Quick Links ----- Select One ------ Adoption Statistics Adoptive Family Groups Forum Adoptive Parent Profiles Birthfathers Birthmother Brochure Donate Faces of Open Adoption How to Adopt Mission Statement Open Page Newsletter Options Counseling Spanish Brochure

Open Adoption in the News

Stories of Open Adoption
“It’s just been life. It’s all I’ve ever known.”

By Jonel Aleccia
Medford Mail Tribune
October 2005

Stacey Bell was 13 when the letter arrived from Singapore. Heartfelt and full of remorse, it was a plea from the woman who gave Bell life – and then gave her to others to raise.

Sophia Gan wanted to explain the decision that led two international students in Eugene to deliver their first child to a Medford couple in 1986.

“Don’t hate me for what I did,” wrote Gan, who was 24 when she and her 29-year-old boyfriend discovered she was pregnant.

But Bell, who considers herself a typical Southern Oregon teenager, didn’t understand the drama.

“My first response was, ‘Why would she think I would hate her?’” recalled Bell.

“I’ve never been mad at her for anything. I’ve known it’s because she wanted what was best for me.”

Score one for Open Adoption & Family Services.

Bell, who’s now 19, was one of the first children placed by the agency that this week is marking two decades of service in Oregon and Washington.

That makes her and her extended family pioneers in an era when adoption moved beyond a culture of secrecy and shame to one of openness – and even ennui.

“It’s just been life. It’s all I’ve ever known,” said Bell, who’s more interested in her identity as a champion bowler than as an adopted kid.

She’ll discuss her experiences today as part of an adoptees’ panel at a 20th anniversary celebration of OA&sFS in Vancouver, Wash.

Acceptance was the goal in 1985, when OA&sFS was founded by John Chally, the state’s leading adoption lawyer, and Jeanne Etter, a Eugene counselor who worked with distraught adoptees yearning for information about their lives.

Their aim was to create an adoption process that brings together birth parents and adoptive parents in a lifelong relationship focused on the needs of the child, said Shari Levine, who has directed the agency for 15 years.

Two decades later, OA&FS has placed more than 900 children, nearly all newborns, organizers said. The ranks now include older children who regard the circumstances of their births as natural, even boring.

“My son takes it all for granted,” said Levine, 48, the mother of adopted kids ages 14 and 7. “I think that is the goal, to make it a non-issue. Look what a huge issue it was.”

Indeed, the silence that surrounded adoptions until late into the last century often left scars on children and adults alike.

Adoptees who wondered about their origins found the quest for identity dominated their adult lives, Levine said. Birth parents, particularly mothers, yearned for knowledge of the children they never saw again.

But for adoptees like Stacey Bell, no such angst exists. In fact, she has become almost inured to the dramatic story of her birth.

“People ask me, ‘Why did your birth parents abandon you?’” she said. “I don’t consider them abandoning me.”

Her birth parents, Sophia and Chin Kai Gan, were University of Oregon students from Singapore who discovered Sophia was pregnant shortly after arriving in the United States.

Because they were in the country on student visas, they knew they couldn’t halt their education for a baby.

So they contacted OA&FS, which had been open for mere months in Eugene.

At the same time, Mark and Jodi Bell of Medford knew they wanted to adopt. But the Medford police sergeant and his wife, an insurance executive, both now 47, said traditional agencies offered little hope.

“The waiting list was two to three years,” recalled Jodi Bell. “I remember leaving and feeling like they shot all of our dreams down.”

A state adoption worker recommended open adoption.

“She said the wait for placement was nine months,” Jodi Bell said. “I called that day, Feb. 12, 1985.”

Their first attempt at adoption was frustrated when the baby’s birth mother changed her mind after finding her family more accepting than she’s anticipated.

“One of the things I think the agency learned over the years was to make sure the birth mom’s support group is in place,” Jodi Bell said.

The second adoption attempt was successful. Stacey Bell was born on Aug. 6, 1986, in Eugene, a 7-pound baby with lots of black hair, recalled Jody Bell.

“We met with her birth parents when she was 15 hours old. We spent about two hours with her birth parents and then took physical custody of her when she was 17 hours old,” she said.

A few years later, the Bells adopted another daughter, Stephanie, now 17, also through OA&FS.

“People ask us if they’re real sisters,” Jody Bell said. “I say, ‘They’re real sisters at our house.’”

Sophia and Chin Kai Gan returned to Singapore, married, and had three other children, two girls and a boy.

Although contact with Stacey has been generous and consistent – cards, calls, gifts, even visits – the couple’s other children and extended family still do not know about her.

“They still feel that they would be disowned,” Jodi Bell says. “She’s a big secret.”

The Gans did not respond to an e-mail request to share their experience.

Stacey Bell characterized her relationship with her birth parents as good but distant.

“I consider them my family, but it’s very hard to get to know them,” she said. “When I talked to my birth father on the phone a few years ago, neither of us knew what to say.”

Similarly, the Bell’s younger daughter has limited contact with her birth family.

“Even today, she wants to see her birth mother,” Jodi Bell said. “She hasn’t seen her since she was 1 year old.”

Although all birth and adoptive families sign legally binding contracts that spell out contact, the actual connection varies widely, parties said.

Mallory Blaschka, a Medford birth mother, has maintained extensive contact with the adoptive family of the girl she delivered nearly two years ago.

Now 19, the same age as Stacey Bell, Blaschka visits four or five times a year, calls frequently and carries photos of smiling, blue-eyed Rebecca Weisbard.

“The best way to describe it would be as a playmate,” she said of her relationship with the toddler.

“I don’t have to discipline her. When I do see her, it’s fun. It’s almost the same as an aunt or with younger cousins. But the feelings are stronger.”

If the experience of Stacey Bell and other grown adoptees is an indication, such a matter-of-fact description of a complex relationship is more common than not.

“They were the ones who gave birth to me,” Stacey Bell said of Sophia and Chin Kai Gan. “But they weren’t my parents because they didn’t raise me.”