A Joyous New Year---Some good news in adoption reform

I'm feeling really upbeat today, the last day of 2013. It's my 45th wedding anniversary, 45 years with a wonderful patient, kind man. We may just go out for Chinese tonight as we did when our three daughters were young and we had little time or money. Last night we and a couple of friends had a great dinner and went to a fantastic concert by the Oregon Symphony. It culminated with Beethoven's Ninth and its rousing finale Ode to Joy.

I feel joyous and optimistic for 2014: my family is doing well, I've got great friends, and there's progress on adoption reform.

Why adoption reform frustrates me

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

Why is adoption reform ignored by The New York Times?

Jane and Lorraine, 1983**

This morning's New York Times carries the last column of Arthur S. Brisbane as The Public Editor,* who comments weekly about the paper's coverage, good and bad. In it, I found this nugget:

"I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing 'there is no conspiracy' and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.(Emphasis added.)

Helen Gurley Brown Gave Early Ink to Adoption Reform

Helen Gurley Brown in 1964

Helen Gurley Brown was a friend of mine. She was one of the few editors back in the day when I was "coming out" of the birth mother closet who supported me, gave me a pat on the back, and gave me an assignment. It was for Cosmopolitan with Brown as editor-in-chief I wrote my first piece about adoption reform, after reading a story in The New York Times about this woman named Florence Fisher and how she was shaking up adoption and demanding that adopted individuals be given their original birth certificates.

When Birthmark came out in 1979, I happened by the office and gave Helen an autographed copy; she wrote me a nice note later that I must have somewhere in my files. Although she was reviled by some of the feminists for her stance on using sex as a means to security and a better life, Helen went her own way and was certainly a feminist in the Madonna mold.

Why I Still Love Find My Family

Back to Find My Family because the show has certainly struck a nerve with lots of grumbling that it doesn't give adoptive parents the air time they deserve because they are the ones who bandaged the knees, did the late night emergency room runs, etc. We know, we have heard that before. We understand that adoptive parents did what we were not able to do: raise our children.

We know that many of the people who raise our children can't even talk about us as more than a "birth canal" and the "woman who labored my son."  We have seen those references, the first at RainbowKids.com and the second in a book called Wanting A Child (apparently anybody's child will do).

But folks, Find My Family is not about how noble it is to adopt because there are so many children who need homes, a questionable premise regular readers of FirstMotherForum are aware of. The ABC reality show is about the fact that simply obliterating a person's identity because he/she was adopted by a new family and given a second identity does not work! Thus the tears, thus the running up the hill to the family tree to meet the person or people who give back an identity that was lost, thus the emotions running high.

Reality all right.

Yes, I know, I can hear people clucking in the background that not every adoptee wants to search, and not every adoptee feels "incomplete" with knowing his or her identity, and to them I ask: Why Not? What makes them cut themselves off from their past, or the search for their past? Isn't it just a little weird to have your slate wiped clean at whatever age you were adopted and have the world tell you--what happened before doesn't matter? Isn't not wanting to know unnatural? Curiosity is normally seen as a sign of intelligence, but when an adopted persons asks Who am I? it is often interpreted as a sign of pathology.

Anybody thinking clearly realizes this is total baloney, the result of years of brain-washing by a culture that views adoption as a pure good, not complicated by the messy emotions of a grieving birth mother and a child who grows up confused. But adoption is painful. Adoption is always painful. The healing can only truly begin with full and complete knowledge of one's story, one's heritage, one's cultural and familial identity.

Yet in 42 states of the nation, it is still not legally possible for an adopted person--of any age--to say, Hey, you know, I want to know who I really am. I want to know what my story is. I want to know who my mother is and why she gave me away. And by the way, I want to know who my father is, too. Did he even know I was born? Was I given away because something is wrong with me?

Only six states allow individuals adopted as children access to their records: Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, New Hampshire, Maine, and Oregon. Delaware and Tennessee place restrictions on this information at the request of the birth parent (though only a minuscule number do this); numerous other states have various kinds of limitations that prevent individuals from freely having this information simply by asking for it. We are talking about letting adults have the same rights as the rest of us: the right to know from whence we came.

Getting the legislation passed to let the fresh wind of truth into an adopted person's life has proven incredibly difficult--and though I hate to say it because of the hackles this will raise, it's often an adopted parent who blocks the legislation. Weird, wouldn't you say? If they love their kids so much, wouldn't they want them to be free? Adoption then is more about ownership than our culture admits. The counterpoint to this is Lou D'Alessandro, the adoptive father and legislator who was the driving force behind the legislation that opened up New Hampshire and gave adopted individuals the right to have their original birth certificates.

In New Jersey right now, the Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts (see sidebar here for call to action) is sitting on legislation despite approval by the Senate in a 31-7 vote and the support of 50+ (of the 80) Assembly members. In New York The Adoptee Bill of Rights has been stalled in Codes Committee by the Speaker of the Assembly Sheldon Silver since 2006, even though it has 70 sponsors.

