When Adoption Promises Are Broken

When I was born, my Korean parents, immigrants to the United States, relinquished me for adoption. At the age of two and a half months, I was placed with a white family who lived in a small town in Oregon. This was the early 1980s, and mine was a closed adoption, which meant that growing up, I had no contact with my birth parents. I didn’t know their names or their circumstances. I didn’t know why they had chosen not to keep me. I was curious and confused about my history, but my adoptive parents couldn’t fill in the gaps, because they knew so little themselves.

When I was in my 20s, I decided to search for more information about my birth family. This required that I pay hundreds of dollars to an intermediary, who petitioned a Washington State court to unseal my adoption records. She couldn’t share my birth parents’ names or contact information with me until she found them and gained their consent. Throughout the process, which dragged on for months, I thought about how things might have been different had I grown up in an open adoption, one in which I might have known more about my birth family and perhaps retained contact with them. I wouldn’t have had to wait decades, and I wouldn’t have had to shoulder the financial cost of a search, to understand where—and whom—I came from.

Back then, it was easy for me to entertain somewhat idealistic notions about open adoption, what I presumed were its benefits and joys. But the more I have learned and experienced in the years since, the more I have come to question some of those assumptions.

It isn’t difficult to find accounts of adoption told from the perspective of adoptive parents; in recent years, adoptee narratives have also started to receive more widespread attention. But to understand open adoption, you must begin with birth mothers—and research on birth mothers can be extremely hard to come by. Lisa A. Tucker, a professor at Drexel University’s law school, told me that when she speaks with Drexel’s research librarians—looking for recent studies on, say, “birth mothers and their emotions after relinquishment”—the librarians will often come back and tell her, “There’s nothing.”

Two years ago, I began interviewing birth mothers to try to better understand what living with an open adoption can be like: what kind of work and commitment are required to maintain openness and communication over the long term, how these individual birth mothers felt about their arrangements, and what rights or options they might have if challenges were to arise. In reporting this article, I spoke with more than two dozen mothers who’d placed their children in open adoptions, as well as with adoptees, adoptive parents, adoption-agency staff, adoption attorneys, and social workers with professional or personal knowledge of adoption. From those conversations, I learned that what openness means in practice can be incredibly fluid.

The type and frequency of communication can shift. A birth or adoptive parent’s expectations or desires might not align with eventual outcomes. Open adoption does not always ensure that adoptees will be able to maintain a healthy, continuous relationship with their birth family, or that they will grow up with easy access to their personal history—nor do formal or informal openness agreements always guarantee that a birth parent can stay in their child’s life. “We talk about open adoption like it solves all the ills of adoption, as if it’s okay for everyone because there are no secrets,” Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, a birth mother and co-author of the book Adoption Unfiltered, who also serves as the director of policy and advocacy at the nonprofit Ethical Family Building, told me. “In reality, the hurts of open adoption are just different.”

Many of the birth parents I interviewed had what they described as largely positive relationships with their children’s adoptive families. Most still had some contact with those children or their adoptive parents. But some, although they desperately wanted to see or speak with their child, were unable to. All of my sources helped me understand how varied and occasionally fragile open-adoption relationships can be.

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Take, for instance, Lindsay, a birth mother from the Midwest. (I am using only the first names of some of the birth mothers and adoptive parents who spoke with me to protect their privacy and that of their children.) Lindsay told me that she’d found out she was pregnant in January 2012. She was living in New York State with her fiancé, who wanted her to get an abortion, she said—and then she came home one day to find that he had packed up all of her belongings.

Her relationship over, Lindsay moved back to the Midwest to live with her parents. They had heard that a couple in their community were hoping to adopt, and the more Lindsay thought about her situation, the more adoption—specifically, open adoption—seemed like the best option for her child. She believed that her baby would be better off in a family with two parents. And she thought that because she was choosing openness, she would have a lasting connection with her child, something that was deeply important to her. She said she told the couple that she and her own parents wanted regular visits. She doesn’t remember the adoption agency providing guidelines for setting terms, or having a written agreement with the adoptive parents regarding communication and visits. “It was more of an understanding,” she explained.

