h♥le cont.: As a first mother, testifying for adoptee rights in New York, 1976

Lorraine 

By 1976 the New York state legislature amazingly enough is considering a bill that will allow individuals born and adopted in New York to obtain their original, unamended birth certificates.

Florence [1] is planning a lawsuit to have the amended birth certificates be declared unconstitutional, but holds back now. If New York’s law fell, could the rest of the country be far behind? Florence and I troop up to Albany with a handful of others—adoptees, adoptive parents, a phalanx of psychologists and social workers, attorneys, adoption-agency heads, and another natural mother who turns out also to be an adoptee, a double-whammy that is way more common than most people know.[2]

Challenging closed adoption records in the courts

Jane

It's time adoptees come together in a lawsuit to strike down sealed record laws. But before I go into this, some history. Over thirty-five years ago a small group of intrepid New York adoptees filed a legal action action in federal court asking the court to declare laws preventing them from examining their adoption records unconstitutional. They sought not only their original birth certificates,  but also their court records and their files at the agencies which handled their adoptions. They faced a formidable army of lawyers representing powerful interests--the City of New York, the courts, and major adoption agencies. They lost.

From that time on, adoptees have been understandably reluctant to challenge these unjust laws in the courts. Instead, they have taken their
case to unsympathetic legislators, only to be told time and time again that

Action is the sincerest form of thanks

Jane

It’s hard to be thankful when you read the nonsense coming out of celebrity-land.

“If my [twin] sons want to know about their egg donor when they are older, I will be able to show them photos. But she asked that they not have contact,” singer Ricky Martin told People.

Ricky, you burro, don’t you know that you’re consigning your boys to searching faces in shopping malls wondering if that Nordstrom shopper or that woman sipping lattes at Starbucks is their mother.

What's better: A contact veto or no reform at all?

I admit I am torn about some bills that would give more than 99 percent of the adoptees the right to have their original birth certificates, when that seems the only thing that will pass in my lifetime. I'm talking about bills that include a birth-parent veto, which would deny adoptees of mothers (and fathers, I presume) who file such a veto the right to know who they are. Cruel and unusual punishment for being adopted, it seems to me.

I've been involved in this fight for nearly four decades now, and time is slipping away. More people will die without the right to their original identities. Might it not be better to accept a compromise and let most adoptees have their original birth certificates, with the names of the parents who conceived and bore them?

When I was involved with adoptee-rights pioneer and flame-thrower Florence Fisher in trying tochange legislation in New York in the Seventies, Richard Gottfried, now chair of the Assembly Committee on Health, and others suggested that we could have a bill that would open adoption agency and court records only to adopted persons who turned eighteen after the passage of the law. In other words, a bill passed in 1976, when this was proposed by a commission on child welfare, would affect only those adoptees born that year and after; meaning: they would get their records on demand in 1994, or eighteen years after the bill passed. For the rest, a system of confidential intermediaries was proposed.

Florence, as founder and the life behind the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association (ALMA), turned down that flat. It was all or nothing; she did not want to leave a whole group adoptees out of the loop. The following year ALMA filed a class-action federal lawsuit against New York's sealed adoption and birth records. That did not go so well, and here we are today, with the nearly the same archaic sealed-records stupidity that New York has held adoptees in thrall since 1935. A passive registry, underfunded and not publicized, connects only a tiny percentage (something less than four percent) of the people who apply. One can read about the legal case in detail in E. Wayne Carp's excellent book of the history of the adoption reform movement, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption.

Yet Florence and I today talk about how if that bill had passed, at least people born back then would have the right to their records today, period. It is a bothersome thought.

I personally know many adoptees whose decades-long searches have led no where. So does Florence. In my files I have letters from people in their Seventies who are likely to die without ever having the answer to the question that has haunted them most of their lives. Many searchers do not take cases where the information is so scant that the search is likely to lead to a dead end. New York, unless you were born in one of the five boroughs of New York City, is a particularly hard nut to crack. A woman I wrote about earlier here has tried to search--by herself, with a searcher I put her in touch with--but to no avail. It's clear she needs either her original birth certificate or her agency file.

I found my daughter Jane in the early 80s, when the still-anonymous Searcher located her; in fact, as I've said here before, he had her name and family and address before from the clues I put in my 1979 memoir, Birthmark.