What will it take to move hearts and minds not only in New Jersey and New York but in every state of the nation that punishes people for the privilege of being adopted? If it is Find My Family, we are all for it. --lorraine

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.

--------------------

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."

Confusion in South Dakota: Open Records Die at Adoptee's Hand

First the Bad News:

The testimony of an adoptee on a legislative committee in South Dakota apparently quashed the open-records bill we had trumpeted yesterday. (Information is hard to get out of SD, so if anyone has new and better information, please post.) Not withstanding what we said earlier--when we thought the bill had passed--it did not.

And yes, you read that right, an an adoptee--who to the best of my knowledge is on the committee himself--killed the bill. Drives me absolutely crazy. It's a way of saying, Hey I prefer these chains and I am so incredibly grateful that was I was adopted, and I don't ever want to know anything about who I REALLY am, fully and completely, and so not only am I not going to look, not only are my feelings about being adopted subsumed under thick lawyers of gratitude and self-hating, I'm not going to make it possible for anybody to have that right!

I am so steamed right now I can hardly type straight. So if you are reading this and if you are adopted or a birth, real, biological, natural, first mother, take a moment and write to the people below.

Let it rip! Let them know how you feel! Let this know that what they are doing is wrong and a flagrant violation of rights! Let them know that birth/first mothers were never promised anonymity! That most of us do not want it from our children! Tell them you were not promised "confidentiality." To most of us, that is a dreaded concept.

If you are an adoptee, tell them that the bill doesn't demand that anyone get their records, it just allows them to if they so desire. Tell them why you need to know. Just because works for me.

When I wrote my letter, I pasted all the emails into one and sent it to everyone. One email. That's all it takes. One. Do you have five or ten minutes (You know you do) to spend on giving adoptees their rights back, rights that were stolen when they were adopted? Your letter could be the one that breaks the back of some legislator who voted against this bill.

Do it now. Do it on your lunch break. Do it before dinner, but do it! Please.


Rep.Nygaard@state.sd.us,
Rep.Cutler@state.sd.us,
Rep.Dreyer@state.sd.us,
Sen.Jerstad@state.sd.us,
Sen.Dempster@state.sd.us,
Sen.Adelstein@state.sd.us

RE: SB153

To: Representatives Nygaard, Cutler and Dreyer
Senators Jerstad, Dempster and Adelstein

Dear Members of the South Dakota Legislature:

Open records bills will never pass if we are silent. I'm not going to post my letter because all need to sound different. You don't have to be a genius or a "writer" to make an impact, you just have to make your voice heard.

Okay, there is no good news about this other than...we are getting close--lorraine

PS: Over at Huffington Post, someone idiot has posted a commentary that Bristol Palin's little boy would be better off adopted. Right.

First Mother Help Needed in SD: No Confidentiality Was Promised

The good news from South Dakota--that they passed an open-records bill with a contact preference--NOT VETO--is tempered somewhat. Apparently there is still some kind of hold up because some in the legislature believe that mothers were "promised" confidentiality.

Hold on there, ladies and gentlemen! I was not "promised" confidentiality, it was forced on me if I wanted to use the state system of adoption. Anonymity from my child was the biggest problem I had with agreeing with the adoption (other than the sense I was doing something against nature, and I was), and I argued with my social worker for weeks over this provision of the law.

Surrender papers carry no such "promise." In fact, the great majority of women long to be united with their children, if only to learn what happened to them and that they prospered.

Letters and emails are needed to reach the SD legislators who are apparently rethinking this bill, and want to add a contact veto. If you are a first mother, please please take the time to email them.

Just copy the information below into your email and let them know the promise of confidentiality is a crock! And that it has been used to keep records sealed in the face of all evidence to the contrary. A mother does not need or want "privacy" from her offspring. And should she be so heartless as to desire it, the adopted person's wishes in the name of human decency must trumps her. Her right to privacy should not trample another person's right to be able to answer the most basic question of all: Who Am I?

Of course it would be better if we had a hundred South Dakota mothers emailing, but let's let them know, wherever you are from, that a right to "privacy" does not included anonymity from your offspring. And if you are in contact with other first mothers, please urge them to write. The time is now.


To: Representatives Nygaard, Cutler and Dreyer
Senators Jerstad, Dempster and Adelstein

RE: SB153

Dear Members of the South Dakota Legislature,

Here are the names and addresses:
Rep.Nygaard@state.sd.us,
Rep.Cutler@state.sd.us,
Rep.Dreyer@state.sd.us,
Sen.Jerstad@state.sd.us,
Sen.Dempster@state.sd.us,
Sen.Adelstein@state.sd.us
___________
Eugenics and the theater, coming up on Saturday.

Who's the IVF Daddy? Opps, I only have a 'second parent'

Rarely does FirstMother find ourselves in agreement with the religious right, but a law change in England brings us into rare, but direct, connect. As of April 6th, 2009, fathers will no longer be necessary in England, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. Read about it at the UK's Sunday Times.

