THE ENDURANCE OF BIOLOGICAL CONNECTION:
TRAVERSING OLD & NEW FAMILY VALUES THROUGH OPEN ADOPTION
Annette R. Appell
William S. Boyd School of Law
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
I. Introduction
The project I am talking about today seeks to have adoption inform family law at a time
when family law is struggling to reflect major changes in who and what families are. While
adoption has traditionally trailed biological and marital family formations, it has begun in
practice and law to accommodate the tensions between parental autonomy and the persistence of
biology. These accommodations contain a number of lessons for family law, including the
failures attendant to the pretense of rebirth and the apparent successes of blending birth and
adoptive kin to create new family systems.
United States family law is largely based on the modern family form and primarily relies
on biology and marriage to define family relationships and regulate rights, privileges and
benefits among family members and against the state. Nevertheless, the lived relations that
constitute postmodern families are much more expansive, increasingly fluid, and include adultadult and adult-child relationships that do not have the sanction of marriage or biological
connections.
As a reflection of this disconnect between law and society, family law has entered a
postmodern phase in which it is seeking to accommodate these complex and unstable family
constellations both by changing law to govern family formation and dissolution and by
protecting extralegal relationships that are formed intentionally and consensually. Thus,
postmodern family law is trying to reflect social, and not merely biological and marital,
relationships.
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In contrast, adoption law, which was institutionalized during the rise of the modern
family, both contradicts and mimics family law norms insofar as it discards biological
connections and then mirrors them as it seeks to replicate the nuclear, marital, heterosexual
modern family. Yet adoption law is also part of law’s movement to reflect the postmodern
family. The most noted changes relate to lesbian and gay adoption (and earlier to stepparent
adoption).
But there is more profound change occurring in adoption law that has gone almost
unnoticed. It is the legal regulation of post adoption contact among family members, also known
as “cooperative adoption” or “adoption with contact”. In some ways then, adoption law is
moving in the opposite direction from the rest of postmodern family law as adoption seeks to
better account for biological connections through adoption with contact. These two
developments speak to each other.
In any event, both family and adoption law are developing in ways that respect biological
and social parent-child relationships and the basic autonomy of families, no matter how they are
created. Nevertheless, some promoters of postmodern family law reform seek to minimize the
importance of biological connections and the biological aspects of parental rights doctrine while
maximizing the social aspects of parenting. Others seek to maintain the modern characteristics
and literal heteronormativity of modern family law.
My thesis is that family law is and should be changing to reflect our postmodern times,
but that biological connection remains extraordinarily important for moral, political, social and
existential reasons and should, therefore, be protected. I do not maintain that these biological
connections are somehow timeless and not socially constructed, but instead that they are still
important in our culture.
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II. Biological Privilege & Value
The freedom and possibilities that postmodern families offer are important (especially for
the middles class) and necessary, but they also have the potential to undermine maternal-child
relationships and to disconnect women from motherhood. Such a disjunction offers its own sets
of problems for families without much social or economic capital. For although family systems
may be changing, the political and economic aspects of modernity have become even more
effective at privatizing wealth and need, creating ever widening income gaps and inhibiting
social and economic mobility. In other words, our seemingly quaint notions of private,
biologically based families are part of the same political, social and economic structure that
produces and maintains poverty and wealth in the United States.
In this context, biological privilege is not necessarily a modern relic, but instead may be
the only wealth to which people have relatively equal access. The biological connection and the
privilege family law still affords it inures to the benefit of the most vulnerable families.
Moreover, biology remains important; we are not so changed socially that biological connections
are not still deep and symbolic of race, culture and even country.
This talk is part of a larger project that aims to anchor the postmodern family law
movement in the physical, social and economic conditions that affect the most disaffected among
us: those who are socially, economically and politically disadvantaged and those who have
experienced the legal loss of a biological parent or child.
Indeed, it is not necessary to undermine or devalue biology as basis of family to protect
or recognize other family formations, including adoptive families, kinship networks, and samesex or plural parent families. Nor is it necessary to discard these new family forms in favor of
modern values. More helpful is an enhanced notion of biological connection – one that accounts
for the social and political importance of biological connection, and what is the focus of this talk:
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the existential aspects of biological ties, the body work of bearing a child, and the palpability
genetic tissue for both the adults (adoptive and biological) and the children.
