/or exchange of information/photos with their child and then once the adoption was finalized the adoptive parents either disappeared who developed amnesia. There has been no protection for these mothers who have been duped.
No