Well, of course some of that male sperm will be necessary, but men--not even "anonymous" men--do not have to be listed on the birth certificate. Single women undergoing fertility treatment will be able to name almost any other adult as their child's second parent on the OriginalBC. The individual so indicated as the "second parent" does not have to be a male or biologically related to the offspring. Now we are all for gay and lesbian rights, but come on! This falls into the theater of the absurd.

The Act excludes "close blood relations" from being so named on the OBC. I suppose this means that a woman's brother or father can not be a "second parent" (this sounds incestuous, just writing it), but what this ridiculous piece of legislation does is subsume the needs of the offspring to the preferences of the biological mother. And that offspring will then have an even harder time finding out whom he or she is descended from, when the day comes that curiosity springs in the heart, and come it will. Sound a bit like any other adoption legislation that was not written with the "best interests" of the child/adult in mind? I can think of one.

Critics claim family values are being further devalued, and though I am not a fan of what "family values" has come to mean, let's have some common sense and consideration of an individual's right to have a family tree--and the ability to find that tree--like the rest of us. For it is a given that this weird birth certificate will make it even harder for some individuals to one day figure out where their DNA came from, unless the "first parents" are willing to spill the beans about the true "second parents," ie, the fathers or sperm donors. This law is no more than a legal codification of a bad practice. It further strips the kids born at IVF clinics of a legal route to learn their complete and true ancestry. It is the legal obfuscation of truth in conception.

We do know--from many sources, including sister blogs--that some women/mothers are not willing to impart this vital information, and even go so far as to hide it. This weird legislation undoubtedly came about at the behest of the gay and lesbian community; we have pretty much stayed out of the fracas over such adoptions, since we at FirstMother are not fans of adoption per se, gay or straight, international or domestic. In fact, since allowing gay adoption further increases the number of all adoptions, we are against it in most cases.

England has some good rules in place--no more than two embryos can be implanted at a time (no octo-moms from implanted zygotes), sperm can not be a salable commodity or given anonymity (which has led to a huge decrease in the availability of anonymous sperm, figure that)--but this one oversteps the boundary of decency and common sense--lorraine

And here's a PS from Jane:

The only relevant Origins USA position is in a draft paper regarding gay adoption. The paper says that gays should not be denied the opportunity to adopt a relatives' child just because they are gay. So it's a pro-family preservation paper, not a gay rights paper as such.

Gay adoption of newborns puts increasing pressure on the adoption industry to supply babies which in turn increases pressure on women to surrender. For the same reason, Firstmother is opposed to women over 40 adopting.

This Heather Has Two Mommies nonsense is bad in another way. It re-enforces in the public's mind that genetics is irrelevant; that the legal system and medical technology can wave a magic wand and nullify the laws of nature. This can lead, and perhaps is leading, to the re-distribution of children from the have nots to the haves, from the undeserving to the government-sanctioned deserving. It bolsters the arguments of adoption promoters and social workers who want to terminate parents' rights at the drop of a hat.

My Daughter's First Visit: Barriers fell and our bond strengthened

Jane's post got me to thinking about my daughter's (also named Jane) first visit to my house on Long Island. She had just turned sixteen; it was April; we had met the previous fall at her home in Madison, Wisconsin, with her parent's blessing. Yes, I know, I had done the unthinkable by searching--and finding--a minor, but that is what I did. The year was 1982; the World Trade Center was an icon of New York City. My daughter Jane had never been to Manhattan, so I arranged to us to stay at a friend's apartment there while we took in the sights. Here's a snippet of what I wrote for my upcoming memoir:

(Please excuse the way this looks but I can not fix it without retyping the whole thing. Sorry.)

Copyright (c) Lorraine Dusky 2009

It’s funny what sticks in one’s mind about any event. Sometimes the smallest detail, like the glint of a diamond on somebody else’s hand, is what you recollect, not the size of the rock. And it’s often the gleam that turns out to be the essence of the thing. Like what I remember about the three days Jane and I spent in Manhattan that spring.

She had never been to New York City. We took in all the usual tourist highlights— we shopped in Chinatown for cheap gewgaws, visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, lunched at the historic Fraunces Tavern near Wall Street, cruised around Manhattan on the Circle Line, sat for a half hour on a bench outside at the top of the World Trade Center and watched the helicopters, rode the Staten Island ferry, even had one of the ladies at the cosmetic counters of Saks Fifth Avenue give us the full treatment. I mean, I crammed in everything I could in those three days.

All that was fine fun, of course, but what I remember best is what we shared at the Statue of Liberty. We took the first boat in the morning from Battery Park, and without speaking of it, made sure we were among the first people off. Then together we raced straight for the elevators, not quite running—because that seemed too crass—but almost. Another family made the first elevator with us. When it stopped, we trotted lickety-split out the door ahead of them, trying not to break into an out-and-out sprint. Without so much as sharing a look, we had, each of us, wanted for us to be the first up the steps of the statue. (We had already discovered that we both loved heights.) Once we reached the steps, we clambered up them quickly, wanting to speed ahead of the other family. Only after a couple of twists and turns did we slow down, look at each other, acknowledge our single-minded quest, and giggle like teenagers.