This part of the project explores the existential and social persistence of biological
connections and connectivity. It proffers open adoption as an instructive example for
postmodern families, particularly in the context of same sex couples who cannot reproduce
without another’s reproductive tissue or labor. These families and those of open adoption
replicate the postmodern family –

its deviation from the two-parent, heterosexual family (though still reflective of that
family)

the non-sexual reproduction of children through assisted reproductive technologies
(ART) and adoption; and

the actual or lurking presence of other relations (e.g., biological mother or father,
siblings)
But these open adoption families are not trying to escape the pull of biology; on the contrary,
they are embracing it. It appears that lesbian and gay families too may be embracing biological
connections.
Open adoption, particularly as it is regulated through adoption with contact, is an
example of the preciousness of biological connections and the various types of parenting
relationships adults can have with children that are both non-exclusive but also deeply protective
of family privacy and autonomy. The open adoptive family preserves the connection between
parent and child while creating at least one new non-biological parent in the child’s life.
The value of biology is deep and wide – for political and moral reasons, as I and others
have explored elsewhere, and for social and psychological reasons. This is not to say that biology
and biological connections are not constructed or are inherently important, somehow true, or
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otherwise absolute. It is to say that in our cultural and legal context, biology and genetic makeup, for better and for worse, matter.
The construction of race, deeply embedded in this country’s history and present, is based
on a set of social norms or understandings relating to blood lines, national heritage and often skin
pigment. Moreover, genes, genetic background, and family history increasingly inform medical
science.
For these reasons and for deeper psychological and social reasons, people are fascinated
by their genetic backgrounds and what it reveals about where they came from and who were their
ancestors. Most significant perhaps is the importance of biological connections and family
history to the formation of identity. For our identities are grounded in and informed by our kin –
fictive, imagined and biological.
Identity is a complex relational notion that lives in several oppositional frames:
psychological and political; personal and social; and invokes both difference and sameness. As a
psychological concept, identity is a developmental and non-linear process of identifying and
differentiating, leading to a sense of authenticity.
Politically, identity has been the basis for claims to civil rights arising out of difference
(disparate treatment) and belonging (entitlement to societal goods). Personal or subjective
identity refers to the unique aspects of a person formed through relationships and experiences
while social identity refers to one’s membership in specific groups, e.g., racial, professional,
social, gender.
We all navigate these various aspects of external projections and belonging and of
personal experiences, relationships and constitution. But through the navigations of oppositions
on these various planes, we negotiate how we are like and unlike others: what makes us distinct
and what makes us belong. It is through this process that we identify who we are.
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The complexity of identity is particularly acute for those who have been or belong to a
group that has been separated from its genetic or historic past or from some ingredient of
belonging and identification. This is the case, for example, for Native American children on the
North American continent and for African Americans whose ancestors were forcibly torn from
their families, tribes, villages, communities and cultures and taken to what became the U.S.A.
These brutal disruptions and that followed all but destroyed their individual identities and the
identities of their descendants. The past several generations have exhibited keen interest in
restoring the missing pieces of the past and long lost biological origin.
In a very different context, but one with some similarities regarding (often involuntary)
ruptures from pre-birth heritage, adoptees experience great, ongoing interest in their biological
family history. Studies show that well over 80 % of adoptees adopted as infants are curious
about their birth parents and 70% of adolescent girls and 57% of adolescent boys express interest
in actually meeting their birth parents. Adoptees continue to be members of their adoptive and
birth families.
There is also a wealth of theoretical and empirical social science research regarding the
importance of such knowledge for adoptees in their development of identity, what has been
described as “a deeply felt psychological and emotional need, a need for roots, for existential
continuity, and for a sense of completeness.”1
Moreover, even in the postmodern family era, biologically based families continue to be
the norm against which other kin groups are distinguished, and although adoptive families are
not inferior or inauthentic, they are understood be a different and unique type of family.
Adoptive families are unique because the members experience or contemplate the biological
family and its environment – ethnicity, race, country, and the like.
1
Fernando Colon, Family Ties and Child Placement, 17 FAM. PROCESS 289, 302 (1978).
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Families created with ART also exist in this shadow of biology. For purposes of this talk,
I will refer mostly to the adoptee and adoptive families to designate families in which at least one
parent is not biologically related to the child or when a biological parent is absent.
For the adoptee, it is both (or either) the physical questions relating to appearance and
health and the more imaginative questions, the whys and the what ifs – the possibilities of having
been part of that family. These all form part of the adoptee’s roots and by extension, those of the
adoptive family.
