[BarbaraB]

Hi CentralTXDad,

I don't think stepparent adoption is all that different, actually. The big difference is that the child is keeping one existing parent. But, as you said, our legal system recognizes one set of parents (although there are states that recognize two mothers or two fathers rather than one mother, one father). So, in a stepparent adoption, the non-custodial parent loses all rights and becomes, for most purposes, a legal stranger to the child.

I would guess that, in many situations, this does not happen unless there is some type of estrangement or abandonment of the parental role (note, I'm not saying all). In other words, if you have a non-custodial parent who is still an involved parent and who contributes financially to the child(ren)'s upbringing, it would be unlikely that the custodial parent would try to terminate their parental rights. So there would have been no perceived need, at least under the mind-set that has prevailed in adoption in recent decades, to have visitation or contact with the absent parent. The laws were not drafted to preserve those relationships, because if the relationships were strong, stepparent adoption would be less likely.

As pointed out earlier, the statutes that deal with open adoption were NOT all written with domestic infant adoption in mind. In FL, and I'm pretty sure in CA, along with at least some other states, they were really aimed at children who were already in state care -- children who might be older, who might have existing family ties or sibling relationships. So the reason for at least some of these laws was not so much creating any rights for the former parents, but giving children the right to have existing connections maintained -- particularly relationships with other children, who were easier to see as blameless in the whole situation.

But in some places, open adoption laws seem to be an attempt for the law to deal with the reality that some degree of contact before or after an adoption has become more and more normal.

A few years ago, in the context of grandparents' rights, the US Supreme Court said pretty clearly that parental rights will not be infringed on by forcing parents to agree to visitation with third parties, unless there is some harm that would result from denying the visitation. (This is really summarizing broadly; there was more to the opinion than that.) I'm not aware of any open adoption statutes being tested against that principle, but I think any such statute would have to be very carefully drafted to survive.

Having said that...most current open adoption statutes do not really force adoptive parents to agree to visitation. They allow adoptive parents to agree to visitation, and as part of the agreement, the adoptive parents sometimes also agree to mediate before changing the visitation or other contact (such as exchanging pictures). There is no statute anywhere in the US that would require adoptive parents to agree to visitation against their wishes, and no statute anywhere that would nullify or reverse an adoption just because the adoptive parents changed their mind about promised visitation.

Enough with the legalese. I think Mommy24 made a very important point, which is that open adoption agreements do not necessarily result in co-parenting or an "odd" relationship -- any odder than any other family relationship, anyway.

What is odd to me, as an adopted person and an adoptive parent, is that I would be allowed to meet a young woman at one of the most vulnerable and emotionally draining points of her life, make a promise to her that she would be able to know how her baby is, and then simply walk away from that promise.