We’re celebrating by keeping Noah home from religious school so we can all hang out together. I feel guilty about this because usually I help serve lunch to the choir and there’s no way to get a hold of the woman to tell her that I won’t be there today. Damn.
There is an agent who is interested in seeing a proposal on the other book idea I have. I’ve given up on the secondary infertility book because the more I wrote on it, the more I didn’t want to write on it. (The proposal books will tell you that this is an over-looked advantage of writing a proposal — if you hate writing the proposal, you probably don’t want to write the book.) Anyway, this book idea is one I casually mentioned here about looking at openness in adoption and how it’s changing the way we think about adoption (or conversely, how the way we think about adoption is driving the trend of increased openness).
These are some of the things I want to look at:
- The activism around open records: What drives it, what gets in the way, controversy, where it’s headed.
- Research around openness, particularly the Minnesota-Texas study and a lot of anecdotal discussion including beliefs & fears and how they are true and how they are not.
- The way openness is used as a marketing tool in domestic infant adoption, the lack of open adoption support, the misuses of the term (open to describe semi-open).
- Which states have legally enforceable open adoption agreements and what that means in practice.
- Openness in foster-to-adopt, between siblings as well as parents. How family reunification policies seem to have contributed to the trend towards open foster-to-adopt placements.
- Reunion and opening closed adoptions.
- Openness in international adoptions — the ethics, the market (people who search for birth families for a fee, people who make money off photographing “finding places”, the cultural clash of adoption values). People who adopt siblings and open the adoptions to each other.
- I also want to talk to adoption professionals who are against openness and hear why and also why they think adoptions continue to trend to openness.
- And I want to look at how our values have changed — like how people used to not tell adoptees they were adopted and look at why that was and why the expert advice has changed on this and what the consequences were then and what they are now.
Now I want to ask — what are some things that you would want to read in a book about open adoption? This wouldn’t be a how-to — it would be a social/cultural exploration of openness in American adoption. It’s not just Open Adoption — it’s openness. What are you curious about it? What questions do you want to ask? What players do you want to hear from?
I’m going to work on this between writing jobs; it’ll be my big project for the summer.