However, he did not give them to me until I paid $1,200. So it goes. I was glad to get the information, relieved to find my daughter. I think he must have worked for the government himself--perhaps he or she was a judge, or social worker, or adoption-agency director who could simply call up Albany and all the other vital-records departments in the country and ask for the information, and it was given. We birth mothers who used his services eagerly paid the fee and subsidized his vacation home in the Adirondacks.

But those days are over. While the Internet has made searching more available to many, thousands more still will not find out who they are without getting their hands on their original birth certificates before they were amended and the names of one's original parents locked away. I'm not going to dismiss them because others--even a great many--will be able to search anyway with the clues they have, even without their original birth certificates. While the pure issue of an adopted person's civil right cries out for justice for all--no birth mother vetoes!--I am left with the haunting sense that this leads to hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of adopted people whose quest for their original identity will have no end, whose lives will have no answers.

So while I totally understand how incredibly annoying and wrong these bills are, for they let a very very small group of birth mother deniers strip the rights of another group of people whose rights should be paramount, I have my qualms about what to do. Somewhat reluctantly, Jane and I have supported such a bill in New Jersey, which has a limited (one year) window in which birth/first mothers might file such a cruel veto, to deny their own children the right to know who they are--but yet it bothers us. At bottom such bills, as the one in Rhode Island, and the one is Illinois, are wrong headed. The states that pass them (Delaware,Tennessee) do not go back and "fix" them. The states that have a "contact preference" instead of a veto (Oregon, Maine, New Hampshire, Alabama) report no problems with the law as is. A contact-preference is just that: mothers and fathers can state they do not wish to be contacted, but the adoptees still gets their original birth certificate. (Alaska and Kansas also give adoptees their records for the asking.)

Yet we get bills that contain these noxious poison pills in the form of a contact VETOES. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union, on a state-by-state basis, is generally against giving adoptees the right to their original birth certificates without this "secrecy protection" for birth mothers, seemingly and wrongly assuming that most of us want to languish in birth-mother-protection programs, living anonymously among the rest of the non-birth parent population. It totally baffles me how they can ignore the rights of the adopted to have the same rights as the rest of us. All I can think is that like NOW in Michigan (which was against a bill which was pretty bad to begin with), the people who run ACLU are under the influence of adoptive parents who hide their fear in the skirts of birth/first mothers, whom they imagine do not want to be found, revealed, whatever.

One can understand the opposition of the Catholic Church because not only have they listened to the tearful confessions of women years ago who had children conceived outside of marriage (though not mine, even after 12 years of Catholic schools), the Church is also protecting scores of priests who fathered children. From all accounts, there are many such children. However, a few dioceses do individually support legislation to give adoptees their rights, such as that of Albany. Lobby organizations such as the National Council for Adoption (FOR Adoption says it all) do not even like these bills with contact vetoes; they only want passive registries. They want to keep business as usual--and it is a big money-making business--going strong.

So once again, as more than thirty years ago, in 1976 when I testified in Albany to unseal the birth records, I'm left with a quandary--do we accept a mediocre bill because it is all we can get? Since it will help so many adoptees get their original birth records on demand, is it worth accepting the poison pill of a birth-parent veto? The American Adoption Congress backs the Rhode Island bill. A group in New Jersey has been working hard for a bill with a limited-time birth-parent veto. Bastard Nation is adamantly opposed to all such bills. Posting this rumination will cause many to denounce me as a sell-out.

In one sense, this is not my fight--except that I have chosen to fight for adoptee rights--but it is not for me to oppose these bills that will affect so many. I am not adopted. I have always had my birth records, and except for a fleeting moment or two when I was five, I always knew whose daughter I was, where I came from, who my grandparents were. I've always been securely grounded in my self-awareness. But hell, I support giving not only all adoptees their original birth records and agency files, but giving birth parents the names of the people who adopted their children. Adoption as it has been practiced is a heinous crime against nature and common sense.

Yet back in 1976, if we had accepted the compromise bill offered, all people born and adopted in New York State since then...would have the unassailable right to their original birth records. What about all those people born and adopted in New York since who have been denied their records because we thought we could get more, way back in 1976? What about them? What about the people who will not get their original birth records if Rhode Island and Illinois pass no bill at all?

Today, I don't have an answer for them.--lorraine 

I was not 'forced' to surrender my child but...

