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Daughter Jane and Lorraine, 1983 |
Because I have been part of the adoption reform movement since the mid-Seventies, and see how little progress has been made in the decades since, I am frustrated. In the Seventies, adopted individuals had full access to their original birth records in Kansas, Alabama* and I believe, Alaska. Oregon, New Hampshire, Maine, and, last year, Rhode Island followed suit. Several states in the meantime passed various legislation that still allowed another party--the biological parent--the right to control whether an adopted person may obtain his most vital document: proof of existence and parentage at the time of birth. Some states still even have adoptive parent right-of-refusal to grant this document to the individual to whom it pertains: the adopted person.
Amended birth certificates are basically falsified legal documents that perpetuate a lie for they are not a record of birth, they are a record of a "pretend" birth of a child to two people that child was not born to. When the laws that legalized such falsification were passed, from the Thirties and even into the Eighties, the claim was that it was done to "protect the integrity" of the adoptive family. If the