Closed Adoptions vs. Open Adoptions

The term adoption generally refers to the inclusion of an unrelated member into another family. Closed adoptions disallow the adopted child or legal parents to obtain information about the biological parents. Modern laws curtail the total transparency of closed adoptions to grant further protections to the child.

Often, medical complications present a complex web of distressing situations to adopted children since they lack important knowledge of familial illness or chronic disease. To this end, many jurisdictional and State guidelines have addressed the complications posed by closed adoptions and started to allow certain information like ethnicity and medical history to pass to the legal guardian.

The recent adaptation to guarantee safe havens for unequipped parents in several states has further encouraged the practice of closed adoptions versus open adoptions. Since parents are allowed to drop off a newborn child at any fire department, police department, or hospital without any identifying information, the adopted child maintains specific disadvantages in later obtaining information about their biological parents.

Moreover, the initial protection of the child from incompetent parents surpasses the call for more open adoptions and proved a more immediate problem for certain jurisdictions.

In certain situations, open adoptions prove an impossible endeavor due to the perceived embarrassment felt by biological parents and the overriding national interest in protecting children first and foremost. Although the passage of certain information stands to aid adopted children later in life, certain undeniable situations confound this reality. Closed adoptions continue to comprise the largest of non-familial related adoptions and present certain difficulties for the legal guardian and child.