Wash. Post story about open adoption

Very long, but very good article.

God Bless!!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: nancyvalko
Date: May 7, 2007 7:16 AM

Comment: My oldest daughter went through an open adoption. It was quite an experience and I can see how it could be a disaster. However, it has been wonderful for her and Meghan, my 8 year old granddaughter.

   Releasing a child for adoption (we never use the term "giving up") is a very painful but heroic decision. Open adoption is not set in stone and it naturally evolves over time. We are blessed that Megan's parents are two of the most faith-filled, generous people I know and that Meghan knows that her birth mother loved her enough to pick such wonderful parents.

Nancy V.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/03/AR2007050301212_pf.html

Open (Secret)
For generations of adoptions, the birth mother was an anonymous woman who relinquished her infant and then receded into the shadows. That is so not Hava Leichtman.

By Liza Mundy
Sunday, May 6, 2007; W18

SLIGHTLY MORE THAN FOUR YEARS AGO, on November 15, 2002, a 26-year-old woman named Hava Leichtman sat in a Michigan courtroom, still enervated, and sore, from giving birth. Ten days earlier, she had delivered a baby: her first child, a boy. She loved him deeply and immediately, and named him Jackson Jeffrey. In front of her now, a magistrate was asking whether she truly and willingly wished to relinquish Jackson Jeffrey Leichtman for adoption by a Fairfax County couple named Larry and Ann Goldfarb.

Hava, at first, could say nothing. She was crying too hard, and shaking. Beside her sat the baby's birth father, a man with whom she had an on-again, off-again relationship; although he had taken care of Hava during the pregnancy, the birth father had made it clear he did not envision a future with Hava and a child. Behind her, rubbing her back, sat her mother, Gail Katz, who had stood by Hava through struggles with mental illness that included an eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and a bipolar disorder that causes bouts of severe depression. It was her mother, Hava feared, who would bear the brunt of child care if she decided to keep the baby. Drifting in and out of college classes, unable some days to even get out of bed, Hava believed that she wasn't equipped to raise a child as a single mother.

Hava nodded. The magistrate told her that nodding wasn't enough. She had to say yes or no.

Go here for the rest of the article.....