At first, she had no reason to doubt that her wishes would be honored. The adoptive couple attended her prenatal appointments and birthing classes, and they were present for the delivery of her baby girl, she said. After the birth, planning visits was easy, because the two families lived close to each other. Lindsay was invited to birthday parties; the families exchanged emails, texts, and photos. When her biological daughter turned 7, however, something shifted. She said that her daughter had apparently started asking the adoptive parents questions about her adoption, and that they had asked Lindsay not to discuss the subject with their daughter unless they were present. She agreed but then was not invited to the next birthday party. And when she asked the adoptive parents for letters and updates, it began to feel “like pulling teeth.” Eventually, she said, the adoptive mother told her that the father would no longer allow visits. Lindsay has never been given an explanation.

Her daughter is now 13. Lindsay told me that she occasionally reaches out to the adoptive parents, “just to kind of remind them that I’m still here; I still very much love my daughter and want to be part of her life.” It has been more than two years, she said, since she received any photos or updates. Her primary reason for choosing an open adoption was to be available to answer her daughter’s questions. Losing contact, she told me, “is like having one of my biggest fears come true.”

Into the early 20th century, many adoptions in the United States happened within extended families, which meant that they occurred with some degree of openness. According to a 2012 report by the Donaldson Adoption Institute, entirely closed adoptions, in which adoptees’ original birth certificates were sealed to hide their birth parents’ identities, did not become common until the 1930s, when certain moral and cultural developments led to the greater stigmatization of single mothers. For decades after that, most parents who relinquished infants for adoption did not expect to see or hear from those children again. But by the 1990s, as the report details, open adoptions were on the rise due to a number of factors: a rising awareness that the secrecy of closed adoptions could have negative long-term consequences for adoptees and birth parents, the desire of many birth parents to maintain contact with their child, and the wishes of many adopted individuals to know more about their origins.

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Research suggests that adopted children tend to benefit from knowing their birth family, their history, and their birth parents’ reasons for seeking adoption. And although studies of birth parents are few, a 2007 study found that some mothers who maintained contact with their child reported less grief and a higher level of satisfaction with the adoption process than those who had no contact. Another study, published in Adoption Quarterly last year, likewise found that birth mothers who remained in contact with their child placed for adoption reported “significantly more satisfaction with their decision to relinquish.”

Today, nearly all domestic infant adoptions fall along a spectrum of openness: Many birth parents receive regular updates and photos, and some see their child in person. Meshan Lehmann, a pregnancy social worker at an adoption agency in Maryland, told me that “the entire adoption is an agreement based on promises: You promised to love and take care of my child, and in return you promised to keep me updated so I can see my child is okay.” Lehmann believes that most of the adoptive parents her agency has worked with take their commitment to openness seriously and honor the promises they made to birth parents.

Several birth mothers told me they had thought that adoption was the best or only choice they could have made given their circumstances. When they were pregnant and seeking information at adoption agencies, many said, they were told of open adoption’s benefits. They came away feeling reassured by the idea that they could remain available and connected to their biological child, that the child wouldn’t doubt that they were loved. “They build you up,” Ranyard, the Adoption Unfiltered co-author, said of some adoption agencies. “They say, You have the power; you have choice; you control how this process goes.”

But some birth mothers who put their faith in such assurances told me that they had done so without fully understanding how tenuous open-adoption communication agreements can be. Adoption is not shared custody or co-parenting. Once an adoption is finalized, the adoptive parents become the only legal parents, with the right to make decisions about their child—including who has access to them.

Adoption laws and policies vary from state to state. In about half of states, agreements regarding post-placement contact are not court-enforceable, regardless of any stipulations put in writing. Several of the birth mothers I spoke with were urged to meet with prospective adoptive parents to discuss their post-adoption terms informally. Some mentioned not being offered much guidance regarding how to communicate with the adoptive parents or sustain a healthy open-adoption relationship. “They never really gave any counseling,” Brina, a birth mother in Alaska who placed her son with an adoptive family in Washington State in 2015, told me of her agency.

When Ashley, a birth mother in Texas, placed her son for adoption in 2007, she initially asked for a “semi-open adoption,” with regular letters and photos, she told me. But in the days following her son’s birth, she said, she and his adoptive parents grew closer than she had anticipated. She recalled how they’d eaten Mexican food together in the hospital while she recovered from a harrowing delivery. “It felt comfortable,” she said, “like they could be family.” For the first several years of her biological son’s life, Ashley and her parents saw her son twice a year, she told me, and kept in touch with his parents over social media.

