AN AIR OF SECRECY has often surrounded the adoption process, especially where infants are concerned. Forty or fifty years ago, adoptive parents often concealed the fact of their children's adoption. Birth mothers were expected to sign the appropriate adoption papers and then disappear to "get on with their lives," often without anyone besides their immediate families knowing they had been pregnant. There was no expectation that adoptive children would want to make contact with their birth families, or that women might wonder how their biological children were faring.

Over the last twenty years or so, however, this pattern has changed. It is very rare today to find adopted children, even young ones, unaware that they are adopted. As teen pregnancy increases, placing a child for adoption carries less stigma than...