[A] state Senate measure signed into law this year makes open adoption agreements like theirs official in Pennsylvania.
An informal review of agencies in some of the 23 other states with open adoption laws found that few parties ever complained to the courts, requesting enforcement of the agreements, said Todd Lloyd, child welfare director of Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children. Rather, the contracts have served more as an official acknowledgement to adopted children that it’s all right to maintain some contact with their birth families, whether that means access to medical records, an occasional holiday card or a yearly visit to a birth relative’s house.
The goal is to encourage adoption, especially of older children from foster care, said Mr. Lloyd, who is helping to craft guidelines for parties and judges involved in future adoptions. Statewide, approximately 900 teenagers “aged out” of foster care at 18 last year without the support of an adoptive family as they entered adulthood.
“A lot of children fear being adopted because they fear losing contact with their birth relatives,” Mr. Lloyd said.
State-sanctioned open adoptions will make it possible for children to have permanent homes without any additional trauma from severing ties to their birth parents or to aunts, uncles, grandparents and siblings.
…
“Kids need to know their stories and have a connection. It’s important to their well-being and their sense of self,” said Sherry Anderson, a therapist and program director at the Three Rivers Adoption Council, who has raised nine adopted children.
“As children mature, they can handle the information in a more complex and emotional way,” she said. “If we don’t give them the information, they may think, ‘It must have been something wrong with me.’ ”
Ms. Anderson believes adoption provides “safety for the soul, body and mind of a child.” However, she also thinks that foster children placed in adoptive families “have a real potential for difficulty because they don’t have those genetic ties and have some level of trauma in their lives.”
“The new law honors those old relationships and makes it possible for children to maintain healthy relationships from their pasts. … It’s really developmentally sound,” she said.
via Breaking down open adoptions.
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How long will it take for the State of New York to follow suit. My mother is 83 years old and has been looking for her birth family for over 60 years. I hope it doesn’t come to the point where I bring her death certificate to a New York judge to open her records. She will be gone and never know who she really is.