Privacy
The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to showcase the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. You don’t need to be part of the Open Adoption Bloggers list to participate, or even be in a traditional open adoption. If you’re thinking about openness in adoption, you have a place at the table.
The current Roundtable prompt is about privacy in blogs. By the very nature of blogging about open adoption, we’re all writing about other people here – partners, children and the children’s first families. And some of the info we may share isn’t our own. So where do you decide to draw the line?
It’s an easy one for us at the moment – it’s just the two of us, and part of the aim of this blog is to tell you all a little about us. If an expectant mother likes what she reads here, she may be more likely to become our expectant mother. So, baring any hugely identifying info (and anyone who knows us personally would still figure out who we were, even without the photos), what you read here is pretty much what you get.
Once we bring our child home though, this blog won’t continue. A new blog may take it’s place, but that is likely to be password protected, & only be for family & friends to keep up with the latest on our kid. If we continue to write any form of ‘open’ open adoption blog, you may well find you don’t recognise us. *All names will be changed to protect the innocent*. And the not-so-innocent, come to that. 
Blogging is such a new art form. Who knows how people will feel about blogs in 20 years time, when our kid is all grown up. Or even in 15, 10 or 5 years – they’ll be perfectly capable of feeling embarrassed by anything we write then. So I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting the whole world in on the details of their adoption. And I doubt their first parents would either. The last thing I’d want in that difficult situation is for details from my private life, and the decisions I’d made, online for anyone to read.
So, no, this is as open as it gets, and this blog will fade away when our child comes home to us.
Thanks for your comment on my blog. We went to one of those attachment seminars too. We felt to same way you did. We were the only ones choosing open domestic also!
Wishing you all the best. Good to connect!
Here’s to holding our baby soon!!
Peace,
Angie
I was trying to figure out if our blog would continue, or how it would continue after we adopt our child. I don’t know if I will completely cut it off, but for sure the posts would have to be password protected. I just feel like the people who want to follow us and weren’t friends and family would like to know how it’s going after the little one comes home, if that makes any sense.
It does. I was including blogging friends in that ‘family & friends’ part. I’m sure there’ll be one or two at least who want to keep up with our kid, once they’re home. So I’ll let people email me for the password.
Hi!
My partner and I are a same sex couple and we are starting the process of international adoption. While in our country same sex couples can adopt, there are practically no children available, and in the countries from which we can adopt single parent adoptions are legal, but same sex parenting is a big no-no, even if it is officially not ruled as such. Therefore I have to make sure that my blog contains no identifying information whatsoever. There are no last names. Well, there is mine, but it’s super common. There are practically no photos. I don’t name companies, I don’t name people, schools, not even neighborhoods. I never mention our shul by name. It’s hard work, because I naturally write them in the entries, and then have to weed them out before I actually post an entry. But I can’t risk our adoption.