Contested Attachments: The Controversial Emergence of ‘Open Adoption’

Abstract

I have begun this chapter with three short quotations from three different research accounts of adoption work. I have quite deliberately elided the very different cultural conditions of their production in order to highlight a stark continuity, from the mid-1980s to early 1990s open adoption appears to have been both an implemented, yet contested set of practices. In all the above accounts, open adoption practices were being actively introduced, but simultaneously challenged. The studies from which the quotations are taken were undertaken at very different times; Fratter et al.’s research was pursued between 1980 and 1984; Lowe et al.’s between 1994 and 1998 and Macaskill’s in 1999. What was curious about this lengthy and continuing trajectory of contestation was the profession’s impervious or resistant relationship to the by now many well-documented research accounts of open adoption’s benefits. Indeed, the research itself has become part of this contested field, with the findings of numerous studies being challenged or disputed as inadequate guides to justify the continuing practices of open adoption.¹ One might consider that such contested findings would bring the practices of open adoption into wider and more agreed disrepute. Yet, conversely, the profession persists in implementing these practices and has done so for at least the last 15 to 20 years.