And of course, if a mother willingly surrendered her child -- if indeed the child was unwanted and she did not want to keep it -- she is not going to experience PTSD as it was not done against her will. It would not be a traumatic event for her. 

Whoa, Cedar, beg to differ! I love your blog (Adoption Critique) and usually agree with you, but the comment above, posted as a comment to the previous post here (Does surrender (for the birth/first mother) and adoption (for the child) lead to PTSD?) sure got my notice.

I was not forced by anyone, save circumstance, society, the prevailing culture, to surrender my baby. I think I can say without being contradicted, the same is true for Jane and Linda. My parents did not make me sign the papers. My parents in another state did not even know I was pregnant because at over four months pregnant, I had been able to go home for Christmas and disguise the fact that I was with child! For a number of reasons--such as the father was a married man, he did not get a divorce in time to save our baby--I did not feel that I could keep my child. I live with the fact that I was not strong enough to change the course of my life on the spot and keep my baby. Do I have regrets that I was not stronger? Did I know what a lifelong impact this would have on my life?

Yes, and no.

Did giving up my daughter fuck me up? Oh yeah, big time. After she was born I was so hysterical that I was held down by two nurses and tranquilized--now she was gone, and gone she would be. Yet two or three weeks later, when it continued to be clear that Patrick, my daughter's father, was not going to leave his wife--not that it ever seemed like he would in time--I signed the surrender papers. It was 1966, and the world was a very different place. Women today still give up their babies without guns to their heads, and we read about their sorrow in places like The New York Times, as we did on Sunday, in their special Mother's Day tribute in the Modern Love column. We read it in a zillion other blogs, in memoirs, and now, even see it making its way in the movies.

Was it traumatic that I relinquished my daughter, even though no one had a hatchet over my head? Or for the writer of the column about open adoption, Amy Seek? Absolutely. I could not know how my dramatically relinquishment would affect me, how within six years the scales would fall from my eyes when I read about Florence Fisher and the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association in The New York Times, and set my life on a course to change adoption as it is practiced today.

Do I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? PTSD is not like cancer, a disease with damaged cells you can look at through a microscope. PTSD is more like PMS...something on a continuum, and somewhere you reach a point where the lingering effects of the event are so overwhelming you end up with a classification of PTSD. I wouldn't call my current state one of PTSD, in the true medical sense where I need drugs, or alcohol or to be locked up in loony bin, but my surrender of my daughter sure as hell bothers me. A whole lot.

Consider this: If I--and a whole lot of other other women who relinquished their children in all sorts of circumstances for all sorts of reasons--were so damn okay, the week leading up to Mother's Day would not have been such a bitch for so many of us.

Firestorms erupted on other blogs. I walked out on a neighbor when she--knowing I relinquished a child, even having met that child--indicated she hoped the thirty-fortysomething couple who live between us "adopt" because the nice young man of that couple finally found a woman and she's moved in, but it's probably too late for them to have children. And they have told someone adoption is on their minds. I'm thinking, Damn, I'll never be able to walk past that house again without thinking about "adoption," and I've already got that at the other end of the block. I'm thinking: every time I see that kid he or she will remind me that somewhere else, there was a catastrophe in someone's life and that's why the real mother doesn't have her baby.

If my surrender was not traumatic I would not be so upset--racing heart, elevated blood pressure, automatic sweat release--when I listen to people talk about adoption casually.

I would not say, Damn, can't I avoid this? nearly everytime I turn the TV on and there's some new story with an adoption twist. Last week it was Law & Order, the week before it was Law & Order, SVU.

I wouldn't think about a friend's daughter from Guatemala, Hmm, probably one of those stolen kids.

I would not even be pissed off that an adoptive grandfather, told me to my face "you are our worst nightmare" when he learned that my daughter actually lived her with us for lengthy stretches at a time when she was in her teens and after. I would not record programs such as Who Do You Think You Are? and The Locator and keep Kleenex nearby because, of course, I know I am going to weep.

My own PMS serious enough that a doctor eventually classified it as Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, or PMDD. But do I have PTSD forty-four years after my daughter was born, and relinquished to an unknown world?

