With open adoption both the biological family and the adoptive families know the names, addresses and contact information for each other. In our situation and the fact the biological mother did not seem to me to have the ability to make great decisions so we did not want her to know our information. We were concerned that if she had our information we would eventually hear a knock at the door and she would be there. We actually took preventative measures to insure that she did not know our information. We used my maiden name for any introductions and papers she saw, we said we lived in a different city than we did. So given this information is given freely in an open adoption we were not interested in a totally open adoption.
We were told by the case workers we should consider a semi-open adoption. With this option we could use a third party to pass along letters to and from us and the biological mother. What we chose to do was have a friend in another city open a post office box and we used that as our third party. Our adoption agency offered but this was a bit more in our control. We were always a bit concerned that if our case worker was out and the biological mother called she would have been given our information by mistake and it was just something we did not want to chance.
We agreed to the semi-open adoption in the mediation mainly for the fact that we thought the biological mother would agree to relinquish her parental rights for our daughter. We also tried to put ourselves in her position and we would want some information about our children. We kept up our part of the agreement however the biological mother did not and therefor our mediation agreement was voided.
Read More about adoption choices:
Open, Semi-Open or Closed Adoption
Open, Semi-Open or Closed Adoption Part 2