Open Infant Program

What is Open Adoption?

Open Adoption offers children the opportunity to have a connection to their birth family. The adoptive and birth parents pledge to maintain this connection (through visits or letters) so the child will always have a link to his/her first family. While maintaining this connection, some birth families choose to receive photographs and letters throughout the years so they can have the joy of watching their child grow up. Other birth and adoptive parents enjoy a greater level of openness and have visits over the years. This is not co-parenting, as the adoptive parents will be the sole legal guardians of the child.

Open Adoption benefits for the child:

• Clearer sense of identity.
• Understanding they are loved by their birth family and why they chose adoption.
• Ready access to information about their medical and social history.
• Access to biological siblings, if there are any.

Open Adoption benefits for birth parents:

• Opportunity to choose and meet the family for their child.
• Ability to be available to personally answer their birth child’s questions about his/her adoption.
• Reassurance of knowing the child is safe and thriving.

Open Adoption benefits for adoptive parents:

• Knowledge that birth parents chose adoption freely and willingly.
• Feeling of entitlement and being personally entrusted to raise the child.
• Dissolution of fantasies about birth parents or fear of the unknown.
• Greater ability to answer the child’s questions about his/her origins.
• Ongoing access to birth parents’ medical and social histories.