Kiersten Jungling always knew she was adopted. As a girl, she had occaisional visits with her birth mother. At 13, she agreed to be a junior bridesmaid in her birth mother's wedding. Kiersten's parents monitored the Facebook account she opened in the 11th grade, though they didn't meddle. But her birth mother, Kelly Ulonska, posted comments from time to time about photos or statements she considered inappropriate.

This unusual arrangement, which has evolved over Kiersten's 18 years, began with a voluntary agreement between Mrs. Ulonska and Khris and Tom Jungling at a Pittsburgh adoption agency several weeks before Kiersten was born. As with past adoption contracts, none of the terms were legally binding.

But a state Senate measure signed into law this year makes open adoption agreements like theirs official in Pennsylvania.

An informal review of agencies in some of the 23 other states with open adoption laws found that few parties ever complained to the courts, requesting enforcement of the agreements, said Todd Lloyd, child welfare director of Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children. Rather, the contracts have served more as an official acknowledgement to adopted children that it's all right to maintain some contact with their birth families, whether that means access to medical records, an occasional holiday card or a yearly visit to a birth relative's house.

The goal is to encourage adoption, especially of older children from foster care, said Mr. Lloyd, who is helping to craft guidelines for parties and judges involved in future adoptions. Statewide, approximately 900 teenagers "aged out" of foster care at 18 last year without the support of an adoptive family as they entered adulthood.

"A lot of children fear being adopted because they fear losing contact with their birth relatives," Mr. Lloyd said.

State-sanctioned open adoptions will make it possible for children to have permanent homes without any additional trauma from severing ties to their birth parents or to aunts, uncles, grandparents and siblings.

Stories like Kiersten's are instructive to families at adoption's crossroads. Over the years, Mrs. Ulonska has spoken to many pregnant girls and parents considering adoption about the importance that kids know "the love and sacrifice that goes into placing a child for adoption."

"Kids need to know their stories and have a connection. It's important to their well-being and their sense of self," said Sherry Anderson, a therapist and program director at the Three Rivers Adoption Council, who has raised nine adopted children.

"As children mature, they can handle the information in a more complex and emotional way," she said. "If we don't give them the information, they may think, 'It must have been something wrong with me.' "

Ms. Anderson believes adoption provides "safety for the soul, body and mind of a child." However, she also thinks that foster children placed in adoptive families "have a real potential for difficulty because they don't have those genetic ties and have some level of trauma in their lives."

"The new law honors those old relationships and makes it possible for children to maintain healthy relationships from their pasts. ... It's really developmentally sound," she said.

Kiersten, now a freshman at Mercyhurst College, has always spoken openly about her life story. Her adoptive mother, Khris Jungling, had one ovary and part of the other removed after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at 26. Mrs. Jungling and her husband, Tom, pursued fertility treatments and in vitro fertilization before they applied to adopt a child.

Kelly Ulonska had a good feeling about them after reviewing profiles of prospective parents at the Children's Home of Pittsburgh. Their application caught her eye because of the unusual way Khris spelled her name. Several weeks later at West Penn Hospital, the Junglings kept the middle name that Mrs. Ulonska had given the baby : Lyne.

The Junglings, who live in Gibsonia, remember sitting down to meet with Mrs. Ulonska for about an hour in the last trimester of her pregnancy.

"Once she met us, she said she was comfortable. We knew pretty much right away," Mrs. Jungling said.

Mrs. Jungling did not recall there being any written contract, although Connie Bach, director of the adoption program at the Children's Home, said the agency has been facilitating open adoptions using a form it created for about 25 years.

The language in the non-legally binding cooperative agreements used at the Children's Home states the contracts are "based on the feelings of all parties at the time of the initial signing, and can be reviewed and renegotiated at an time prior to or after" the adoption.

The parties can agree to permit the adoptive parents to attend prenatal visits, be present at a child's birth, cut the umbilical cord or request circumcision. They may agree that the adoptive parents will keep the name the birth parents put on the birth certificate. They also can specify which party will initiate contact and whether it will happen through the agency.

The contract also gives birth parents an opportunity to articulate whether they want to ask for regular letters, photos, e-mails, phone calls or visits with the child. It offers a chance for them to state whether they want other relatives from the birth family to maintain contact with the adoptive family.

Kiersten's parents agreed they would send letters and photos of their daughter through the Children's Home to her birth mother. They agreed to leave the door open to discuss in-person visits when it felt right. (The birth father was never involved in the process and has remained out of the picture.)

When Kiersten was 4 weeks old, the Junglings, who had been advertising in newspapers around the country, were notified of the possiblity of another adoption in Florida. They ended up adopting Domenic, the son of Mrs. Jungling's relative by marriage, who is four months younger than Kiersten

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Kiersten was 7 when Mrs. Ulonska asked to meet her for the first time. The child clung to her adoptive mother's legs that day.

"I remember she knelt down in front of me and said hi," Kiersten recalled. "I thought, 'Who are you?' I didn't understand."

A few years later, she went bowling with her adoptive parents, Domenic, her birth mother, her birth grandmother and the grandmother's husband.

Mrs. Ulonska said it was OK for Kiersten to call her "mom" or Kelly. Kiersten settled on "Kelly." Kiersten got cards for her birthday, Christmas, Easter, even St. Patrick's Day from birth relatives. The pace of visits picked up.

At Mrs. Ulonska's wedding, the bride's mother-in-law -- seemingly awestruck -- asked Kiersten, the 13-year-old junior bridesmaid, how it was possible that she and her birth mother had this kind of relationship. "I had no idea it was that big of a deal," Kiersten said.

In contrast, her brother Domenic saw his birth mother twice, at 12 and a year later, by his own request. He also met a sister that his birth mother was raising who is seven years older than he is. Like Kiersten, has had no contact with his birth father.

Mrs. Jungling said Domenic, a senior in high school who wants to become an actor, "has a lot of anger" about his adoption and "he considers himself being abandoned."

Of course, not all open adoption agreements call for the type of contact Kiersten has had with her birth mother. Sherry Anderson, at Three Rivers Adoption Council, recounted the case of a father who adopted a 14-year-old boy who had been in foster care. Whenever he had conflict in his new home, he would run away to his birth mother's house.

The adoptive father struck up an agreement with the birth mother that she would call and let the adoptive father know, keep the boy at her place overnight and send him back in the morning.

Under the new law, families can sign voluntary agreements to these kinds of situations and file them with the court that finalizes their adoption. Children 12 and older must consent to the terms of their own adoptions. The law also allows for a statewide confidential registry so children can access their birth families' medical records and social history.

For children involved in about 4,000 private adoptions and 2,000 foster care adoptions each year in Pennsylvania, open adoptions provide a sense of possibility, said Ms. Bach, who has overseen hundreds of these agreements over two decades at the Children's Home.

"They can be loyal to two families. They don't have to cut off ties to be with the new family. Having both is really important."