You might dismiss this as not so unusual, lots of people would do this, you can say, but we knew—wordlessly—why it was important to be first up the steps. Just because. Years later, if we ever spoke of that day, Jane would say, “Remember how we had to be first up the steps of the Statue of Liberty?” and smile. I’d nod and smile back. Our particular shared silliness. No one telling the other to “slow down,” or “Hold on, what’s the rush?” Being first up the steps that day was far more important than the view once we got to the crown. That was nice too, yes, but the best part was being first. Standing there just the two of us, looking down over Manhattan, the first of the day to get that view. She knew that too. She was my daughter. Those were magical times, there seemed to be no self-consciousness between us those days. Barriers fell and our bond strengthened.

Because I had written an Op-ed piece for The New York Times about finding my daughter and the sealed-records statute in New York state, the photographer Jill Krementz wrote and asked if we would be willing to be included in a book for children and teens to be called How It Feels to be Adopted. She’d photograph us and tell Jane’s story in her own voice. Jane immediately agreed to the project. She was going from simply being a kid in an L.D. class to someone special, someone with something to say that others people wanted to hear.

In her essay, Jane reveals that though her mother was pleased that I called, she was “especially nervous” once I was on track to visit because she was threatened. Jane says that most of her own friends were pitted against me, saying things like “I wouldn’t let her just walk into your life. You should tell her to buzz off.” The story is mostly a straight recollection of events after I phoned.

Of our days in Manhattan she says…“What I liked best was our just getting to know each other…. Now I understand the problems she had before I was born and why she put me up for adoption. Being adopted had always made me feel a little insecure, and even though I loved my parents, I still had a lot of unanswered questions and stranger fantasies. Actually, one of my fantasies turned out to be true. I’d always imagined my birthmother was a writer….”

Yes, she would go home to her other life in a few days, but we had these days. However she felt, to me we were mother and daughter then. It didn’t matter that she called me Lorraine. She mostly called me Lorraine—there were a few exceptions when she called me mother, but they would be later, and always rare. Mom was always the woman who raised her; Mom was back home in Wisconsin. But she also called herself my daughter, when it proved expedient. However I really didn’t have equal rights; if I called her “daughter,” she bristled.

We were in the little supermarket on Henry Street--now it's a fancy take-out emporium called Espresso--but then it was a small grocery story, Federico's Market, located practically across the street from the two-story colonial Tony and I were renting. I introduced her to the woman behind the counter--This is my daughter, I said simply, not explaining further, knowing that the woman already knew the whole story. Jane smiled and said hello, but told me once we were on the street that she did not like being introduced as "my daughter."

Then what should I call you?" I protested. She didn't have an answer. Neither of us came up with "birth daughter," for the term wasn't in vogue then, and besides, it implies that the daughter is a daughter only at the time of birth, as if the ties of blood and strings of DNA matter for naught and had been dissolved with the signing of a paper soon after birth. But here we were, sixteen years later. Jane would always be the daughter of two women: Ann, who raised her, and me, who had given her life.

Dear President Obama: Open Sealed Records

Copyright Lorraine Dusky, 2009

Today there are approximately six million people in America who do not have the right to answer the question: Who am I? Who was I at birth? The state took that right from them when they were adopted as infants or toddlers. Only in eight states do they have the right to their original birth certificates. An active movement of adoptee-rights advocates is pressing for reform throughout the country, but the going is at a snail’s pace. At this rate, millions of people will die before the laws are changed, and changed they will be one day. Right is on our side.

Adopted people are not children all their lives. They grow up and need not only updated family medical information, but they need and desire to be whole and integrated individuals, and that includes having full knowledge of who they were at birth. As far back as 1971, the American Academy of Pediatrics stated in a position paper: Determining identity is a difficult process for someone brought up by his natural parents; it is more complex for the individual whose ancestry is unknown to him. Cicero said it this way: Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live forever as a child.

I am a birth mother and journalist who has written extensively about this subject for numerous publications, from Parent’s magazine to The New York Times to Newsweek to USA Today, as well as others. I am also the author of Birthmark (1979), the first memoir to break the silence of women who gave up their children to adoption. I have testified for open records both in Albany and in Washington DC before legislative committees. I relinquished my daughter in 1966 in Rochester. I am the New York representative of the American Adoption Congress, but I write to you as a private citizen today.

The main objection to giving adoptees their original birth certificates is the supposed confidentiality “promised” to the women who relinquished their children in years past when great shame was attached to bearing a child out of wedlock. The vast majority of birth mothers welcome reunion with their children – even if that child is the product of rape or incest. This is only one example, but it speaks volumes. When Maine passed legislation opening its files as of January 1, one of the leaders of the reform was birth mother Bobbi Beavers, whose surrendered child was the product of a rape. She and her son have been reunited.

Yes, there are some who wish to remain unknown to their children. But their number is small. Various studies both in this country and abroad indicate that only between three and six percent wish to remain anonymous from their children. Yet the imagined specter of these women in the mind of legislators continues to block open records at the state level. This small group of women should not dictate public policy, a policy that so dramatically involves an entire class of people, individuals who were never asked what their preferences were. You have to go back to slavery to find a similar situation in which two parties – the state and an individual – make a bargain that forever seals the fate of a third person.

