Opening birth records: States of fame (OR, OH) and shame (WA)

Bills in three states, Oregon, Ohio and Washington, open the door to greater adoptee--and in Oregon, first parent--access to adoption records. 

FAMOUS--OREGON
Oregon is leading the way with a bill that will allow adult adoptees to see their entire court file, other than the home study. The Senate passed the bill, SB 623, unanimously on Tuesday, April 23. If this becomes law, adoptees will no longer need a

How to make an Open Adoption work

Jane

Linda Schellentrager is a remarkable adoptive mother I met at the Coordinators2 Symposium in September in Richmond, Virginia. Remarkable because she accepts that she’s a second mother. A second mother not in the sense that she is subordinate--she has been the fulltime mother in every sense of the word--but that she is another mother, an additional mother to the one that her son was born to.

This was not the case in 1992 when Linda and her husband, Marty, adopted  a newborn boy they named Eric. While they met Eric’s first/birth parents, sixteen-year old Laura and eighteen-year old Justin, shortly before they took Eric home, they did not have an open-adoption agreement.