Powerful testimony for adoptee OBC access at NY hearing

From left: Carla Rupp, Mike Schoer, Joyce Bahr, Marsha Raffloer and Dennis Sumlin

“If I had known that someday I could meet my daughter it would have been so much easier to sign those papers. My social worker and I went over this point again and again and again. Never, never, could I see her, not ever, time heals all wounds, she would say. It does not heal this one….” So began my testimony yesterday at a New York state assembly hearing on the Adoptee Rights Bill, A909. As I wrote here before, my opening few lines quoted from a transcript of testimony I gave in 1976 at a similar hearing in Albany 38  years ago.

Adoptees, first parents rally in Manhattan for adoptee rights

Sen.Velmanette Montgomery, Asbm. David Weprin, Carol Schaefer, Lorraine

The odds of buying a cup of coffee from your father and not knowing he is related to you are not quite off the charts, but that is certainly a rare coincidence. Yet it happens. Joe DeCarlo Pessalona said of frequenting a deli in Manhattan's Greenwich Village: "I used to buy my coffee from him [his father] and I had no idea it was him." he said. Pessalona

NYC Press Conference for Open Records for Adoptees

Press Conference for the Bill of Adoptee Rights from Flower City Media on Vimeo.
If you can get through this without getting a tear in your eye, you're a stronger person than I am. If you are in any state that has a bill in the works get involved!

I'm going to email both David Weprin and Richard Gottfried and thank them for their support. And by the way, Unsealed Initiative is collecting money (and size donation welcome, and we mean any amount) for Weprin's election campaign. He is a staunch supporter and we need him in Albany. If you have any NY connection with your adoption, please contact Joyce Bahr at unsealedinitiative@nyc.rr.com. 

We have around $400 at this point; I'd love to see us get to a thousand.  And check out UI's page too: Unsealed Initiative.  

On another note, I just read a blog by an adopter looking for a second child and she writes she feels
incredibly "sad" for me. Argument going on under earlier blog: Why I'm not celebrating "Birth Mother's Day"

It was weird to read, I admit. --lorraine 

Memo to Gov. Cuomo: Repeal the 1935 law sealing original birth certificates

Lorraine

It's lobby time in New York again, and this year the prognosis looks good and members of Unsealed Initiative, under the guidance of Joyce Bahr, are scheduled to meet with the governor, Andrew Cuomo, or members of his staff, to discuss the Adoptee Bill of Rights giving adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates.