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Open Adoption in the News

Open Hearts
Open adoption lets mothers meet prospective parents, bonding disparate lives through the love of a child

By Gabrielle Glaser
The Oregonian
Oct. 24, 2004

Last fall, Mandy Phibbs was a girl in trouble. But her predicament also put her in demand.

Mandy, three months pregnant, had decided to place her baby for adoption. One afternoon, she sat at the suburban Portland agency she had chosen, sifting through stacks of “Dear Birth Mother” albums filled with notes and photos from prospective parents. All the comfortable middle-class lives Mandy, then 17, knew she could not provide her child.

The agency had suggested that she set a list of conditions. And so she had: She wanted the parents to be Christians older than 35, married for several years and already raising a child. She ruled out families in Oregon: “Schools are better in Washington,” she said.

The most important requirement also created the most complexity: Her baby’s family must be within driving distance so that she could continue to be part of her child’s life.

She would eventually choose a couple in suburban Seattle to become her baby’s parents. They would be with her on the day of delivery and will be in her life from now on.

Such open adoptions, in which a child develops relationships with both birth parents and adoptive parents, are a striking departure from the secret dealings of a generation ago. Adopting families had scarce information about birth mothers, who after delivery left the hospital with little hope of ever seeing their children again.

The lifelong sorrow, well-publicized, of adoptees and birth parents eventually led to another model. The first open adoptions are believed to have started in California in the early 1980s.

Word of them has slowly spread. Officials are seeing an increase in the number of babies placed for adoption after decades of decline.

“Because of open adoption, more birth mothers are coming to adoption than ever before,” said Shari Levine, executive director of Open Adoption & Family Services. The Northwest agency, with headquarters in Portland, facilitates only open adoptions. Its placements have risen from 20 in 1985 to roughly 60 annually in the past few years, Levine said.

No central agency tracks private, domestic adoption statistics. But adoption officials who specialize in open adoption have likewise noted a rise.

Sharon Fitzgerald, of the nonprofit Independent Adoption Center in Pleasant Hill, Calif., said placements at the agency, which has offices nationwide, have increased 8 percent in the past five years.

“What’s more important than the raw numbers is that the nature of adoption is changing,” said Adam Pertman, author of “Adoption Nation” and executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York. “Birth mothers are no longer treated simply as baby making machines.”

From 1970 to the late 1990s, the number of children placed for adoption declined from roughly 90,000 to 50,000 annually, according to a recent issue of “The Future of Children,” a policy journal jointly produced by Princeton University and The Brookings Institution. The drop is attributed to the 1973 legalization of abortion, the availability of contraception and the growing acceptance of single parenthood.

Meanwhile, as many as 1 million families hope to adopt, said Brad Imler, president of the nonprofit American Pregnancy Association in Irving, Texas.

And as many as two-thirds of them, officials say, are now willing to welcome women like Mandy into their lives.

The process is not universally accepted. Thomas Atwood, the executive director of the National Council for Adoption in Alexandria, Va., sees problems with open adoption.

“It is not necessarily in the best interest of the child,” he says. However, there is little data to determine how openness affects children. He is concerned about cases in which the birth parents’ behavior may be damaging to the child.

Harold Grotevant, a University of Minnesota professor who is the co-author of a longitudinal study on open adoption, has found no evidence of harm to the child or to parents involved.

“Everything we’ve looked at disagrees with the premise that openness in itself is harmful to children,” he says. His studies have found that the open adoption process lessens the grief for birth mothers and was not harmful to the adoptive parents.

It is in the West, with a tradition of independence that lends flexibility to the notion of family, where open adoption predominates.

“In many parts of the East Coast, open adoption is just smoke,” Fitzgerald says. “But it’s wildfire in the West.”

In her first trimester, Mandy weighed her future as a mother, and it looked bleak. What could she impart to a child? She hadn’t yet graduated from high school. Her parents, young themselves, had divorced when she was small.

“They did the best they could,” she said, “but I wanted more for my child.”

She was raised by her father, Shawn Phibbs, a contractor. But at 16, she chafed at his rules and struck out on her own. She had a bout with drugs and drinking, started seeing a man many years older and moved into his trailer on the coast. She soon discovered she was pregnant.