It is hard to escape biology and all that is constructed through and around it. But perhaps
such an escape would not be a good thing, at least so far as we can imagine a bodiless world.
Ignoring biological connections can be dehumanizing: a way, perhaps unintentionally, to
commodify children, to make them untethered, transferable, blank. Birth connections help
define and humanize us by providing ties to family, culture and history. Seeking to eliminate
these connections through adoption treats the child as a commodity.
Elimination of such connections also undermines birth parent identity and aggravates the
grief attendant to the loss of a child. These emotions are no doubt heightened because the
context of adoption is one in which a child is born of one person and transferred to another in
circumstances that are often wrenching and not entirely voluntary.
Just as adoptees seek or long for facts regarding their birth and biological parents when
navigating identity, birth parents too experience a relationship to the adoptee because the
connection and subsequent disconnection from the child is part of the parent’s identity. This
disconnection may be experienced as loss of at least part of the parent’s self. This is a loss of
identity and forms a core component of grief.
Adoptive parents too may experience some of the disjointedness that surrounds adoption.
Beside their own sense of what ifs and why nots regarding the possibilities of producing their
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own biological children, they may feel the child’s gap between the child’s original family or
community and the child’s adopted ones. And they often seek to bridge these gaps in myriad
ways, especially in the context of transracial and international adoption . . . .
III. Brief Overview of Social and Legal History of Adoption
Adoption law has not been entirely impervious to these experiences of adoption and
connection. Although it has been somewhat resolute at its core, adoption law has changed over
time to reflect changing social and legal norms.
The first general adoption statutes, enacted in the 1850s, established the hallmark of
adoption: the termination of one family and creation of another, when in the interests of the
child. Adoption law maintained these core characteristics, but became confidential and
anonymous after World War II in response to an increase in infant adoptions that was in turn
spurred by several forces: a growth in infertility, the availability of infant formula, and changing
psychological theories that began to view environment as more important in child development
than genes.
Fictive birth became the adoption paradigm, such that the adoption was equated with a
new birth, even providing for substitution of the adoptive parents for the birth parents on the
birth certificate. Eventually, the original birth certificates were sealed from all eyes, including
those of the adoptee.
The unitary view of adoption became that of anonymous infants, even for related
adoptions and adoptions of older children. In substance, this unitary approach provided solely
for confidential, static adoptive relationships which terminated all pre-birth connections and
sealed all birth records.
During the rise of postmodernism in the last half of the 20th century, this model of
adoption has become dated as parties to adoption experience less secrecy and value it less. In
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addition, this heteronormativity has become slightly less normative as families are formed and
reformed without mutual biological connection – as occurs with stepparents, lesbian and gay
parents, and single parents.
Just s a decline in heteronormativity has led to some changes in parental rights doctrine
(which still reflect heteronormativity), a series of social and legal changes have led to a
devaluation of secrecy and myth in adoption. Like the changes in parental rights doctrine, the
changes in adoption still reflect core aspects of adoption while acknowledging the existence of
multiple parents.
IV. Same Sex Parents: Lesbian and Gay Families & the Missing Biological Parent
Lesbian and gay couples cannot create children together without assistance from third
(and even fourth) parties. Yet many lesbian and gay couples are parenting children. These
parenting relationships may have originated in a variety of ways, including during previous
relationships, through foster care or adoption, and assisted reproduction.
In all of these
instances, the children reared by lesbian and gay couples have more than two parents. Yet the
law recognizes at most two parents. Indeed, so far lesbian and gay families receiving family
status appear to be quite conventional – almost heteronormative except that they are same-sex.
For example, states are granting recognition and family benefits to lesbian and gay
domestic partners and members of civil unions and even marriage. The non-marital statesanctioned relationships are like marriage in that they contemplate a domestic, mutual and
monogamous relationship, and contemplate no more than two members of such a union or
partnership. In addition, according to most of the reported decisions regarding same-sex couple
adoptions reveal couples who were in marriage-like relationships, characterized by monogamy,
long term commitment, jointly held property, cooperation, future planning, and shared parenting.
