Reaction Paper on Adoptions
Marilyn Smith
Northeastern State University

Adoptions Learning lots of things in this work shop about adoptions opened my eyes to a few things I would like to discuss in this paper. One is understanding that all adoptions are a legal process. Another one would be the different types of adoptions whether, it is a voluntary, public, kinship, and international, open or closed each one of these has stipulations. Last but not least hearing Cecilia tell her story about giving her baby boy up for adoption. As a student going into social work I can see the different roles that a social worker can help provide services for adoptions.
However, the one that I would like to talk about is the open adoption. First of all what is an open adoption? It allows the birth family to have some degree of contact with the adoption family. This contact may vary in different forms such has pictures, phone calls, or in person. This can be incredibly important to that of the birth mom to continue through with the adoption process.
At the workshop and getting to hear Cecilia’s story made me aware of how it is important to have open adoptions. I always thought that this would just make it harder on the birth mother by seeing her child but, hearing Cecilia speak about this gave me a different way to look at open adoptions. By having that form of communication left open between the birth mom and the child can help the mom go through the process more easily. This also showed a different side of adoptions and how you not only help yourself but another family as well. Not only did Cecilia give up her baby boy she helped another family gain a baby boy. Seeing how the open adoptions really helped Cecilia and allowed her to be a part of her sons’ life in some kind of form lead to my change in thinking about open adoptions. As a social worker and comprehending the important things about open adoptions we can obviously say that being there for the birth mother and helping her in any services that she needs while going through the process can have some promising rewards. Working at her pace and not the agency can show some respect for what they are doing and going through. The second thing that I really enjoyed about this work shop was learning about Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and adoptions. ICWA is a law that helps federal recognized tribes with children whether it is with adoption or just for a placement of a child. This law was enacted in 1978 by Congress and supersedes the regulations of the Oklahoma adoption code. However, “before 1978 the percentage of Indian children that were removed from their homes and placed in non-Indian homes by states and courts, welfare agencies, and private adoptions agencies were 25 to 35 percent (Jones, 2013)”. Seems as though the social workers, and non-Indian judges where unappreciative of the heritage of that child. “[Historically, an alarmingly high percentage of Indian families in comparison to the general population have been broken up by the often unwarranted removal of their children by non-tribal public and private agencies. A disturbingly high percentage of such children