Not long afterward, she left the man and returned to the home of her father and stepmother, Fawn, 44, in Forest Grove. Fawn, mother of a 24-year-old son, is an advertising executive who grew up in foster homes.

Both insisted that Mandy, who hopes to join the Air Force, continue her education, and Shawn, 39, encouraged her to consider an open adoption.

After their own two decades of child rearing, they felt ill-prepared to raise another child. And Shawn told Mandy: “You can’t go to college with a baby in your back seat.”

Throughout her pregnancy, that crisp sentence became Mandy’s mantra.

Abortion was out of the question. She had had one, at 14, and her eyes well up when she thinks about it. She still can’t forgive herself for it, she said.

So one by one, she called adoption agencies listed in the yellow pages and met the one she felt accorded her the most respect. Some of them, she said, treated her like she was just a number.

The first “Dear Birth Mother” album Mandy saw was from Jan and Ken Sharp, a suburban Washington couple in their 40s with a 2-year-old son, Sam. As she sorted through all the others, the Sharp family kept drawing her back. Jan, a former teacher, and Ken, an assistant suburban fire chief, seemed to radiate warmth even from the laminated pages.

“There will rarely be a day that I won’t think of you and wonder how you are doing,” Jan wrote. “Just as you will think of your baby and me, I will always remind this child that they are lucky enough to have two mothers who love (him or her).” The words were compelling – and revealing.

“It wasn’t all about her,” Mandy said.

Other details hit Mandy just as powerfully. In a photograph of the nursery, Mandy saw the same white crib she had picked out for the baby if she decided to raise the child. In another photo, Mandy spotted a pair of papier-mâché figures from Mexico. A friend of Jan’s had given them to her as souvenirs, and they perched on a living room coffee table.

Mandy recognized them instantly; Fawn had some nearly identical ones in the Phibbs’ home.

To Mandy, the figures took on a totemic meaning. The represented the steadiness Fawn, whom Mandy calls her mother, had brought to Mandy’s life.

“When I saw those things, I just started bawling,” Mandy said. “They were the right ones.”

But that didn’t help the conflicted feelings Mandy had about the strange relationship that drew them together. The Sharps were unable to have a baby but could educate and care for one. Mandy, 17 and pregnant, was unprepared for motherhood.

“I felt like I didn’t deserve my baby,” Mandy said.

Last Halloween, Jan was chatting with some relatives when the phone rang. It was the Sharps’ caseworker, calling to say an Oregon birth mother wanted to meet them.

Jan was stunned – and wary. Nothing in her path to parenthood has been easy. Infertility was painful enough, and adoption was proving no less trying. Sometimes, she wondered if she wasn’t destined to remain a teacher, shepherding children to adulthood only in the classroom.

Once the Sharps turned to adoption, they were chosen quickly by a birth mother. But the adoption fell through at the last minute when the father refused to sign termination rights – from prison, no less.

Nine months later, the Sharps adopted Sam after a surprise call. He was 7 weeks old and had been in interim foster care as legalities formalized from his birth father’s home state of South Dakota.

Ken, 46, had a daughter from a first marriage, now 22, and together, he and Jan had Sam.

“Let’s count our blessings,” he told her. He couldn’t bear to see his wife endure any more torment.

But Jan, 41, an energetic woman with expressive hazel eyes, was reared in a large Roman Catholic family in Wisconsin. She couldn’t imagine just one child in her life and persuaded Ken to keep their file active at the agency just a few more months. Then the call came.

Within weeks, the Sharps drove to Portland to meet Mandy at the agency. They had instant rapport, and the couple went with Mandy to her obstetrician’s appointment.

Jan stood watch over Mandy’s gel-covered belly as she peered at the ultrasound screen. A 9 ounce fetus floated peacefully, spine and organs intact.

“It’s a girl,” the technician announced.

During her pregnancy, people stopped Mandy to ask her what she was having, what she was naming it, and if her nursery was ready. She was blunt with questioners: “I’m having a girl, I don’t have a nursery, and I’m not naming her. Her parents are.”

People look at her strangely, but she didn’t care.

“Why lie?” she said. “People look at you like you are a terrible person, but really, it’s the opposite. You love your baby so much, you want to do the best thing for it.”