In 2011, Ashley received a message from the adoptive parents (which she allowed me to review) announcing that they believed that it was time to “separate our openness.” They said that their son, then 4, might begin asking questions that could leave him confused, and asked Ashley not to contact them via Facebook or request future meetings or photos. They added that it would be up to their son to decide whether to see Ashley when he was older.

Ashley doesn’t know what, if anything, her now-18-year-old son has been told about her. She can still see some photos of him on Facebook, and she told me that her mother contributes to an education savings account for him every month. But she said they haven’t contacted his adoptive parents for more than a decade, for fear of being blocked online and losing their last link to him. “I am absolutely terrified that they would take away what I do have,” she said, “because they took away what I did have.”

Advocates, adoption attorneys, and social workers I spoke with told me about practices that might improve legal protections for birth parents, such as ensuring that a mother is represented by her own counsel in an adoption. Many also said that court-enforceable post-adoption contact agreements, or PACAs, should be available to birth parents in every state. Such agreements may contain provisions regarding how and when important information will be shared, how often photos will be sent, and how often in-person visits will occur. They might also include sections on social-media boundaries, gift giving, and the option for future mediation should communication problems arise. “The message you’re sending” with a PACA is that “this is serious business,” Celeste Liversidge, an adoption attorney and the executive director of Ethical Family Building, told me. “This isn’t just a conversation that we had over dinner.”

Even a carefully crafted, court-enforceable PACA is not unassailable, however. One birth mother I spoke with, Erin, who lives in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, placed her infant daughter with adoptive parents who’d signed a PACA. The PACA, Erin explained to me, stated clearly that she wanted to see her child twice a year. But shortly before her daughter’s first birthday, she said, the adoptive parents informed her that they were moving abroad—something they had long hoped to do yet had not mentioned before the adoption.

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Erin told me that the family has made trips back to the U.S., but that she has seen her now-8-year-old only once in person since the family relocated. She said that she recently had a virtual call with her daughter, and that she hopes to establish a closer relationship with the adoptive parents, whom she considers to be excellent parents. She explained that she does not wish to involve a court; in the past, she was also advised that, because the adoptive parents now live outside the United States, holding them to their original, legally binding agreement would be challenging. Although Erin told me that she appreciates her agency’s efforts to help her reestablish regular communication with the adoptive family, she also wishes that she had added “tougher” language to their initial contact agreement, to more explicitly protect her rights. She had chosen open adoption “leaning on the fact that no matter what happened, I would get to see my daughter, and I’d get to be a part of her life,” she said. “That’s not what happened.”

If a birth mother does want to take adoptive parents to court for a contract violation, she needs legal representation—which not everyone can afford. Birth parents frequently cite financial hardship as one of their primary reasons for choosing adoption. If a birth mother retains a lawyer, she still needs to prove that contact with her is in the child’s best interest, as Tucker, the Drexel law professor, explained to me, which adoptive parents might dispute. Taking a litigious stance can also risk damaging an already-shaky relationship. A birth mother might not be getting the visits she asked for, but is she willing to risk angering the adoptive parents, who could disparage her to her child or further limit her access? If she’s still receiving photos or being permitted to call her child once in a while, is she willing to risk losing those remaining strands of connection?

Hope O. Helder, a birth mother who serves on the board of the On Your Feet Foundation, an organization that provides support and community for birth parents, told me that the power dynamic inherent in open adoption is why many birth mothers “live on eggshells.” “I’ve talked with hundreds of birth moms, and I’ve never met one who doesn’t feel that or worry about losing access,” she said. Adoptive parents “have all the control. They have the child.”

It is impossible to know how many birth parents in an open adoption do not have the level of post-adoption contact they want with their biological child. In one survey, highlighted in the Donaldson report, more than half of adoption-agency staff members said that they were contacted about a problem with an open adoption once or twice a year—a tiny fraction of their placements. Still, given that roughly 3,000 adoption agencies operate in the United States, this could amount to hundreds of breached contact agreements a year, Tucker has pointed out. The study published in Adoption Quarterly in 2024 found that 17 percent of the 223 birth mothers surveyed had previously been in contact with their child but were no longer. Seventy percent reported wanting more contact than they had at present. Among birth mothers who reported having no current contact with their child, 95.6 percent said that they hoped to reunite with their child.

