In a closed adoption, you don’t know where your child is or how he or she is doing; you lose all ability to monitor their health and welfare.

There are dozens of reasons to avoid closed adoption and opt for an open one instead, but I’ll talk today about the most terrifying reason of all: the potential for harm to come to your child.

Now, most adoptive parents are good and loving people, who would never dream of harming any child. But in closed adoption, you just don’t know who will be doing the parenting…and you could be one of the unlucky ones.

There are certainly lots of horror stories out there. Probably the most famous is the Lisa Steinberg abuse case. Lisa was illegally adopted in New York City in the 1980s, and underwent unspeakable abuse before she died. A quick summary of the case can be found at CrimeLibrary.com.

(If you want to learn more about the Steinberg case, two excellent books are What Lisa Knew, and the excellent book written by Lisa's birthmom, Don't Call Her Lisa. Both are available used on Amazon.com.)

If you need more examples of the harm that can come to adopted children, you can take a look at Adoption.com'slist of abuse in families that adopted from Russia.

Does this mean all adoptive parents are suspect? No. In some cases these parents were simply unprepared to deal with the pressures of adoption, and uneducated about dangers such as Attachment Disorder. In others, they were just bad apples, through and through. (see the story of Masha Allen, who was abused by her pedophile adoptive father.

Whether the abuse was due to ignorance or malice, social workers, homestudies and required paperwork obviously did not do enough to prevent the wrong people from adopting.

I could go on, but I won’t. The media loves to cover cases of abuse by adoptive parents, so a simple Google search will tell you everything you need to know.

Let me reiterate: this is not an attempt to slam adoptive parents. There are unfit parents of all kinds, and obviously, plenty of birth families abuse kids, too. (Masha’s birthfamily abused her, which is why she was available for adoption by her subsequent abuser.) The reason I bring up the topic is to get you thinking about why closed adoption is not something you want to be involved in.

Of course, if your surrendered child is being abused by adoptive parents, there is not much you can do about it, even if the adoption is fully open. You lose all legal rights to your child upon relinquishment, so technically you have no more input into what happens to your child than a stranger walking down the street. But at least in an open adoption, you could see what was going on and try to report it. And while open adoptions can and do close down all the time, at least if you have identifying information on your child’s new family, you might be able to track them down.

Worst case scenarios are just that--not common. But you should consider the possibilities as you decide between open, semi-open, and closed adoption.