Sometimes doubts filtered through, but Mandy considered her reality.

“My baby deserved two parents who didn’t fight and the opportunity to go to college. I’m an 18-year-old barista with a high school diploma and no health insurance. How could I support her?”

Adding to the picture was the birth father, who could not be reached for this article. He was reluctant to sign off on the adoption, Mandy said, but finally consented.

In late April, Mandy was ready to give birth, and the Sharps drove three hours to the hospital. Only Fawn stayed in the delivery room.

Finally, little Chloe was born. She weighed 6 pounds, 2 ounces.

Within hours, Mandy asked to sign the papers that would relinquish her parent rights. The birth father came to the hospital to sign them, too, and quickly left. Mandy wanted to do it soon so she could just focus on the baby.

On Chloe’s first night, Jan slept with Mandy and Chloe in the hospital room. Mandy didn’t want to be alone, and Jan didn’t want her to be. So Jan slipped on a sweat suit and climbed onto the room’s pull-out chair. Whenever Chloe budged in her cot, Mandy woke up and fretted that she needed a bottle. But Jan told her: “Honey, she’s just stirring. Go back to sleep.”

The next day, Many didn’t let Chloe out of her sight. She put the baby, swaddled in the hospital receiving blanket, in bed next to her.

“I just wanted her to know how much I loved her,” she said. “Knowing I was all she needed, it was perfect. Everything we did was good

“I’m better off and she’s better off, but those first few days …” Her voice trails off. “They were so sweet and so perfect.”

The goodbye, however, was not. As she prepared to leave the hospital, Mandy held Chloe tightly. She told her how much she loved her and explained her decision.

“I knew it wasn’t logical,” she said.

Then she dressed her in a flowered cotton outfit and asked the nurse for a duplicate set of footprints. Chloe slept, oblivious to the emotions around her.

Jan and Ken stood by, both hopeful and helpless.

“What do you say to someone?” he asked. “Thanks?”

There is perhaps never so much expectation for a human being as when a newborn leaves the hospital: Tired but glowing new mother, surrounded by flowers and balloons, holds a bundled infant. The baby’s face is obscured by a little hat, and it is almost always asleep. But that never stops relatives from snapping dozens of pictures.

In open adoption, though, even that scene is tinged with grief and the sense that perhaps things might have been different.

Tears slid down Jan’s face as she took Chloe from the nurse. She kept thinking about Mandy. “Focus on the baby,” she told herself.

Once outside, Jan and Ken locked Chloe, snug in her infant seat, into the car. Shawn helped steady his daughter as Fawn loaded her trunk with Mandy’s bouquets, the giant birthing ball and a teddy bear.

And like Chloe in the car driven by her father, Mandy slid into the back of the car driven by hers.

As Jan and Ken fastened their seat belts, Jan turned to Ken and said: “This looks good on paper, but it sure doesn’t feel right.”

Mandy dove beneath the windows so her weeping would be out of sight of the Sharps. She gulped for air like a fish on a boat deck as Fawn stroked her hair.

But she had to compose herself for a meeting at a restaurant with the Sharps and Chloe. Agency officials recommend such “placement ceremonies” after the families leave the hospital. They serve as an emotional punctuation point at the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.

Shawn suggested going to The Spaghetti Factory, a Portland establishment known for its raucous family birthday parties. He thought the restaurant’s commotion might detract from the occasion’s sadness.

Everyone was exhausted. At the restaurant, Chloe was perched in her car seat between Jan and Mandy. Mandy had no appetite and looked over often to check that the baby was breathing.

Ken and Jan presented Mandy with a gift, a necklace with Chloe’s birthstone, a diamond.

The couple had pondered what to give her for weeks. Even now, Ken perhaps still wonders. “What is appropriate?” he asked as he bounced Chloe, now 5 months, on his knee.

“Here we are, with the big pay-off, a beautiful, healthy little girl. After our dinner, we were driving her up to a big celebration with her brother, her grandparents and a whole family of aunts and uncles.”

“And poor Mandy,” he said. “Mandy was just going back home to her room. Mandy wasn’t pregnant any more, she didn’t have any doctor’s visit any more, and she was all alone. You can’t imagine how awful you feel. Overjoyed you have that baby but awful thinking of what the birth mother is going through.”