Despite the evidence, still the myth – that of the poor, woebegone “unwed mother” who has never told a soul, let alone her husband – persists. It is in her name that the National Council for Adoption, a coalition of adoption agencies opposed to open records, the Church of the Latter Day Saints, some adoption attorneys, argue to keep records sealed and sued in state courts. But the lawsuits, filed in both Tennessee and Oregon, have failed as the higher courts recognize the validity of adopted individuals seeking their identity papers.

The secrecy-seeking woman is a smoke screen, and obscures what these organizations really want, i.e., to cling to outdated closed adoptions—they can charge more for them! And they do. Despite what we know about the need to know, despite our best efforts to educate the public, despite what common sense dictates, some prospective parents still want closed adoptions and sealed records, and they are the ones who fund the organizations fighting to keep records sealed.

Yet the evidence is clear: no one is harmed by giving adopted people their original birth certificates. Oregon has had open records since May 30, 2000; according to the Oregon Center For Health Statistics website, as of May 31, 2007, 9366 unamended—i.e., original—birth certificates were requested, while 84 women have filed a “no-contact” preference, 79 of them filed when the records were first opened. That is fewer than one percent. Other states with open records are Alabama, Maine, New Hampshire. Tennessee and Delaware allow a mother to file a contact veto; Alaska and Kansas never sealed the birth records of adoptees. Open-record states report no problems due to this policy.

In 1980, the then U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare came to a similar conclusion after holding numerous hearings of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers and other experts around the country. The Model Adoption Act the agency issued stated:

“There can be no legally protected interest in keeping one’s identity secret from one’s biological offspring; parents and child are considered co-owners of the information regarding the event of birth….The birth parents’ interest in reputation is not alone deserving of constitutional protection.”

While other provisions of the act were passed, this provision died at the behest of a powerful senator from Texas, the late John Tower. He was an adoptive father.

But beyond the fact of the small numbers of women seeking anonymity from their own children, you will find no legal precedent written into law in any state of the country. The relinquishment papers birth mothers signed contain no promise of anonymity.

New York’s law is probably typical. Dating from 1935, and passed at the behest of the then governor, Herbert H. Lehman, it contains no promise of confidentiality given to the women who surrendered their children. In fact, many of us, including myself, argued with our social workers about this implied premise of the law when we were signing the surrender papers. We were told we had no choice, if we were to go ahead with an agency-sponsored adoption. In short, we simply capitulated as we had no power to do otherwise.

Worth noting is that Gov. Lehman was an adoptive father. Presumably, this outdated law was passed with good intentions – to assure that families formed by adoption bond, and it was thought then this was best done by severing ties to the past. Presumably, the intent of the law was in the best interests of the child. We now know this simplistic view of adoption doesn’t work.

And understand this, no matter how sorry a group we birth mothers were at the time we gave up our children, we and the times have changed. We are different now, and we deserve no special treatment, not when the state affords no such protection to any other group of people. Many people wish to bury their past and hide their previous marriages; men, including priests, do not wish to be named as fathers in paternity suits, yet the state does not take it upon itself to offer the protection of privacy to them; nor should the state be in the business of “protecting” a minute number of birth mothers from embarrassment, especially as it comes as the cost of trampling the rights of others.

Opponents of open-records often show up to testify and claim that adoptions will go down, and that abortions will go up if the records are unsealed. This is untrue. In the open-records states of Kansas and Alaska, adoptions are proportionally higher, and abortion rates lower, than the national average. Indeed, Kansas has significantly lower abortion rates than the four surrounding states – all with sealed records. Please note that the National Council for Adoption actually has collected these figures, but their spokesman frequently ignores what he knows and makes this specious statement when it testifies, simply because he can. He lies.

Opponents of open records also argue for registries matching parents and adoptees, rather than releasing birth data. But most registries were set up with enough restrictive provisions to make them largely ineffective, and that certainly is the case here. In New York more than 18,000 adoptees, birth parents and siblings have registered since December of 1983, but the “success” rate is fewer than four percent! Offering adoptees a registry is a poor excuse for denying them their original birth certificates. Being able to own that piece of paper surely would seem to be a right that the Constitution guarantees for everyone, once the plague of slavery was abolished.

However difficult it has been to change hearts and minds, change is coming. A 1994-95 Cornell University survey of adoptive parents in New York found that 78 percent actually favored open records. Enlightened adoptive parents and grandparents are sometimes our staunchest supporters in state legislatures. Adoptive father Sen. Lou D’Allesandro led the charge in the New Hampshire Senate in 2005 that opened the records in that state.

For myself, I went around the law. By going underground and paying some stranger $1,200 in 1981, I located my daughter nearly a quarter of a century ago, and enjoyed a relationship with her and her parents for 26 years. She died in 2007.