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A. Lesbian and Gay Families & ART
In the past several decades, reproductive technologies have advanced and proliferated. It
is estimated that approximately 40,000 children are born each year through sperm and egg
donation. The various technologies, from the humble and relatively simple sperm donation to
the implantation of one woman’s fertilized egg into another’s womb, can construct families with
numerous permutations of genetic and social relations. When one takes into consideration these
technologies and the employment of surrogates to bear children, it is possible that a child could
have as many as two biological mothers, a biological father and a legal father and mother. These
are perhaps the most post-modern of the post-modern families, but they too are rooted in and
cannot escape biology. Indeed, they are formed through consensual relationships involving
donors and surrogates but ultimately, they drift toward biology. They do so by replicating
heteronormativity in multiple ways and in their inability to escape biological connections in fact
and imagination.
Assisted reproductive technologies allow single women, single men, same-sex couples
and married couples to have children with the assistance of genetic materials of men and women
who will not be part of the legally recognized family.
These arrangements have traditionally been anonymous, at least when health care
professionals are involved and anonymity is the legal norm in this country. This anonymity,
besides arguably promoting donations, helps maintain a fiction of biological relatedness which
allows families to pass as normative. Indeed, the “[e]laborative devices used to preserve the
anonymity of donors highlight the significance attached to genetic ties in western societies and
how this is linked to ideas about family, intimacy and social relations more generally.”2 Laws
2
Katrina Hargreaves and Ken Daniels, Parents Dilemmas in Sharing Donor Insemination Conception Stories with
their Children, 21 CHILDREN & SOCIETY 420, 420 (2007).
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too have been crafted to cut off any legal relationship between the donor and the child to further
preserve the nuclear family ideal and mask the missing genetic ties. Thus, in the 1970s, states
amended their laws away from biologically-based parenthood when donors were involved.
In recent years, there has been a movement both toward openness with children regarding
their ART origins and openness regarding the identity of the donor. Although there are
differences regarding disclosure issues in families created through ART and adoption, the
lessons of closed, anonymous adoption have informed this move toward more honesty regarding
genetic parentage.
Increasingly then, parents and children in families created through reproductive
technologies involving gamete or womb donors experience second, third, fourth and fifth parents
who are not formally part of the family. Yet in other ways these families tend to hew toward the
modern family and heteronormativity. Those who can pass as a traditional family, such as
heterosexual intimate, and especially marital, partners, appear to be more resistant to sharing
information about the use of donors and to embrace openness regarding the donor’s identity.
Just as heterosexual couples are more likely than not to choose a sperm donor with
similar physical characteristics to the father, even same sex partners – who cannot pass as joint
biological parents – are more likely to choose a donor with characteristics similar to the nongenetically related parent. Couples make these choices also to increase the partner’s involvement
with the donor insemination process and the child they will share. Perhaps this phenomenon even
reflects notions of evolutionary biology.
Scientific and anecdotal evidence suggests that donor-insemination offspring in
childhood and adulthood have great interest in their donor parents and biological siblings. The
establishment of the sibling donor registry and the large number of members and matches
suggests as much. Moreover, birth mothers with children from open-identity sperm donors are
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reaching out to families with children from the same donor. These (disproportionately single)
mothers reached out to the other families to help create a family for the children and also to
address curiosity about the donor by comparing the offspring. Most of the families in one small
study had ongoing contact with each other. Even birth mothers who utilize donor eggs may wish
for her children to reach their donor mother.
B. Lesbian & Gay Adoption
Lesbians and gays create families while in prior heterosexual relationships or become
parents in while single or in committed relationships, through artificial insemination using
anonymously donated sperm, and sometimes the sperm of gay men, relatives of a same sex
partner.
Lesbians and gay men also form families through adoption, many while openly
acknowledging their sexual orientation. It is estimated that in the past few decades, thousands of
lesbians and gays have become legal parents through adoption.
When lesbians and gays bring children to the relationship from a prior relationship,
adoption law continues to govern their options for establishing mutual parental rights and
responsibilities regarding the children. State adoption law, however, closely reflect remarkably
similar norms regarding families and parenting in that they model exclusive parenting, twoparent marital families, or single parents. Adoption generally does not countenance as parents
two fathers and a mother, two mothers and a father or a grandmother and her daughter; instead,
most states’ adoption laws contemplate single or married parents.
Most adoption statutes are silent regarding lesbian and gay adoption. Only five states
have explicit statutes that countenance lesbian and gay adoption: Florida, which prohibits lesbian
and gay adoption; Mississippi, which prohibits “couples of the same gender” from adopting; and
Connecticut, Connecticut and California, which all provide explicit procedures for lesbian and
gay couples to adopt. Other state laws do not address single or same-sex couple adoption.
