Today, Allison Quets pled guilty to international kidnapping. In case you can't place her, she was the 49-year-old mother who had placed twins (conceived intentionally, through in-vitro) then took them to Canada over Christmas-- without their adopting parents' consent.
Formerly an engineer with Lockheed of Florida, Quets reportedly suffered from severe hyperemesis throughout the pregnancy, and was in a weakened state when persuaded by a boyfriend to entrust her babies to a prospective adoptive family he knew from North Carolina.
Within hours of signing the initial consents, Quets says she knew she'd made a mistake and sought immediately to undo it. The adoptive family, however, wouldn't acquiesce, and Quets ultimately invested $400k (her life savings) in the battle to regain custody. But she'd regained nothing but visitation, by the time she spirited the children out of the country.
When news of the kidnapping hit the media, the collective groans of open adoption professionals could be heard from coast to coast. The story seemed to reinforce all the very worst public fears about openness, putting a human face on the proverbial "birthparent from hell." International adoption proponents gloated, opining (erroneously) that this nightmare "could never happen" in an inter-country placement.
But the truth is, this dispute wasn't about openness. Not really.
It was about a drive-by adoption gone bad. It was a transaction hastily arranged not after weeks of careful counseling, but rather, after two marathon sessions in a Florida attorney's office. Quets claims that she was heavily pressured to sign, and even called 911 in a desperate effort to seek police intervention at one point. But within a matter of days, the deal was done, her babies were gone, and Quets was launched onto a certain path towards maternal destruction.
Open adoptions require that the parties be cooperative, not adversarial. In the best open adoptions, all the parents of the child/ren involved share common goals and an unwavering commitment to their child/ren's best interests. Openness does not require that they always agree (or even always like each other), but rather, that they always hold the needs of the child/ren to be of tantamount importance, no matter what. That's what was missing between the twins' three parents.
Had everyone genuinely honored the true spirit of openness, this might never have ended up a front page story, at all. And two precious tots named Holly and Tyler wouldn't have to grow up with such a tragic footnote marking the very first chapters of their life stories.
