Michigan Trend Gaining Acceptance : ‘Open Adoption’ Preserve Ties to Birth Mother

When Lynn Cowsert gave her baby up for adoption 20 years ago, she was required to sign a document that said she was abandoning her son.

Signing that piece of paper devastated Cowsert almost as much as the thought of never seeing her child again.

“I was not abandoning my son,” Cowsert, now 40, said from her home in Traverse City. “I was saying that I needed to give him a family that could provide him with the things that I could not at the time.”

The wording of that release document was just one of the negative connotations that adoption carried with it at the time.

“Our society made him ashamed of me,” Cowsert said. “They were saying: ‘Here’s this woman who dumped you,’ when I was really trying to make a positive statement by giving him up.”

Knowing that her son will never know the details of his background--or his biological parents--weighs heavy on Cowsert’s mind.

“And it will always hurt that I will never have the chance to tell my son I love him and explain why I made the decision I did.”

Cowsert’s painful experience with the traditional, closed adoption system has propelled her into the forefront of the open adoption movement.

She is now vice president of the Michigan Assn. for Openness in Adoption, a new, nonprofit organization formed to promote the acceptance, education and research of open adoption.

Open adoption can range from an anonymous exchange of information and letters between the birth parents and adoptive parents to pre-birth meetings between the two sides with a plan for a continuing relationship after the child is born.

Although this method has been practiced for about 15 years in varying degrees in a few places, the program in this northwestern city on Michigan’s Lower Peninsula is considered by many to be the most progressive in the United States. Its founder, social worker James Gritter, has completed more than 150 open adoptions in eight years as child welfare coordinator at Community Family and Children’s Services of Traverse City, the social services arm of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Gaylord.

Although most adoption agencies in the country are beginning to offer open adoption, generally in the form of a single meeting between the birth mother and adoptive parents, very few will assist in setting up an adoption involving continuing contact, said Reuben Pannor, a former Los Angeles social worker who has written extensively about open adoption.

Pannor said that the practice is most common in California, but that the Traverse City program is “as open” as any he has seen.

About 75% of all pregnant women who come to Gritter’s agency wind up requesting a fully open adoption, including continuing personal contact with the child. Almost all want to choose the adoptive parents from profiles of couples in the agency’s pool.

Some women even choose to select the adoptive parents early in the pregnancy and have them accompany her to doctor appointments and act as natural childbirth coaches in the delivery room.

“In those cases, the adoptive parents can share that delicious anxiety that adoptive parents in a closed placement never experience,” Gritter said. At the same time, the birth mother receives the emotional support that often is otherwise unavailable.

In most traditional adoptions, the birth and adoptive parents are never identified to one another and the only information exchanged involves the birth mother’s medical history and racial heritage.

That was the way Mike Spry and his wife, Jean Rokos, always had thought of adoption. When they first heard about open adoption, “I thought it was an absolutely crazy idea,” Spry said.

Four years later, the couple has two children adopted through the Traverse City program.

Now an enthusiastic supporter of open adoption, Spry founded and is president of the state advocacy group for openness in adoption. He and about 20 other adoptive parents in the association have contributed to a book on their experiences, which is due out in the fall.

The main reason the Sprys changed their minds was their hope that it would spare their children the emotional burden many adoptees face due to the secrecy surrounding their biological parents. The Sprys have kept the doors literally open for both birth mothers.

“Part of the beauty of this program is that we were there when they said goodby to the babies, so we can fully appreciate just what kind of sacrifice the birth mother has made,” Spry said. “Now I want to give something back. I want that person to be a part of my life.”

Amy Winn, 20, of East Lansing, Mich., the birth mother of the Sprys’ 1-year-old son, said open adoption has been ideal for her.

“The reason I know that I’ll never try to get him back is because I can always know how he’s doing and how much he’s being loved,” she said.

The potential for interference by the birth parent is a criticism that Gritter hears often. He contends that the open environment discourages harassment.

“When a woman enters our program, her whole plan is for the child to do well in life and for her to know how the child is doing. For her to misbehave in any way really only serves to undercut her very own plan,” Gritter said.

The open adoption agreement is legally non-binding and either party can pull out at any time.

One of the major benefits is that the adoptive parents can be licensed as foster parents so the baby can be placed with them immediately after birth. In closed adoptions, the child must go to a separate foster family for several weeks until the end of the legal period during which the birth mother can change her mind.

With the benefit of getting the baby early comes the risk that the adoptive parents will have to give the baby back if the birth mother changes her mind before signing the release papers.

Fifteen percent of the women who enter the Traverse City program decide to keep their babies before that legal period is over.

Gritter said that’s a positive.

“From the outset, our goal is to find a way to keep the baby with the birth parents,” he said. “If the birth mother changes her mind, we’re with her a hundred percent.”

Such situations are difficult for the adoptive parents.

The Sprys’ second child was with them four days when they found out that his biological father was preparing to sue for custody. They gave the baby back.

“The program prepared us for that possibility,” Spry said. “We never lost faith in the program. And we jumped right back into it.”

Critics say women who request open adoption often do so because they are psychologically unready to part with the child.

Gritter counters that it is perfectly natural for a woman to want to remain part of the child’s life. In fact, he worries about birth mothers who seek a closed adoption.

“We worry that their motivation is a sort of denial and that they won’t come out of it as healthy as the birth parent who has actively done what she could for her child,” he said.

The Traverse City program grew out of Gritter’s desire to see birth parents treated more humanely and to allow adoptees to have as much autobiographical information as possible.

He also believes that the principles on which confidential adoption was originally based--to avoid the stigma of illegitimacy--are obsolete.

Faulty Premise

But leaders in the field of traditional adoption contend that open adoption is based on the faulty premise that closed adoption has not worked.

“There has never been reliable data to show that adopted children suffer emotionally,” said Jeff Rosenberg, spokesman for the National Committee for Adoption, an adoption advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

Rosenberg compares openness to joint custody in a divorce settlement.

“It’s not joint physical custody, but it is joint psychological custody,” he said.

His biggest fear centers on the relative newness of open adoption.

“There’s no way to know what kind of effect this will have on children,” he said. “What gives these people the right to experiment with children’s lives?”

Gritter said the effects of open adoption won’t be known until the children mature and follow-up studies are done. But he predicts that within 10 years all adoptions will feature some sort of openness because birth parents will insist on it.

“Its underlying principles are that honesty and openness are generally healthier than secrecy and deception,” Gritter said. “It’s based on the idea that people are entitled to as much information about themselves as possible, that they should have access to the information that is vital for their sense of self.”