I ask you to let other adoptees have this same right and find a way to give adopted people the relief they seek. They want only to be treated like all other citizens: to have the right to the information of their birth. They were never asked what was in their best interests in this singular event of their lives. Birth mothers never were promised the secrecy and anonymity from our own children so many would continue to foist upon us. For the vast majority of us, the law as written only continues the cruel and harsh punishment that surrendering our children initially heaped upon us.

Bills to open the records have been around since the Seventies, but have been blocked for years. It is time to let the truth of one’s origins be everyone’s birth right. It is time to let adopted individuals—who never asked to be adopted, who were never asked what was in their best interests—to enjoy the same rights as the rest of us. You can right this wrong by pushing for federal legislation that gives all adopted persons the right to know the answers to life's most primal questions: Who am I? Who was I when I was born? What is my story?

Cordially,

Lorraine Dusky, first/birth/original mother

Living in Interesting Times

Become a crusader and life never is boring...Today I'm thinking about that Arab curse that goes something like: May you live in interesting times.

A few months ago, as readers of Firstmotherforum know, I was scathingly attacked by a friend, a hot-shot bankruptcy lawyer and rainmaker, for having searched for my daughter and effecting a reunion with with her. Mind you, I've known "Aston" for nearly as long as I knew my daughter--since 1981. Aston started a cancer-care foundation for people who live on the East End of Long Island and my husband, Tony, is an active member of the board. We see Aston and his wife for dinner; we have mutual friends. Aston, incidentally, is godfather to the Chinese adoptee of mutual friends who have a home down the street. Aston and his wife,Marci, are childless; his mother argued against adoption and so they did not. I've known his wife for longer than I've been married, and I've been married 27 years. Shortly before this incident, she and I spent an afternoon together at a horse show. We're aren't, say, BFF, but we like each other.

Aston was not against adopted people searching and meeting their natural parents, but he was really against, really really against, first mothers searching. This would disrupt the adoptive family that has been getting on just fine, thank you, without interference, he insisted. He spoke of other mutual acquaintances who adopted from Gladney and then moved to Texas, where the wife was originally from, as really "taking a chance" because then the first mother might have an easier time finding them. (I don't know if this is one of Gladney's "open adoptions." Apparently the adoptive mother was worried about what the girl was eating during her pregnancy, and so at least knew something about her.) All of Aston's sympathy was for adoptive parents, who were there in the middle of the night, fixed the scraped elbow, read the nighttime stories, paid for orthodontics and SAT prep tests, et cetera. There was not an ounce of compassion for any first mother who searched. Marci, there at the dinner table also, said nothing. My husband felt she was anxious that Aston was going too far.

Finally, he asked: "What part of your pie chart in doing so is selfish? I just want to know." How do you answer that? The question was designed to make all first mothers who search look bad.

I have been quite torn up by this incident, for it made me acutely aware of how many people--including friends and acquaintances-- see me, a first mother who had the audacity to search, as well as the whole shebang of open records, particularly giving first mothers information about their children. We've got a lot of educating to do, and some people we will never reach. Aston represents legislators who will never vote for open records.

Except for answering the phone the time he called for my husband and I was curt, I have not spoken to him, or Marci. They have an annual party Thanksgiving weekend. I threw out the invitation. We did not RSVP. This morning I found an email from Marci asking if we are coming, that it's been too long since we've seen each other, signed "love." I have no hard feelings toward her at all.

In the larger world of searching and adoption reform, this incident is small potatoes. So what if my feelings are out of joint? Or even if this is the end of a friendship? This too will pass. I'm just venting today to friends who read this blog. You have to put aside the personal happenings and insults if you believe in a larger cause, one that you know is just and right, even when it seems everyone is against you. I know I sound hopelessly petty today, please forgive me, but I'm feeling blue.

Here is what I emailed Marci.

Dear Marci--

The conversation with Aston about adoption hurt deeply and has stayed with me and I would feel really uncomfortable coming to the party. Being a birth mother entails lifelong pain. It isn't something that happens once and you get over it. I have turned that into lifelong crusade both for opening sealed birth records for adopted people and the rights of mothers to find out what happened to the children they gave up. Aston's attack that night was therefore an attack on who I am so it is very hard for me now to know how to relate to him at all. It's also becoming increasingly awkward for Tony because of ------Foundation.

I tried to explain my feelings to Aston in a subsequent email but he never responded.

I'm very sorry because we have known each other for a long time--actually since before we had Tony or Aston in our lives. I don't know where we go from here.

This is one of those days I wish I didn't live in interesting times.
--lorraine

PS: In a day or two we'll be writing about international adoption.

"Adoption Reform?" Not really. Just the same old story

I sent the following today to Adoption-News-Service, which supposedly is about "adoption reform," as it states on the bottom.

"Could you please enlighten me as to how this announcement--which I seem to have received six times already--relates to 'adoption reform'? It has nothing to do with 'adoption reform.' It has to do with adoption. If I continue to get these kinds of emails, what is the point of being on this list?"