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Silence regarding lesbian and gay adoption creates uncertainty around such adoptions, especially
same-sex couple adoptions; and this silence can serve to both deter such adoptions in some states
and to enable them. For if there is no ban, then such adoptions can occur, but if there are not
provisions addressing the familial relations of lesbians and gays, then fewer of such adoptions
may occur and those that are perfected are subject to challenge.
The reported decisions suggest that the movement is toward permitting lesbian and gay
and same-sex adoption. There is virtually no reported litigation arising out of denials of adoption
petitions of single lesbian or gay persons, except for Florida and an Arizona case of questionable
relevance.
Moreover, although the best interests of the child standard appears to provoke more
scrutiny for lesbian and gay adoptions, it has more often than not been utilized to grant
adoptions. The reported decisions suggest that courts confronted with lesbian and gay families
that embody dominant marital norms of monogamy, financial security, mutual care and support,
and psychological parenting find adoption to be in the child’s best interest even despite lack of
clear statutory support for such non-marital two parent adoptions.
Otherwise, it is difficult to assess conclusively how courts are responding to petitions
lesbian and gay single and same-sex couple adoptions because adoption proceedings are closed,
sealed and usually uncontested. For all of these reasons, adoption cases rarely yield published
decisions; and, of course, the proceedings themselves are sealed. Estimates suggest that single
lesbian and gay adoptions are permitted in the District of Columbia and nearly every state and,
including Utah and Mississippi, which have bans applicable to lesbian and gay couple adoption.
Throughout the country, same-sex couple adoption is occurring as well, but is not as prevalent as
single lesbian and gay adoption.
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Perhaps the most salient road block to same-sex couple adoption, in theory, is the absence
of special provisions for same-sex couple adoption. These adoptions can be challenging because
adoption statutes’ two-parent, marital norm contemplates adoption by one person or two married
persons and that the legal parents will lose their parental rights before an adoption can occur,
except for the case of stepparent adoptions when the prospective adoptive parent is married to
the legal parent. Thus, read literally, the legal parent seeking to have her lesbian partner adopt
the child would have to have her own rights terminated in order for her partner to adopt.
Adoption statutes can also thwart a same-sex couple seeking to adopt jointly an infant or
foster child not related to either of them because the statutes provide for a “person” or “married
couple” to petition for adoption. Unless “person” is read in the plural, as number of courts have,
only one of the couple can adopt, for in all states but Massachusetts (and arguably Iowa),
lesbians and gays cannot get married.
Finding that the best interests of the children in question in the same-sex couple adoption
case militated toward two-parent adoption and against requiring termination of one parents’
rights, courts have permitted such adoptions to occur.
Thus adoption courts seem to be
embracing two parents for children. The trend is toward permitting such adoptions and the civil
union and marriage laws are making such adoptions clearly available.
Yet these families, like stepparent families and reproductive technology families do not
neatly fit into that two parent biologically-based norm. There are other people out there who
have reciprocal biological if not affective relationships with the children. Birth fathers or sperm
donors are often known in the context of many lesbian adoptions. Indeed, unlike many
heterosexual families created through ART, lesbians and gays often make informal arrangements
with known donors or surrogates to create their families. In these families, the adoption fiction of
rebirth is more difficult to sustain simply by virtue of the sex of the parents.
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Moreover, in these cases the birth parents or donors may be involved with the child on an
ongoing basis. Although not necessarily active members of the child’s life, they may be known
and identified so that the child will know whence he or she came. In other cases, for example
adoptions from foster care or adoptions by gay male couples, the adoption may be open with
ongoing visitation or other contact. This contact may be with the birth mother or the extended
family.
Still, in all of these cases, the exclusive one or two-parent family prevails as a legal
matter. Thus, despite the physical impossibility of two parents of the same sex being the
exclusive parents of a child, the law regarding adoption and reproductive technology recognizes
only two parents and those parents are in those contexts defined around their relationship with
each other, rather than a biological relationship with the child.
