The children also must remain in foster care until all appeals are resolved. A number of states, including Colorado, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Idaho, have begun to set up a mediated cooperative adoption process like Oregon's. Several other states, including Indiana, have established legal safeguards to ensure that even informal agreements allowing birth parents continued contact are enforceable. Parents there can go to court if the agreements are broken, just as divorced parents can when custody arrangements are violated. But even in the case of broken agreements, adoptions cannot be revoked.
Cooperative adoption is an outgrowth of the increasing openness in all areas of adoption.
In years past, most adoptions closed off all connections between adopted children and their biological parents. Adoptions today frequently contain some degree of openness, ranging from birth parents providing health data and other information, which in the past often was not available, to actual contact. The secrecy behind adoption has lost its hold on the adoption field. Having contact with birth parents doesn't disrupt the new family, said Kelly Shannon, Oregon's Permanency and Adoptions program manager. The truth is, kids want to be safe, and they're pretty smart about that.