ACLU: Right on Kaepernick, wrong on adoptee and first mother rights

Lorraine

"We support Colin Kaepernick and every other American who has defended an unpopular opinion." So tweets ACLU National. (And we do too, see our current sidebar.)

The ACLU National support 49ers quarterback Kaepernick's kneel-down during the singing of the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police brutality, but they also support injustice against adoptees. They say they do this for those birth/first mothers who wish to remain secret from their children. Baloney. If that is their argument for being such a stand-up partner to adoptee injustice, they are ignoring what they actually support.

CHRISTIE Vetoes Adoptee Rights in New Jersey and other legislative news

Lorraine

Deflated. That's how I felt when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's threw out the adoptee-rights bill (some 30 years in the making) with a massive, unconscionable, cave-to-the-closet statement on Thursday:

"The decision of any biological parent to seek adoptive parents for a child is an enormously complicated choice. The emotional struggle preceding any adoption is unlike any other step facing a parent, with ramifications for the mother, father and child that will endure throughout their lives."

Do Origins Matter?

Lorraine

Judy Clarke, the court-appointed lawyer for Jared Loughner, the deranged 22-year-old charged in the Tucson shootings, is said to be likely investigate his life--"going back several generations to learn as much as possible about his origins"--as she prepares his defense. Of course most people will just read that and move on, but as I read it this morning in The New York Times my mind--the mind of a first mother, a birth mother--leaped to the awareness that this would almost certainly not be possible if Loughner were adopted.

ACLU Tramples Adoptee Rights & First Mother Protections

By Lorraine Dusky and Jane Edwards

Politics definitely makes strange bed fellows. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey has lined up with Right to Life and the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) to oppose a bill which would allow most of the adoptees in that state to have a copy of their original birth certificates. The ACLU and its unusual fellow travelers claim opening records would a) invade birth mothers’ privacy and b) cause adoptions to go down, presumably because women would choose abortion rather than adoption.

When you have a family history of breast cancer, take this test. Or, Do not pass Go, Go directly to jail.

Did you know that genes can be patented? That's right, ever since 1982 when the U.S. Patent Office let a group of inventors "own" a specific gene. Today more than 20 percent of human genes have been patented in the United States, primarily by private firms and universities.

What does this have to do with adoption?

Plenty, if you are adopted most likely you do not have access to your family medical history. A company called Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City (in our least favorite state) holds the patent on breast- and ovarian-cancer genes, and they have developed the only test so far which doctors recommend for women with a family history of breast or ovarian cancer to see if you are carrying the discordant gene. You see the problem, right?

If you don't know if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, what do you do? Pop for the test, of course. It's around $3,400 and good luck getting your insurance company to cover it because you say you're adopted. Earlier this month, Myriad reported its profits increased 67 percent, to $35.4 million, for the quarter that ended Dec. 31, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

There have been complaints aplenty that the patents impede research because scientists are even forbidden to looked at BRCA results with permission. Amazingly enough, in the first lawsuit of its kind, the American Civil Liberties Association, while no friend of adoptee rights, no sirree--and the Public Patent Foundation of Cardozo School of Law argued earlier this month in federal court in New York that patents on these genes are unconstitutional because they restrict research and thus violate free speech.

The lawsuit, Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, et al., was filed on behalf of researchers, genetic counselors, women patients, cancer survivors, breast cancer and women's health groups, and scientific associations (ED: too bad it does not include the American Adoption Congress and "women adopted as infants without access to family medical records") representing 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and laboratory professionals. The lawsuit was filed against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as well as Myriad Genetics and the University of Utah Research Foundation, which hold the patents on the genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. The lawsuit charges that patents on human genes violate the First Amendment and patent law because genes are "products of nature" and therefore can't be patented. 

All of this reminded me of being in Albany a couple of years ago to lobby for an open-records bil for adoptees. One of my fellow lobbyists was a woman who flew up from another state. She had been born and adopted in New York, and so records were tied up in some dark dank corner of Albany. She talked about having medical tests that might be unnecessary, and the expense, trying to explain to the doltish legislator she was speaking to, Daniel O'Donnell, why this made her feel less than equal to well, say the guy she was talking to. (We've talked about Mr. Daniel O'Donnell of the Albany Assembly before.)
 
