[cinderella07]

I'm a college student exploring people's experiences with adoption. I am also married and may not be able to have my "own" children and my husband and I are exploring adoption.

I am trying to speak to different adoptive parents and/or adoptees about their experiences for an independent study at school. If anyone would like to offer me some help I would appreciate it if you could PM me. I am not looking for names just experiences to further my research for school and discuss with my husband.

Thank you
Leslie

[jaenelle]

We signed up for open adoption, being open to almost anything including visits, and fully expected to have that in our lives. We were very leery of open adoption when we started researching adoption, and very nearly chose international adoption because of it. But after more reading and talking to people who have things like visits with birthfamily, we decided it was something we could handle if it would benefit everyone involved. So we checked that we were open to basically everything on our application form with the agency.

Our daughter's birthparents essentially chose a closed adoption -- our agency requires that we send photos and a letter every 6 months, and that is all the birthparents wanted. We have told them in our letters that it's fine if they want to contact us, but so far no response. Our daughter's birthmom had been discharged from the hospital before we were even called about our daughter, and we were not matched pre-birth by her choice. She did not want to choose the family, so the agency did, although she did want them to tell her about us and give her approval of us.

So we wound up with a very different situation than we signed up for. I am okay with it, because I truly believe it is what the birthparents want. If they wanted to contact us that would be fine with us. I really wish they would, actually.

[BrandyHagz]

Leslie,

Adoption involves 3 sides of the triad...Open Adoption is no different.

I'd encourage you to talk to all three sides, to understand the complexities involved in open adoption...rather than just two.