If others agree with me, please leave a note here--and then respond to them directly. I've had it with these noxious invitations to help adopters deal with the "challenging process that feels like an emotional roller coaster." I seriously doubt they want me to show up, and talk about my daughter's difficulties, her adoptive mother's seeming actual dislike of Jane, the various symptoms of neurotic behavior that show up with greater frequency among adopted people. See Adoptees More Likely to be Troubled in Time magazine. Bring this up at a conference about adoption, as I did last year, and you will be hushed almost immediately.

I understand that prospective adopters have real issues and fears to deal with--this child is after all, not carrying their DNA and who knows what that could mean!--but please, do firstmothers want to be reminded of this? Walk in our shoes for a day. Maybe Adoption News Service could send out invitations to all on their list to attend group therapy sessions for women and teenagers considering giving up their children for adoption.

THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE FROM ANS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ADOPTION REFORM. PLEASE LET THE ADMINISTRATOR OF ANS KNOW.

Email: Adoption-News-Service@yahoogroups

In a message dated 11/06/08 19:01:10 Eastern Standard Time, Adoption-News-Service@yahoogroups.

Title:		PRE ADOPTION SUPPORT GROUP
Date:		Thursday November 13, 2008
Time:		7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Location:		JCC of Manhattan, 76th and Amsterdam Ave
Notes:		PRE ADOPTION SUPPORT GROUP Adopting a child can be a challenging process that feels like an emotional roller coaster. JCCA’s Ametz Adoption Program PRE-ADOPTION SUPPORT GROUP is there to help future parents navigate the waiting period in a warm and supportive environment with others struggling with similar challenges. The experienced group leader, and adoptive mother herself, really understands both the practical and psychological demands of adoption. Come share experiences and get answers with someone who not only knows that success is absolutely attainable, but can provide the guidance and support to make the wait easier. If you have any questions or would like to register for one of these groups, please call JCCA at 212-558-9949 or visit our website www.jccany.org/ametz to register. We look forward to your joining us.
Get reminders on your mobile, Yahoo! Messenger, and email. Adoption-News-Service is a broadcast-only list that posts legislative activity, media coverage and conference information pertaining to adoption reform. It is (thankfully!) member-driven. The moderator reserves the right to approve the forwarding of messages sent to the list. Conversational messages need to be sent directly to the individual who posted the notice, not to the list itself :-).

I Did Not Want Anonymity

I've been thinking about all the pain and anguish that is evident from our own postings, and those that come through in the comments, and how this can be translated into something for the good of mankind....and the only way I can see out of revisiting the grief, like an old phonograph record stuck on a groove, is to work for change. Open the records. Get them out of those moldy, dusty basements and into the light. Free everyone from feeling they have to decide whether to search but let them have the idea that it's not a slap in their adoptive parents' sense of well being but normal and natural....so I say to all, adoptees and first parents, get involved in your state, and the state in which you were adopted or relinquished parental rights.

When we go to lobby, legislators will say that they haven't heard from enough people to warrant a change in the law. That they have to "protect birth mothers in the closet." Which makes me particularly crazy and mad. Unless you let them know how you feel, they are going to go on protecting you until the end of your days.

Change is not going to happen until we make our voices heard. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and write a letter. Call your legislator and make your voice heard. Do it. Do it now. Do it again tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, I called Sheldon Silver, the head of New York's Assembly, and let them know I was a birth mother in favor of the Adoptee Rights Bill, and would they please move it out of committee and pass it. ! Last weekend I got a letter from him saying that my "situation will be useful during future discussions on this matter." Damn straight.

I unearthed a piece I wrote for womensenews, in 2004, just before New Hampshire opened its records for adoptees, and it explains my "situation" as well as any. The piece is going to be reprinted in a book of some sort--womensenews didn't tell me the name of the book.

And a note to Mairaine:Thanks for correcting the source of the quote in the previous post. I fixed post.

To get more involved, check out these sites:

American Adoption Congress

Origins-USA.org

Concerned United Birthparents

and in New York:

Unsealed Initiative

For information on Illinois, click on 73Adoptee website on fav blog list at right.

Open Adoption is "one free baby-sitting scam"....

Last night I couldn't help myself, I delved into that book that started the terrible argument with my friend Yvonne over whether or not the givers of life have any rights--any rights at all--to find out what happened to that life. And I read enough into The Brotherhood of Joseph by Brooks Hansen to realize how far--how incredibly far--we have to go before we are going to change hearts and minds among adopters. I know that word--adopters--invokes revulsion in many and I'll grant that it does seem like a cruel term, but Mr. Hansen says that when he hears a kid on the bus ask a girl if she's ever going to look for her "real" parents, the word evokes in him the same feelings as if he had heard "nigger" or "cunt." So for the moment, let me call him and his wife Elizabeth, ADOPTERS. Because that's what they are; for the record, he prefers "actual parents." He never says what he would prefer we first parents would be called. Actually, he would prefer us dead, though he doesn't say that. He doesn't need to.

A brief rundown of the story. He and his wife, age 36, want to be parents. Are desperate to be parents. Somewhere between the wife's age of 36 and 37 they hop on the fertility-industry train. Apparently they missed the biology lesson that says that after age 29 a woman's fertility starts to decline and .... keeps going down. After four years of the awful business--and it is pretty grim--and going into debt, they try a donor egg from a relative of the wife's That fails also. He admits freely that they wanted their own kid: "...we are a species, 'let's face it--that prizes the blood-bond uber Alles. And the law makes that pretty clear...Even distant grandparents can wedge a child from the arms of adopted parents just by showing up in court." (As if, but that's another story.)

He then explains why an open adoption is repugnant: "Just because we'd been through the IVF wars and lost, that didn't mean that Elizabeth should always have to save an extra seat at the dance recital." He's incensed that prospective adopters could pay for the care and "late-night Whopper runs" of a pregnant woman who was considering giving them her child and then "change her mind, keep the baby, and not have to pay back the prospective couple one red cent..." He calls open adoption with its "update letters, report cards, scheduled visits, etc., "seem like one giant free baby-sitting scam."

So it's off to Russia to adopt where they get Ilya or Theo, I can't quite tell. And though the book seems to end there, I'm aware--remember, he's the son of friends of Yvonne, the adopting grandparents live in my little town and are people I occasionally run into at the supermarket or the ATM--they get a second child from Kazakhstan. Apparently the well-educated Mr. Hansen and his wife never read Cicero:

Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live forever as a child.

They want a kid that will never be able to have a relationship with any kin, or most likely, never be able to learn more about his ancestry than the adopters know and tell him. By choosing this kind of adoption, they are choosing to form person that can never know, never have a history other than the one they create.

I awoke early this morning in one of those aggravating mind frenzies, thinking, if this is what Yvonne ( see earlier blogs) thinks is not only possible, but preferred, if this is what informs the opinions of people like Aston (the moneyed class, let's be clear), if there are people like Brooks and Elizabeth Hansen, we have so much further to go than we thought. I try to be sympathetic to people who adopt, but lord, since there is no reciprocity evident in so many of them towards the women who gave their children life, it's kinda hard to be understanding of their plight. And feelings. (To make the book even more in my face, it's blurbed on the back by another friend, this one a writer and the adoptive father of a darling Chinese girl. She really is darling, I'm not being sarcastic.)

Which brings me back to The Locator. I've seen all four episodes and they have all been adoption-reunion stories, and no matter how much Troy Dunn charges for people who aren't his pro bono cases, these stories pack a wallop in a half hour, and the more people that see them the more we are going to change public opinion about open adoption, and open records for adoptees and birth parents.

The other day I got an email from a compatriot in the fight to open records and the basic gist of it was--tell stories. Tell stories about separation and reunion. Get to people on a gut level. You can quote statistics about "unresolved grief" from the Donaldson report on birth mothers, but that doesn't do as much good as one heart-breaking story of loss and reunion. So let me encourage all of your nay-sayers about The Locator, and its media commercialization of one of life's most basic stories--mother and child separation--to think about it in a different light. The more people who see it, the more we are going to be able to reach the hearts and minds of legislators, and people like Yvonne and Aston and their friends.

The Locator website at WE has a silly mind game, Troy Dunn's blog, a reunion registry (yeah, really), summaries of the episodes, but in the end, the television show reminds the audience that life does not begin with adoption, that the need to know one's past is universal, and only those who have been brain-washed not to think about the past, or have been too hurt to let themselves wonder, shut off this curiosity.

It's on in back-to-back episodes on Saturday evening, starting at nine p.m.

The Locator...is looking for you.

This just in from Women's Entertainment (WE), home of Bridezilla, Platinum Weddings, Extreme Plastic Surgery:

The Locator

Are you looking for someone important who you just can't find? Birth parent? Sibling? Lost Love?

Over the last two decades, The Locator, Troy Dunn, has found over 20,000 "unfind-able" men, women and children - be it an adoptee seeking their biological parents, someone looking for a lost sibling, or anyone with a heartfelt need to reunite for a personal and compelling reason.

Troy is currently looking for individuals who have a desire to be reunited to be featured in his new WE tv series, "The Locator". If you want to say: "I love you", "I'm sorry", or "Thank You" to someone you can't find, Troy might be able to help you do it.

Apply now on our website: TroyTheLocator.com

Well, it could be like Extreme Home Makeover,ABC's Sunday night hit. I wonder if the Locator would do it for first mothers/fathers? The show is advertising for people, as the copy above indicates from their website. I assume you have to be willing to knock on the door-- unannounced--of your birth parents and take what comes. While anything that gets across the innate unfairness of closed records (to both adopted people and birth parents) gets a star in my book--even that tacky short-lived but highly controversial "Who's My Daddy?"--this ought to also rate high in the ick factor of personal invasion.

We'll see, it would seem that the person found would also have to agree to his/her fifteen minutes of fame to be seen on camera. How do you folks feel about this? Anybody want to apply? Know someone who might? You never know...I believe the show is scheduled to start this fall. My husband said that he saw a promo for it that shows The Locator knocking on the door of a first/birth mother.

--lorraine