Maureen Fura, who runs a birth-mother group through Postpartum Support International, which offers mental-health assistance to parents, still has a close relationship with the daughter she placed for adoption 27 years ago. But she told me that most women who come to her group have not gotten the level of communication or visits they were promised. “I think it’s cruel,” Fura said. “These women are erased.”

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In many cases, birth mothers are the ones who decrease or cut off contact in an open adoption, whether because of financial precarity, health problems, or other challenges. Some pull back because they find it too painful to maintain contact with the child they’re not raising. Several of the birth mothers I spoke with said they wished they’d received more mental-health support from their adoption agency. Fura told me she didn’t realize that placing her daughter for adoption “would be a forever grieving.” Visiting and then leaving her child, she said, used to plunge her into a deep depression, though she kept visiting. Later, when she had a second child, the grief from placing the first threatened to overwhelm her: “I thought I didn’t deserve to have a baby because I gave one away.”

One of the adoptive parents I interviewed, Jim—who lives in Pennsylvania and adopted a child in Maryland with his wife, Kim, in 2014—told me that their child’s birth mother hasn’t seen her since she was a baby, because it is too hard for her to face in-person visits. Their daughter’s birth father still sees her twice a year, and Jim told me that he and his wife are committed to their openness agreement, even though in years past they experienced some hitches: instances when the birth father didn’t show up, or acted erratically. Now visits take place at the adoption agency, with a social worker’s support, Jim said, and always go smoothly.

Some of the legal experts and agency workers I spoke with told me that they understand why adoptive parents might waver in their openness commitments when they see a birth parent struggling. But they also pointed to the need for agencies to better prepare prospective adoptive families, to help them understand the benefits of openness and the importance of keeping their promises. If problems do surface, adoptive parents can seek ways to address them: ask for supervised visits, involve a mediator, take any number of actions short of cutting off contact—which, Lehmann told me, should be the last resort.

In many of the conversations I had while reporting this article, birth and adoptive parents brought the focus back to their child, whose well-being they considered paramount. Jim told me that one of his and Kim’s priorities is to help their daughter build her relationship with her birth father, so she can make an informed decision about the kind of contact she wants to have with him when she’s older. Ranyard said that although she believes that she and her child’s adoptive family, with whom she has a good relationship, are “doing the best we can,” her child’s experience and his attitude toward the adoption over the long term will ultimately determine how she feels about her decision. This was a view shared by Brina, the birth mother from Alaska. She said that she greatly appreciates her son’s adoptive parents. But “the real judge of how well it will go” will be her son, “when he’s an adult.”

As a teenager, I learned that my birth mother had made an overture to my family when I was about 6 years old, reaching out via the lawyer who’d represented my adoptive parents. She had asked for photos, a chance to speak with me on the phone. In short, she wanted to know me, and so she’d tried to open the adoption herself. My adoptive parents had refused to allow contact or send pictures, and didn’t tell me about her attempt to communicate with us for years after the fact. They did allow their lawyer to tell my birth mother that I was “happy and healthy and doing well in school.”

Although my adoptive parents had always listened when I expressed curiosity about my birth family or sadness over having been given up, it was difficult for them to fully grasp how I felt. They did not understand the profound sense of racial and cultural isolation I experienced as an adoptee and the only Korean I knew growing up. Unlike me, they took comfort in the closed adoption, because it underscored their belief that our family was my only family. Yet when I set out to find my birth parents, they tried to support me. They were happy for me when, at the age of 27, I reunited with my older, biological sister, whom they eventually came to view as family too. In time, I believe, they also realized that some of their deep-seated fears about openness—that I would no longer consider them my parents, that they would lose me to my birth family—were unfounded. Opening my adoption brought us closer, in the end, because it required us to speak more candidly about it.

I would never call my reunion with my birth family a simple happy ending. It has given me a sister, new relationships that I treasure, and knowledge for which I’ll be forever grateful. It has also brought plenty of heartache, as I’ve continued to confront and process painful truths about my birth parents, their choices, and the sense of shame they still feel regarding my adoption. I now understand that no amount of openness in an adoption can change the past, nor can it, on its own, guarantee peace or healing. But I know one thing for certain: I would never wish my adoption closed again.

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