He was right to wonder. Certainly, the dinner hadn’t brought much “closure” for Mandy. That night, Mandy took one last look at her room and turned around. Without her belly, without her baby, her own double bed seemed enormous.

So she slept on the living room couch, just outside her parents’ room. In her hands, she held the receiving blanket that still smelled like her baby.

During Mandy’s pregnancy, Shawn had detached himself from its realities. “She’ll give it up and we’ll all go on,” he thought to himself. A trim, muscular man with a boyish face, Shawn is a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for a decade. As he recalls holding Chloe for the first time, he brushes tears away from his fists. “I just wasn’t prepared for how much I’d love her.”

As he told his granddaughter, the possibilities, and the past, flashed before him.

“I wasn’t the perfect father to Mandy,” he said. “With Chloe …” He looked outside, unable to finish his sentence.

Now, though, his role was to help his daughter through her grief. Though Mandy has the help of agency counselors, the truth was unavoidable: she had, at least in part, lost her baby. Fawn tried joking that they needed Costco-size supplies of Kleenex, but no one much laughed. Privately, Shawn told her: “Let’s just go buy a crib and tell Ken and Jan, ‘We’re going to raise that baby.’” Fawn replied: “I absolutely agree.”

He shakes his head, as if shivering will somehow loosen his sadness.

“We’re intelligent enough to separate emotions from our actions, but if we’d been given a choice at that moment, we would’ve grabbed Mandy and Chloe and brought that baby home – and not regretted it to this day.”

“It’s hard to give part of your family away when you never really had one yourself,” Fawn said. “Ken and Jan are giving Chloe the best childhood she can have. Raising a family is hard work, and it’s tiring. They’re only just starting. They’re giving her better than we could give her. Better than Mandy could give her. That’s the intellectual reality.”

But when babies are involved, emotions often eclipse reason. So the night before the Sharps left for home, Mandy, Fawn and Shawn drove to see Chloe at their hotel room.

Mandy held and fed Chloe and thanked the Sharps again and again. In turn, they thanked her yet again.

“We all knew, in our heart of hearts, that it was the right decision for Chloe, for us to adopt another child, and for Mandy to allow herself to grow into the young woman she could be without the pressures of motherhood,” Jan said.

But most everyone knows that “it’s-for-the-best” thoughts often feel much like bitter pills. Ken and Jan tried hard to smile as Mandy and her parents said goodbye and stepped out into the warm night.

A few moments later, the sound of Mandy’s sobbing drifted up from the parking lot. Jan glanced at Ken. Without a word, they crossed the room, away from the open window.

Early this fall, Shawn drove Mandy and a friend, Annie, to visit the Sharps.

Mandy and the Sharps have agreed to two visits a year. Sometimes a birth parent and the adoptive family will exceed an agreement if both parties are comfortable. Experts say birth mothers often want to visit more in the first year but will reduce their visits as the grief subsides.

In the best of times, hosts want the house to be clean, the food to be delicious. But when you are receiving the biological family of your baby, the stakes are perhaps higher. In open adoption, the etiquette comes with experience alone.

“You wonder: Are we extending ourselves too much? Too little?” Jan asked.

“We know we’re good parents and that things are going well,” Ken said. “But when the birth family’s coming, you want to be on top of your game.”

But the meeting was relaxed. Mandy played with Chloe as Annie and Jan looked on. Shawn and Ken watched football on television.

A few hours later, they left. Moments into the trip, Annie discovered she had left her coat. Shawn left the girls at a coffee shop and returned for it.

Shawn recalls that when Ken saw Shawn at the door, he looked anxious – until Shawn said, “Annie forgot her coat.”

Ken, though, remembers only finding the jacket and chatting pleasantly with Shawn. The fathers agreed that Mandy was doing well, and Ken saw Shawn off.

“Totally innocuous,” he said.

But the contrast in the impressions of that small exchange reveals something greater: Ambivalence will likely hover for years to come, on birthdays, during visits, and as the two families hang their Christmas stockings.

It is perhaps as much a part of the equation as tiny Chloe herself.