O'Donnell (of the Upper West Side of Manhattan) stopped her and said that he would never never as long as he lived, no matter what she or I or anyone in the whole wide world might say, vote for open records for adopted people. She continued on, tears welling up in her eyes. O'Donnell treated her as if she did not matter.

If I'm getting off the track here, excuse me, because every time I read about O'Donnell (and I do read about him now and then), who is a major player in getting gay marriage passed in New York, I see red. While O'Donnell is fighting for the rights of his own group--a right I support, and wrote in favor of years ago in USA Today--he can not see beyond the blinders imposed by his sister, adoptive mother Rosie O'Donnell. He once told another lobbyist that Rosie and he were afraid that if the records were open--and Rosies' adopted children knew the truth of their origins--that their birth mothers would come back and attempt to extort money from her; he told Joyce Bahr of New York's Unsealed Initiative that giving adoptees their original birth records was unconstitutional, the court cases that she showed him to the contrary notwithstanding.

And adopted individuals' need for a health history? Phfft! Not our concern! Apparently we haven't made the case yet, and it does seem to fall on deaf ears, such as O'Donnell's and all the others who oppose our bill or hold it up on committee--it's in the Health Committee in the Senate and Thomas Duane, who chairs that committee is not at all interested in moving it along. He recently referred to birth mothers who might be found as "fair game," as if we were all fearful of the phone call that might open the door to the child we lost. (See sidebar for more on Duane and how to reach him.)

Let's hope U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in New York decides in favor of not letting a corporation--any corporation--own a human gene. The ruling was stupid in 1982, and stupid it remains.--lorraine
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I don't know what is up with the white space here but I can't get rid of it. 

A Conversation about Open Records for Adopted People

Why has it been so damn difficult to give adopted people their original birth certificates? To do away with the noxious sealed-record laws and give adopted people the same rights as the rest of us, that is, to know whom they were at birth? You'd think we were asking for the gold of Fort Knox to spend on Manolos. A licensed private investigator, Dennis McCarthy of Auburn, New York , has some ideas and we've been having a lively dialogue.

Dennis: First, not all of the 1.5 million children put up for adoption during the Adoption Holocaust (1945-1973) were the result of a couple of teenagers getting themselves into a situation society wouldn't let them get out of. No, some of those children were the result of powerful "important" men who either betrayed their marriage vows, or were intimate with the "wrong kind" of woman, or who raped a female relative. Men who wield social power don't want their wrongdoing revealed, and I guarantee you, the names of many such men are right there in the adoption files along with the teenagers' names. Whatever power they held 30 or more years ago has likely only increased; if they're dead, they doubtless have left behind powerful families who will only perpetuate the secret. Thus, the records will remain closed on that account.

Lorraine: Yep, we know that a lot of men don't want their unacknowledged children to come out of the woodwork. We also are quite certain that the staunch opposition we run into in some instances from the Catholic church--such as in New Jersey--is at least partly the result of priests who fathered children. But in Albany, the bishop has come out in favor of giving adopted people their original birth certificates. But I'd like to know what it is with the American Civil Liberties Union, which generally is hell-bent on preserving the anonymity of birth mothers. I got into a public argument on a radio show once with the ACLU director in Miami, and he was surprised to hear the other side of the story. I'm not sure I turned him completely around, but he was expressing doubt about the ACLU's position by the time we finished talking.

Yet the ACLU in general, and at the national level, has certainly not been on the side of adopted people, which makes me nuts. Adopted people are the ones whose cause the ACLU ought to be supporting--instead of opposing them. Somehow I feel that the ACLU's support of sealed records--sealed from the people they concern the most--is simply corrupt. Like, maybe they have been co-opted by some of those big-shots you mention. Somehow the ACLU is largely convinced that birth/first mothers do not want the records opened, when the opposite is true. But their position is, We gotta protect those first/birth mothers in hiding.

