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Open adoption is a form of adoption in which the biological and adoptive families have access to varying degrees of each other's personal information and have an option of contact. In Open Adoption, the adoptive parents hold all the rights as the legal parents, yet the individuals of the biological and adoptive families may exercise the option to open the contact in varying forms: from just sending mail and/or photos, to face-to-face visits between birth and adoptive families. ==History of openness in adoption== Although open adoptions are thought to be a relatively new phenomenon, in fact most adoptions in the United States were open until the twentieth century. Until the 1930s, most adoptive parents and biological parents had contact at least during the adoption process. In many cases, adoption was seen as a social support: young children were adopted out not only to help their parents (by reducing the number of children they had to support) but also to help another family by providing an apprentice. Adoptions became closed when social pressures mandated that families preserve the myth that they were formed biologically. One researcher has referred to these families, that made every attempt to match the child physically to their adoptive families, as 'as if' families. Open adoption has slowly become more common since research in the 1970s suggested that open adoption was better for children. In 1975 the tide began to change, and by the early 1990s open adoptions were offered by a majority of American adoption agencies.〔http://www.adoptionhelplawyer.com/tag/open/〕〔http://writepass.co.uk/journal/2012/12/open-adoption/〕〔http://adoption.about.com/od/adoptionrights/a/historyofopen.htm〕 Especially rapid progress was seen in the late 1980s and early 1990s - between 1987 and 1989 a study found only a third of agencies offered fully open adoption as an option; by 1993 76 percent of the surveyed agencies offered fully open adoptions.〔http://statistics.adoption.com/information/adoption-statistics-open-adoptions.html〕〔https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Summon/Record?id=FETCH-LOGICAL-c1346-8a25fdc07e0a1257e1bc2b7e8d11586e554550fafe69b4c63d73c774959a59de1〕 As of 2013, roughly half of US states consider them legally binding, however contact in open adoption is not always maintained. The social stigma of unmarried mothers, particularly during the Baby Scoop Era (1945-1975) rendered them social outcasts. By the 1980s the situation improved greatly and the vast majority of unwed mothers kept their babies.〔http://babyscoopera.com/〕 In a mother driven society after WWII infertile couples were also seen as deviant due to their inability to bear children. The social experiment of taking the children from "unmarried mothers" and "giving them" to adoptive parents became the norm during the BSE. These adoptions were predominantly closed. The records were sealed, biological mothers were told to keep their child a secret, and adoptive parents told to treat the child "as if born to". According to a 2012 report in the Washington Times 95% of US infant adoptions now have some level of openness between adoptive and birth parents.〔Lori Holden: The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013, p. 3., ISBN 9781442217409〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「open adoption」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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