Maybe not in the clinical sense. But a variation thereof. If I didn't I would not be writing FirstMotherForum. I'd simply be smelling the roses.--lorraine 
___________________________
PS: If you are interested in commenting here about how you do not have a lifelong trauma relating to adoption and we who do are the unusual, please go to a blog that is devoted to the great happiness that is adoption for other people. There are several. This is not one. Yes, some of the arguing that goes on in the comments here is best done elsewhere, and what was underway in the last blog made me rethink what we post. I'm laying that out now because I am tired of the bickering that goes on, the accusations that follow--even in snarky comments at other blogs about how I am despicable--when we do not post some comments. It's tiring. I'm done with it.

Why Don't We Have National Adoptive Mother's Day?

This is going to be the shortest post ever because I have just been on the phone with Jennifer, my alternate universe daughter, Evan, my step-son and his son, Dylan, and then I called adoption-reform pioneer and founder of ALMA, Florence Fisher to tell her about the wonderful email I got my granddaughter, Lisa...who was adopted (yes, if you are new to my life and the blog, that is the case, my daughter was one of the many adoptees who also relinquished a child for adoption and I could not stop it)  and whom I contacted shortly after New Year's.

Let me just say her email was wonderful, and thanks everyone--Jess and Alison and Celeste and others--for the cards and calls, and for everyone who left a comment. I was really down in the dumps earlier in the week--was it Mother's Day approaching? probably--but the day turned out fine. My husband and I went antiquing (he found a book of American maps he was searching, I found a fab rhinestone-and-enamel pin of two parrots from the Fifties) and had brunch in a noisy busy Mom-and-Pop kind of place. But the reason for the now post is not to talk about "my day," but to direct you to one you all have to read: Happy Birthmother Day or Happy Adopter Day.

Cassie, I wish I had written it...you hit the nail on the head with a twenty-pound hammer. Thank you for writing it.--lorraine

A Sweet Decision May Foretell the Ending of Patents on our DNA

A federal judge in Manhattan on Monday (3/29/10) struck own patents on two human genes related to breast and ovarian cancer, saying that the patents--though granted for decades--were "improperly granted" because they violated a "law of nature." Hallelujah. A law violating a "law of nature"? Hmm, maybe I can think of another law that violates a "law of nature." Let us think.

In a 152-page decision, Judge Robert W. Sweet of the U.S. District Court said pointed out that the whole concept of patenting a gene was no more than a "lawyer's trick," designed to circumvent the prohibition of the direct patenting of our DNA. As a result of Sweet's (we do love this guy's name) decision, seven patents were declared invalid--patents on the genes BRCA 1 and BRCA 2, whose mutations have been linked to breast and ovarian cancer, making this decision of particular interest to women.

The whole idea of patenting genes is nuts. Genes come out of nature, they were not developed in a laboratory by a modern day Dr. Frakenstein. With the patents, Myriad Genetics (and the University of Utah Research Foundation), had developed the only test to determine if individuals were carrying mutations of the genes linked to a high incidence of breast and ovarian cancers. We previously wrote about the impact of these patents on adopted people in February, noting that adoptees with no access to their family medical history were at a particular disadvantage in deciding whether or not such an expensive procedure (approximately $3,400) might be necessary.

A group of women, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, brought the lawsuit, claiming that the patents stifled research, kept prices high and prevented women from getting a second opinion. (We do wish adopted individuals had been part of the lawsuit, because the decision might have been a wedge for the courts to consider the unjust impact of sealed original birth certificates and adoption files.) Myriad Genetics offered the only test, and no other could be developed as the company held the sole right to work with the genes in question. According to The New York Times, many in the patent industry believed the judge would uphold the patents. Quelle surprise!

Every now and then a judge come along who comes out with a decision that smacks of so much common sense backed by a simple "law of nature" that it takes your breath away, considering all the inane and unjust laws on the books.

Decades ago, in the late Seventies, adoption reformer Florence Fisher thought we could dispatch closed adoption and birth records in every state of the union with a single Supreme Court decision. It would, we hoped, wipe all the crazy-quilt identity secrecy laws off the books and return honor and identity to all adoptees. Florence's organization, the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association (familiarly known as ALMA) brought a class-action lawsuit against New York's sealed adoption records laws. The lawsuit claimed that the law violated rights found in the First, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments: the right to knowledge of their natural parents, a right the Supreme Court had long recognized as within the protection of the First Amendment; the right not to be confined or controlled not only by slavery, but by "badges or incidents of slavery", contained in the Thirteenth Amendment;" and the right to privacy--which included the right to knowledge of one's origins--in the Fourteenth Amendment. (For a fuller explanation of the lawsuit, see E. Wayne Carp's Family Matters.)

