Connor Howe

Even most adopted people, I don't think, understand that.

Really, the open versus closed is a legal thing.

The reason open adoption became a thing was because of the sealed records issue.

There was a bunch of adopted people in the 1970s that were advocating extremely hard, especially in the state of New York,

to open records.

They founded groups like bastard nation and a bunch of other legal advocacy groups to try to unseal their records.

And there were a bunch of adoption, social workers that were like, yeah, this is kind of dumb.

In fact, like I think when they actually proposed the concept of open adoption, the 1970s, they wrote something along the lines of like,

Um, why do we have to, why does like, and I'm paraphrasing here, but they're like, why does, why is this idea of this family building that we're creating built on this foundational idea that is like these children are losing their birthrights?

The birthright was like what the word they use that I remember very distinctly.

And they said like.

They even brought up Ohana means family in Hawaii kind of thing, not in the Lilo and Stitch sense, but they talked about that there are all kinds of ways to create families or build families or whatever where you don't have to legally sever the child's connection to the child's family.

And that was a huge part of why they were trying to create this open adoption.

Again, that had nothing to do with visitation.

I mean, I'm sure they would have liked for the child to visit their families if that's something the child wanted to do, but ultimately it really had to do with the records being sealed versus opened.

And again, yeah, I mean, theoretically speaking, you can have a relationship with whoever you want to have in a closed option if you find each other.

It's still a closed option.

You still don't have your records, right?

It's all about the records.

But the openness agreements and that whole side is a very kind of like they want to play it both ways where –