Bruce M. Rappaport: 1942 - 2006

Pioneer for open adoptions

His center, once `shunned' as radical, helped remove the secrecy that prevented adopted children from learning of their heritage as adults

November 28, 2006|By Los Angeles Times.

Bruce M. Rappaport, a trailblazer in the open-adoption movement who pushed for the right of birth and adoptive parents to choose and know each other decades before it became the norm, has died. He was 64.

Mr. Rappaport died Oct. 27 after a brief illness in Walnut Creek, Calif., said Kathleen Silber, associate executive director of the Independent Adoption Center in Pleasant Hill, Calif., which Mr. Rappaport founded in 1982.

Silber, who also is recognized as an open-adoption pioneer, said, "The whole field of adoption has changed basically in a generation, and a lot of that had to do with dynamic leadership such as Bruce's."

The trend toward openness started around the late 1960s when adults who were adopted as children began demanding to know about their heritage, Mr. Rappaport noted in interviews.

The term "openness" is "unfortunately a scare word that sounds like some crazy thing . . . like `open marriage,'" Mr. Rappaport said in 1996. "For years we tried to call it `normalized' adoption because it means approaching adoption the same way you do the regular part of your life."

Mr. Rappaport's adoption activism grew out of his job as director of a San Francisco Bay Area infertility clinic. When couples learned that further medical treatments made little sense, they often asked him where to turn next. He knew the odds of adopting quickly through a state or county agency were against them.

With the legalization of abortion and increased societal acceptance of unwed mothers, the number of people who placed their children for adoption dropped dramatically from the 1960s to the 1980s, according to the center.

Part of the problem was that young women raised during the feminist movement balked at having no say in their child's future and at the secretive process of traditional agency adoptions, Mr. Rappaport said.

With a group of colleagues from the clinic, he established the non-profit adoption center to challenge the status quo. Later, a branch was opened in Los Angeles.

He also founded the National Federation for Open Adoption Education in 1990 to sponsor national conferences and educate other agencies.

During the center's first decade, employees were considered "absolute outlaws and literally shunned by the adoption world," Mr. Rappaport wrote in a farewell to the center upon retiring this fall. "But after about 20 years, the victory is pretty complete."

According to current estimates, nearly 80 percent of voluntary infant adoptions in the U.S. are open to some extent, he wrote.

Born in New Jersey, Mr. Rappaport earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Chicago and a doctorate in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He had served on the faculty of San Francisco State University.