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Kelly,
our dd was placed with us as a foster child at the age of 10 days. Up to that point I had never even considered an open adoption. To be completely honest, we were initially willing to maintain contact with our dd's bfather in hopes that that would convince him to relinquish. Well, he did relinquish finally, but not because of that. And we do maintain contact, but not for that reason. After already promising the bfather that we were willing to maintain contact, I started researching open adoption and came to a whole new realization. My uncle is a psychologist and runs a group home for troubled teens. He works with several adopted children, and says that the ones that have some kind of tie to their birth family do so much better. I'm not trying to convince you to have an open adoption, just wanted to point out that there are benefits.
There are varying degrees of openness ranging from frequent visits, to occasional pictures and letters only. If your child did know their bparents it would be up to you how well, or even what to refer to them as. If you're not comfortable with actual visits (I won't lie -- it's not always easy), you could consider a semi-open adoption where you keep in touch with the bparents through letters and pictures, you could even send them through an agency and you wouldn't have to disclose each other's whereabouts or full names.
I can assure you that our dd knows who her Mommy and Daddy are. We are the ones who take care of her, we are the ones that she is attached to. I've also been told by some great members from this site that kids in open adoptions are less likely to have the "fairy tale" ideas of what their bparents are like, or what "could have been." If they know (at least of) their bparents, and know their reasons for placing them for adoption, it makes sense that they would be more secure.
You have to do what you're the most comfortable with, and like other posters before me have pointed out, there are bmother's out there who also want a closed adoption. I just wanted to share that I have found that open adoption is really not so bad.
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