Now, let's talk about the infamous "Searcher," whom I paid $1,200 in 1981 to locate my daughter. Those of us who knew of him feel that he must have been someone in a position to look at records at will and have contacts in all 50 states, as nothing seemed to deter him from a successful search. Later, I found out that he figured out who my daughter was by reading my memoir, Birthmark (her particulars were purposely included), and tracking her down, but he did not pass on the information until I forked over $1,200. In later years, his fee went up. I don't know when he stopped operating.

I have to say I would have paid more, and did not mind at all that I might have been breaking a law to locate my daughter. I have often felt that blood on the steps of Albany and other state capitals--or a publicized break-in similar to Watergate--is the only way we are going to convince some legislators that keeping the records sealed is as criminal and as wrong as slavery. As for first mothers being given the information about who got their children, forget about it. That was part of the proposed Model Adoption Act that made it to Washington in 1980--much to our amazement--but now it's such a hot potato no one will even consider it.

Dennis: Second, there is the likelihood that if The Searcher and "God" and others like him got caught, and their crimes were revealed, the scope of what they did was so enormous that the State would hush it up and simply fire them rather than doing the right thing and prosecute them, instead of risking a public scandal involving government criminality. No state wants a black eye like that, and if the records are unsealed, the crimes of people like The Searcher might come to light. Thus, the records will remain closed on that account, too.

Lorraine: I don't know if I agree the sins of The Searcher are important today. When you lobby in Albany, as I have, what you hear like a mantra is: The Privacy of the Birth Mother. Hosanna....they must be protected. Protected from whom, I'd like to know. That is all BS, but I'm repeating myself. I think most of the people I've met in Albany do not even know the Searcher operated. Behind enemy lines, as far as I'm concerned. This is war.

Dennis: Third, there is too much free-floating, unrequited anger among searching parents and adoptees whose posts I've read on the Internet. There is far too much public venting. It isn't that venting is wrong; indeed, venting is necessary. But when you memorialize your venting online, it will remain there for the world to see until the end of time, and when a political showdown happens between parents/adoptees and the politicians who control our lives, the politicians are simply not going to listen to people whose distinguishing characteristic appears to be anger. And on that account, the records will remain closed as well.

Anger has only one use, as a stepping stone to positive action. However, I see too many people who have decided to embrace their anger and never let it go. These are people who truly have been victimized, but they've made the useless decision to remain victims, and in so doing, they're robbing themselves of the opportunity to be listened to and to make something happen. Embracing victimhood gives one a sense of entitlement; victimhood makes people sit and wait for society to magically pay them back, to set everything right. And those are the people who will spend the rest of their lives in the hole society dug for them.

But this is what society wants and expects of its victims – society wants its victims to stay in the hole, to stay there and sit and wait for someone or something else to pull them out. It's a war of attrition in which no one accepts responsibility for anything. It's a war of attrition which society always wins, has always won, and will always win.

Lorraine: Wow. That's a very bleak way of looking at the situation. I agree that there is a lot of anger--I have some myself--because I felt when I surrendered my daughter I had no choice. I argued with my social worker over the sealed-in-perpetuity of the sealed records for I had been going along on the assumption that when she turned 18 or 21, both of us would be given the other's identity. That seemed like the natural thing, the moral way, the right way. I was shocked when I found out that was not the case. Finally, the social worker--Mrs. Helen Mura--said that if I would not agree to a closed-forever-adoption, the agency--Northaven Terrace in Rochester, New York--could not help me with the adoption. Incidentally, the agency no longer exists.

So as for "breaking a law" and paying some clerk or official who could make a phone call--he did his work before the Internet, remember--and get the information I would have walked over hot coals for, I did not give a damn. I was participating in a social revolution, and I'd do it again. Wait--I still am participating in a social revolution. Eventually, we will win. Even the Prince of Darkness, the late Bill Pierce of the National Council for Adoption, the scourge of open records, said that we would win one day, that open records were the wave of the future. He told that to Florence Fisher, one of the real pioneers of this movement, and the founder ALMA, an early organization that did much to move adoption reform forward, and is still around today. I'm going with that. That open records will be a reality in my lifetime.

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Dennis McCarthy is a private detective bonded and licensed by the State of New York. "For 34 years, I have been an investigator/detective of one kind or another, but since 1983 I've worked as private detective and/or lawyer's investigator."