Open Adoption - What Is It and Why Would We Choose It?

According to Wikipidia.org, "open adoption means that the birth mother and adopted family know who each other are. Even in an open adoption, the birth parents' legal rights of guardianship are terminated, and the adoptive parents become the legal parents."

What this means is that a birth mother (and possibly birth father) will be solely responsible for deciding who their baby goes to. Meaning, as long as each couple or single passes the agency's strict requirements and make it into the pool of viable candidates, they could be selected by the birth parents. Most agencies don't let the birth mother select until she is 6 or 7 months pregnant, but it is possible that they don't decide to give the baby up for adoption until after they have given birth.

I imagine an after birth call going like this:

Agency: "Hello Keith and Jon, a birth mother selected you in TX. She just gave birth and you can come pick the baby up if you would like."
Jon: (silence)
Keith: (chokes on mouthful of Green Beans he is eating for dinner)
Jon: (Begins Heimlich Maneuver)

This isn't as uncommon as you would think. Still, the choice is up to the birth parents.

Some people might think this creates huge complications for us and the baby. But if you think about it, I mean really think about it, it is what is best for the baby for a couple of reasons:

1. We get 100% custody of the baby.
2. We make an agreement for the amount of visitations and contact the child and birth parents will have. Both parties have to agree. This normally involves 2-4 visits a year and pictures twice a year (or so).
3. The baby never questions where they came from. There is no soul searching journey to find their birth parents who may have intentionally tried to avoid them by doing a closed, State adoption.
4. If the baby questions their birth parent's love, we can explain the inevitable horror of having to remove the birth mother's baby from her arms and how her heart looked as if it had broken into 5 million pieces.
5. We will know what kind of /problems/issues/diseases the baby is prone to based on the birth parents medical history which we can ask about at anytime.....to the actual source.....the birth parents.
6. The birth parents have the peace of mind of knowing and seeing that they made the best decision they could be seeing how cared and loved the baby is.

Finally, we choose this because many other options are not available to us and the few that are, are not really viable to us at this time. I want to clarify however, that even if the other options were available to us, this would still be what we chose.