V. Opening Adoption
These postmodern families and the porousness of their affective, if not legal, family
relations is part of a larger set of movements that have challenged adoption’s myth of rebirth and
mandate of secrecy. A decrease in the numbers and percentage of infant adoptions with a
corresponding increase in older child adoption through stepparent, relative and foster child
adoptions made the rebirth theme of adoption less tenable; for when the child knew or knows his
or her birth parents and has actually spent substantial time with them, it is hard to pretend the
adoptee was born to the adoptive parent. Relatedly, there has been a rise of openness even in
infant adoption as birth mothers gained more autonomy arising from increased reproductive
choice and changing legal and social mores.
As a result of social and legal movements pushing for a more porous adoption model,
open adoption has become the norm in adoption practice, even for infant adoptions wherein the
fiction of rebirth had been more tenable than in stepparent, relative and foster child adoptions.
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Increasingly, even after adoption, birth and adoptive families maintain a relationship that
includes some form of contact or the potential for contact.
Generally, these post-adoption relationships are privately ordered and maintained. In
other words, open adoption arrangements are informal and based on the agreement of those
people involved and do not carry the force of legal sanction should any of the parties chose to
discontinue or otherwise stray from the terms of the agreement. . . .
The prevalence of open adoption and the concerns regarding fairness issues in this private
ordering have led a number of states to codify such adoptions. These statutes make clear that
when open adoptions are entered into under the adoption with contact statute, parties have rights
and obligations. Those open adoption agreements that are entered into outside these mechanisms
continue to be unregulated.
Major factors motivating states to adopt such regulation were the desirability of providing
procedures for these arrangements, to make clear when these arrangements are extralegal and
when they are subject to enforcement and also, of course, to serve the interests of children in
openness.
This codification, known also as cooperative adoption or adoption with contact,
represents a model of accommodation of family privacy and the existential facts of adoption: that
the birth family and adoptive family are tied together through the child; and adopted children are
members of two families.
Approximately twenty states have adoption with contact statutes. These statutes allow
adoptive parents and birth relatives or others at, or before, the time of adoption to enter into
enforceable agreements for post-adoption contact, such as visitation or correspondence.
The statutes do not permit approval or enforcement of post-adoption contact plans unless
the adoptive parents and the party who will have contact agree to such a plan at or before the
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time of adoption. In this way, the statutes in effect create a new type of adoption in the sense
that from the start, the parties are committed to ongoing cooperation around the child.
Although the statutes do not permit the failure of post-adoption contact to invalidate the
adoption, they do present a significant incursion into the legal and social paradigm of adoption as
rebirth. For adoption with contact both acknowledges the child’s pre-adoptive birth ties and
brings these connections forward into the adoption, often as a very part of the adoption decree
itself.
The defining aspects of the statutes are:
(1)
They do not permit a court to grant an adoption with contact unless the adoptive
parents agree.
(2)
Each statute indicates who must approve of the agreement in order for it to be
enforceable later;
(3)
All but one require the agreement to be in writing, either as a written contract,
relinquishment, or court order;
(4)
They provide for enforcement of the agreements unless there are grounds not to
enforce or there are grounds to modify;
(5)
Most importantly, they provide that the failure of contact will not constitute
grounds to vacate the adoption or invalidate a relinquishment. No statutes permit
vacation of the adoption or withdrawal of relinquishment as a sanction for breach
or modification of the agreement or order.
VI. Lessons of Open Adoption and Adoption with Contact
Open adoption, but more specifically adoption with contact, shows that it is possible to
have bundles of rights, statuses and connections that honor the parent-child and other biological
and social relationships, but also protect the authority of the primary legal parents who attain and
retain the authority to make important parental decisions regarding their children, [such as where
the child will go to school, where the child will live, with whom the child will visit and all of the
daily mundane and not so mundane parental determinations.] Even decisions regarding the
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contact with the birth family are, under adoption with contact and informal open adoption
constructs, voluntary – or at least they begin that way.
Open adoption also provides examples of community or shared parenting. It undermines
the heteronormative model of two-parent, exclusive parenting by recognizing the multiple people
who have parental or parent-like relationships with children. These relationships may be
biological, social, historical, and may range along a spectrum of quality and quantity.
This relatively new model of adoption illustrates the enduring importance of biological
and social families and provides an example of how parental rights and relationship needs not be
all or nothing – that parents can lose their parental rights but receive the right to maintain a
relationship with their children under terms agreeable to both sets of parents. In effect, it
provides an opening, creating a more porous, though still largely private and autonomous family
system. This model of shared parenting provides examples of shared parenting in other types of
families not created through adoption.
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