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Open Adoption in the News

Opening hearts, lives

September 3, 2003
By Mary Guiden
South Seattle Star

When Rainier Beach resident Dave McKinney was growing up, he never really thought about having a son or daughter. As a gay man, he says he never really thought it was an option available to him, so he didn't consider it.

Eight years ago he met his current partner, Duane Best. Best says that he always had the inclination to be a father: it is what he was created to do. "Being gay never was an obstacle [to having a family]. I hate to be all like, 'it's fate, fate, fate'.but I wanted to be with someone I'd really honor" as a parent to my child, Best adds.

Together, they made the choice to adopt and are now happily raising Mason, and eight-month-old baby boy.

How did they reach the decision to adopt, and what went into their decision in choosing an agency? McKinney and Best say they looked at options both international and through the state. The international route was ruled out, Best says, because the pair "would have had to lie" about their relationship. McKinney and Best also nixed adoption through the state because the end result was a closed adoption, a situation in which 20 to 25 years down the road, the adopted child may decide to seek out his or her birth parents.

Then the pair found out about open adoption, an arrangement in which the birth mother chooses the adoptive parents and continues to have a relationship with them and the child, thus doing away with a lot of secrecy that has surrounded adoptions for many years. McKinney says the approach, with its emphasis on truthfulness, "just made sense" for them.

To move beyond the mindset that he could not have a child or be a dad, McKinney read The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant. Penned by Stranger editor and nationally syndicated sex advice columnist Dan Savage, the book chronicles the journey Savage and his boyfriend, Terry Miller, took in the late 1980s when they decided to adopt a child.

McKinney says reading The Kid provided him with a certain amount of possibility and involvement, and the pair ended up working with the same Portland, Oregon-based agency, Open Adoption & Family Services.

Since its founding in 1985, Open Adoption - with offices in Eugene, Medford and Seattle - has placed more than 825 children in homes. Less than five percent of total placements, or 38 children, have been with same-sex couples.

Open Adoption & Family Services' executive director Shari Levine says including gay and lesbian couples among the adoptive parents' pool was a natural fit for the agency. "We don't impose any restrictions on adoptive parents based on their age, race, religion or even handicap status. We do a very thorough home study and background check interview.[and choosing] the parent is a decision that lies in the birth mother's hands. More and more birth moms will choose a handful of gay couples and a handful of straight couples, not judging them on their sexual preference. They're choosing the people they really think will be the best parents for their child," Levine says.

That is exactly the way it played out with Mason's birth mother, a 19-year-old Oregon resident Sarah Flick. Flick says when she decided to give her child up for adoption, she initially looked through a notebook that had information on more than 100 couples. She then chose 15 potential adoptive families and read through 20-to-25 page portfolios for each one. "As I was doing it, I was excluding people and including people. The bottom line is I just really liked [David and Duane], and I couldn't get them out of my mind. I was going in that direction no matter what I did," Flick says.

Meeting the pair in Oregon (with a mediator present from the agency) solidified what Flick says she felt in her heart. "I remember my aunt and I, we were so nervous, it was almost like meeting a celebrity, because we had seen so many pictures and read so much about them," she explains.

Choosing a same-sex couple as adoptive parents "was not a big issue," she adds. What worried her more was letting her family know that decision, because she was not sure how they would react. Flick says her parents were supportive, but that other, older family members who live in more conservative parts of the country "brought up how people would react to that [gay parents], how it might be a harder life for him growing up."

Best can relate to that mindset, because is family is Baptist and very "religious-orientated," as he describes them. "My folks are thrilled for us, they love Mason but it's also 'outside the nine dots' for them," he says. "The whole gay thing is issue number one with them, then bringing up a child into it.and then there's the whole, 'what if she wants her baby back?'" Best adds.

But at the same time, he says his parents have consistently risen above their opinions. "They introduce us to people, and they will say, 'this is Duane, and his son, and his partner, Dave.' Being able to accept that makes space for them to be loving," he explains.

Agency director Levine, an adoptive mom herself (Levine and her husband have two children via adoption), says that her agency is proving that adoption doesn't have to be negative at all, and that it can actually be a win-win for everybody involved. Her kids, she says, aren't plagued by the secrecy of closed adoptions and her 11-year-old son, Gabriel, is already figuring some of that out by himself. "He said something kind of brilliant the other day, that it's the unknowns that make adopted kids feel adopted. So if you have your story, you process it and it becomes a part of you. If you don't have your story, it becomes forbidden fruit and you go after that," she says.

Without that "forbidden fruit" in the McKinney and Best household, Sarah Flick is enjoying the chance to watch her son grow up in a loving environment. She sees Mason and spends time with the dads at least once a month; the open adoption contract only stipulated five visits per year.

"I really had no idea what it would be like, that may be why making the decisions was so hard, because you don't know exactly what it will be like. But I just can't imagine things any better. I am just so happy and I think that I made the right decisions. It's just so obvious to me how much they love him, and how much he loves them. Especially now that he's getting older, and he wants them more, because he knows that those are his parents.and I just love to see that," she adds.

McKinney and Best, likewise, enjoy the unusual relationship they have with Flick, as well as the chance to watch their non-traditional family grow. "One thing I find exciting is the level of creativity. Our relationship with Sarah is not like any other I have. She's not my sister, she's not my lover, but she's the mother of my son. We have a relationship with her parents [and other family members].and we're inventing this because they are non-traditional roles. It seems like there's nothing set for us. We get to choose the way to do it," Best says.