The Open Adoption Book: A Guide to Making Adoption Work for You

by Bruce M. Rappaport

Updated for a New Paperback Edition, the Definitive Guide to Open Adoption, by the founder of the Open Adoption Movement The exploding popularity of open adoption today underscores what adopting parents, birthparents, and many adoption experts now maintain: Open adoption is the healthiest, most humane, and fastest method available. It's better for the birthmother, because she (not lawyers or social workers) decides the future of her child. It's better for children, because they're raised without the shroud of secrecy and stigma that accompanies most closed adoptions. And it's better for adopting parents, because it dramatically shortens the time it takes to obtain a baby, from an average of seven years to under one year. As director of one of the country's leading open adoption agencies and founder of the first nationwide network of open adoption organizations, Bruce Rappaport has facilitated thousands of successful open adoptions and acquired an intimate understanding of the most common and heartfelt concerns of parents seeking to adopt a baby. Interweaving personal stories and real-life experiences of adopting parents, birthparents, and adopted children, he answers the questions clients most frequently ask:
* What is an open adoption? How does it differ from traditional adoption?
* Will I ever feel like a real parent if my child's biological mother knows I'm raising her child? Will she interfere?
* What if the birthmother changes her mind after the adoption?
* How long will it take to get a child?
Documenting answers with extensive personal experience and research, Dr. Rappaport paints a reassuring yet realistic picture of the open adoption process. The result is a highly informative, deeply moving book that will help many people realize the greatest joy life can offer.

Genres: Adoption, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1992

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was required reading by the agency we're adopting through this time. I think this was probably an excellent and timely book when it was published 25 years ago. Today, it's still a decent book, and I primarily found it interesting for the historical perspective it provided. I knew that adoption today looked different than adoption 50 years ago, but I didn't have a sense of what it was like at the time when that shift was happening. So that was fascinating to read about.

I would say that maybe 60% of the book's content is useful for parents adopting today through a private, domestic, agency adoption. You're going to want a lot of other background on adoption in 2017 to contextualize the information, though. For example, the author claims that birthparents who are mentally ill or do drugs are almost never found in open adoption because they don't have the wherewithal to pursue this kind of adoption. Now that open adoption is the default for most U.S. adoptions, rather than being an experimental new process, that is no longer the case. I think just in general, when Rappaport spoke confidently about what open adoptions were and were not like, it was because he was running one of the few organizations in the country who did them, and was likely in close contact with the couple dozen others who were doing the same. Now there is such a broad range of adoption agencies, the vast majority of whom are doing some form of open adoption, that you really can't speak that confidently about what the process will be like.

Aside from the anachronisms that pepper the book, it's a nice, possibly overly rosy perspective on open adoption relationships. I've read enough adoption books that I don't harbor the typical misconceptions about birthparents or adoption relationships, but this would be a good introduction for anyone who had such fears and misconceptions, which is probably why our agency requires it. Even though it's geared toward adoptive parents, I think it could also be a great resource for pregnant women considering adoption, as there seems to be a lot less understanding among the general population about how adoption works nowadays (compared to prospective adoptive parents, who are naturally inclined toward doing lots of research on it). Rappaport does a nice job of showing the benefits to birthparents of an open adoption arrangement, although I think he glosses way over the grief and loss that most birthparents feel.

Honestly, it was just kind of refreshing to read an adoption book that isn't about the worst-case scenarios from adopting children out of foster care or international orphanages. If anything, it made me feel sad all over again that our son's birthmother has not wished to have contact with us other than receiving a monthly update. Rappaport was a bit harsh on the negative consequences of a relationship like we have with our son's birthmother, which I understand from the perspective of wanting to sell the concept of open adoption, but sometimes you can be willing to have a fully open adoption and end up matched with someone who wants it mostly closed. I would have liked more information on navigating that kind of situation.

Is it worth a read? If you know nothing about the way adoption works today, how adoptive families and birthparents maintain relationships with one another, then I think you'd learn a lot from the book. Just keep in mind that it's 25 years out of date.

[ratherastory · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good example of a book that annoyed me in spite of the fact that I agree with the basic premise that open adoption is overall a good choice. The tone is patronising, and there's a large section devoted to the author looking down his nose at women who choose abortion or single motherhood rather than adoption. It was incredibly off-putting. The rest of the book is basically a cheerleading section for open adoption, with a brief chapter that gives lip service to the need for counselling for all parties involved. Dozens of positive "testimonials," often given without even so much as the first name of the person being quoted, with no other evidence given to balance it out. I realise the book was written a quarter of a century ago, which is probably why it's so much in favour of practices which are now considered unnecessarily coercive toward expectant mothers and fathers (extensive pre-birth contact, the presence of the prospective adoptive parents in the delivery room, etc.). The author also refers to expectant parents as birth parents, which was an irritant throughout the book. Birth parents are only termed thus *after* parental rights have been terminated and the adoption is final, not before.

[C. · Rating 2 out of 5]

My partner and I were assigned this book by our home study group as part of our adoption process. This book is probably great for someone looking into open adotion with either a)no idea what open adoption is or b)a great amount of fear and worry surrounding open adoption. Howver, since we've both done a lot of reading about open adoption and are not just comfortable with but excited by the idea of open adoption, there was little new in this book. I skimmed it in about a half-hour.

[Melanie Ridgeway · Rating 2 out of 5]

It had several chapters on how demoralizing and terrible for your self esteem that infertility treatments are. The phrase DUH kept running through my head didn't really think it was necessary in a book about open adoption. I believe open adoption is the best for all involved but the book wasn't as positive as I would have thought and left me feeling bummed about the process instead of excited.