Florence found a Constitutional lawyer, Cyril Means, to draft the lawsuit, funded the court case, and forward we marched, thinking we really thought we had a shot at getting the identity-stripping laws off the books and into the dark history of adoption. Certainly the court could not fail to see the merits of our argument. No such luck. The idea that adoption trumped all the rights of the individual held sway in court then, holds sway in most state legislatures today. ALMA's case was dismissed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York; and dismissed on appeal by one Judge James L. Oakes. I remember talked to Florence that night, both of us low and full of despair.

Oakes was wrong; his dismissal an abomination, as surely as the Dred Scott and Plessy V. Ferguson decisions. I pray that the time comes in my lifetime that someone will file another such court case, and that the winds of change have blown enough so that some judge, perhaps one as sensible and ethical and far-seeing as Judge Sweet can see that the time for true justice has come. Then we need not be squabbling about tenets in proposed legislation that we find reprehensible, then we need not be fighting amongst ourselves at all. Then we shall all be free.--lorraine

A Birth Father Refuses to Meet His Daughter

While we are talking about men's reactions to learning about a first child who had been surrendered to adoption, here is a section of the memoir I'm writing that relates to my daughter, Jane, and her biological father, Brian. This section picks up after Birthmark has been published, and I have found Jane. The year is 1983; Jane was seventeen. Jane lived in Wisconsin; her adoptive mother was a nurse, her father an insurance adjuster. At the time of this part of the story, Brian was a reporter for Newsday on Long Island, where I live.

Copyright 2009 Lorraine Dusky

Chapter 11 No-Show Dad

If the point of Birthmark had been to shine a light on the truth of adoption and the injustice of sealed birth records, as well as to show that mothers did not forget, then further publicity of our “happy ending” was a good thing. With Jane’s and her parents’ agreement, I initiated reunion stories in the media when she came back to Sag Harbor the following summer for an extended stay—most of the summer! Imagine my elation! Imagine my joy! Evan, my husband's son, was also spending the summer between college semesters with us. In two years, I’d gone from a single woman singing the blues to a wife and mother, two times over.

Sure, it happens to a lot of women, but to me? Not something I would have allowed myself to imagine. How much the changes in my life affected me was evident apparently in the lines of my face. A couple of months after I’d been reunited with Jane, someone a friend of a friend asked her if I’d had a face lift or “something done.” He said I looked “different, younger.” I was forty at the time.

Jane and I did a TV show in Boston, interviews with the local weeklies, and Long Island’s daily, Newsday, where Brian worked, sent a columnist. Her story [1] filled nearly half a page, with a picture with the two of us sitting on our back porch with our arms wrapped around each other. Ann [Jane's adoptive mother] is quoted, noting that while Jane had been curious about her biological mother, friends were against our meeting. “You never know how strong the ties are.” she said. “But we did it for Jane’s sake…. Here was this glamorous girl from New York. ‘It had to be that, didn’t it’ I thought then. I wasn't thrilled about the whole thing. I really did feel threatened.” She added that her husband was more suspicious about what I wanted, “but it was easier for him because it was a mother who came into the picture….But no, it worked out nicely.”

The writer noted that Jane was only uncomfortable with one question: What is Lorraine to you? “It’s hard to describe to other people what she is to me,” Jane answered.

Oddly enough, the writer did not ask about her father, and we offered no information. Did she know who it was? Did she even knew him? The information mill among newspaper people operates pretty well, as you might imagine; but maybe she hadn’t heard any of the gossip from Rochester, because after all, I left there in a cloud seventeen years earlier. If Jane hoped a story in Brian’s own newspaper would melt his heart, she kept it to herself, and I did not mention it. I hoped he would call. Unless he was at that moment away in detox, he had to have seen the story.

However, her father was mentioned a few weeks later, in a New York Times story, [2] that noted that he lived on Long Island, but so far had refused to meet her. The story included another mother [Alison Ward and her daughter, Holly] who had reunited with her teenage daughter. The four of us are all smiles in the accompanying photograph. “Jane, who had planned to start searching for her natural mother when she turned eighteen, views the situation this way: ‘I just feel I have two women who really care about me,’” the story read. No sweat, she seemed to be saying.

Ann was quoted in the piece, remarking that she “always wondered if [our meeting] would interfere with my relationship with Jane, but finding Lorraine has freed Jane and given her much more self-confidence. And, if anything, Jane and I are as close, if not closer, than ever.”

A spokesman for the National Council for Adoption—the opposition—was also quoted in the story, stating that the search movement could be the source of a great “potential for human sorrow” on the part of the birth mothers. “These women may have had their child through rape or incest, and a meeting could be very harmful to them.”[3] He estimated that only one to two percent of adoptees and birth parents want to meet; Florence Fisher of ALMA disputed that, and put the figure at 80 percent. Elizabeth Cole from the Child Welfare League noted that records are open in Britain and Israel and that her colleagues there “had not found the practice to be harmful.” She predicted that adoptees will eventually get their original birth records in this country. That was in 1983.

The piece ended with a zinger: “In 1979 Julie Welsh, a 33-year-old medical secretary from Fair Lawn, N.J., traced the son she had given up for adoption 12 years earlier to a family who lived only 30 minutes away. One day she summoned the courage to knock on their door. She learned that the boy’s adoptive mother had died when he was 5 and the father had married a woman who did not like him, so he was sent to a private school in New Hampshire.

“‘If you want him back you can have him back,’ Mrs. Welsh was told. She did, so the following weekend she and her husband drove up to get the boy, Jeff, who had not been allowed to come home for holidays or vacations. The Welshes, who have two other children, have legally adopted Jeff, whose first words when his mother encountered him were: ‘I’m so glad you came and found me!’”

Brian had to have seen at least one of the pieces. But he did not call. Nor had he responded to the picture and note I’d written earlier, sent to him at the office. There was no reason in making another call, only to be turned down again, but Jane had other ideas. She would get him on the phone herself—he would not turn her down if she called, right? Probably right? I admired her moxie—she was only seventeen, and she’d been the adopted kid who had seizures and wore a hockey helmet to school for four years. But what if, even then, he said, No, I won’t meet you and hung up? Was she up to this outcome? How much more pain did she have to endure? But I did not interfere; this was her call. She’s a gutsy kid, I told myself—she’s my daughter, all right.

So, from the upstairs phone in the hallway—the same one where I’d taken her name down two years before—I dialed his direct number at Newsday and handed her the receiver. Please stay, she whispered as the phone rang, I might need you. Brian answered.

But she was also his daughter, she was also a teenager afraid of rejection, and now her courage failed her. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” I could hear his voice faintly coming through the line but Jane could not make herself speak. Her eyes were shiny globes of infinite sorrow. Go ahead, say something, I urged with a nod of the head, Say something. Say Hello. Say anything.

She could not find her voice. Maybe I should have grabbed the phone out of his hands and yelled at him to be a man and just say hello to his daughter, but he’d been so clear—even irritated the last time I’d called—about not being ready, just “not now,” and maybe my intervention now might just make him angry, and that might be worse than this impasse. That might set back everything, if she were ever to meet him. Maybe.

Brian hung up after twenty seconds or so.

Jane looked me, sad and terrified and disappointed all at once, a look that broke my heart. She ran down the steps and out of the house. No, she did not want me to come. She did not want to talk about the aborted phone call, or him or anything when she got back, and what really, could there be to say? We never spoke of that phone call again.

Of course now I was really angry with Brian. This was someone who had spoken of “honor” and “character” when we had been together. He turned out to be a straw man. He didn’t even have the backbone to meet his daughter.

---

[1] Marilyn Goldstein, “ Forging A Family Bond After 17 Years, Long Island Diary, Newsday, July 21, 1983.

[2] Judy Klemesrud, “Mothers Find the Children They Gave Up,” New York Times, Aug. 29,1983.

[3] While that seems to be the great bugaboo about open records to uninformed people or those opposed to open records, there are no indications, no statistics from states with open records that these women object to meeting their children in any greater number than women who were not the victims of rape or incest. Of course last week, we had a story from New Jersey about a woman who was suing the state when she a child contacted her. For such women, I have little understanding, as the child is wholly innocent in such a circumstance.