In these last few weeks, First Mother Forum has focused somewhat on legislation, because now is the time when bills get passed. People sometimes ask how to write to a legislator because it seems to daunting the first time. But it shouldn't be. So how to begin? First, let the recipient know your connection to him, especially if you are writing your legislator--you vote for him, or her, she is going to pay attention to what you have to say. Sometimes this information may be obvious from the return address on the stationary, but in email you need to say it.
My letter to the Speaker of the New York Assembly:
Box 968
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the Assembly
Legislative Office Building 932
Albany, NY 12248
Dear Speaker Silver:
You are probably aware that there is a movement afoot to give adopted people the same rights as the rest of us: the right to know who they were at birth. Today there are two bills, one in the Assembly (A8410) and one in the Senate (S5269) which would restore equality to this class of people who were stripped of the right to know their original identities when they were born.
Although the New Jersey ICare asked that letters be sent yesterday, if you were too busy, please write and send a letter or a post card today. But time is running out. Corzine will soon leave office. This is the letter I sent yesterday to
Assemblyman Joe Roberts Speaker of the Assembly Brooklawn Shopping Plaza Rt. 130 South & Browning Road Brooklawn, NJ 08030
Dear Speaker Roberts: I am writing to ask you to post the adoptees’ birthright bill (A-752) in the Assembly Human Services Committee and then released to the floor for a vote. Although I write from a neighboring state, I do so because sealed records have caused so much heartache and psychological stress—as well as physical—to so very many.
I am a 67-year-old grandmother who relinquished a child for adoption in 1966. I was happily reunited with my daughter in 1981, with the blessing of her adoptive parents. For more than a quarter of a century we had a relationship that was sometimes up, sometimes down--but knowing where the other person was/who that person was made for a great sense of calm in both of our lives. My daughter had epilepsy and its attendant physical and emotional problems; she committed suicide in December of 2007.
During my pregnancy I was misdiagnosed, and prescribed birth control pills for the first several months, with the obvious result of Vitamin B6 being leeched out of my body, a well-documented side effect of birth control pills. The amount of hormones in those early pills was up to ten times greater than today’s dosage. It is now suspected that a lack of B6 in the developing fetus leads to epilepsy, just as a lack of folic acid leads to spina bifida.
When my daughter was six, she had her first grand mal seizure. Her physician contacted the adoption agency in hopes of obtaining updated medical history from me. Around this same time, I wrote to the agency myself and informed them of the birth control pills. Though I had not taken DES, its ill effects on the fetus and later the individual was much in the news at the time. The adoption agency did not even bother respond to her doctor’s letter. As for me, I was informed that she was fine and happy in her family.
Yet years later, after my daughter and I were reunited, her adoptive parents and I jointly wrote to the agency, Northaven Terrace in Rochester, New York. The responses we received casually referred to the physician's earlier letter, sent a decade earlier. We will never know what might anything have changed if her physician, her adoptive parents, and I had been in contact, but surely her psychological stress—a trigger for seizures—could have been lessened for years. She was a girl who had to wear a hockey helmet to school because she fell down so frequently. She was a girl who needed all the love and reassurance she could get, wherever she could get it. Her parents unquestioningly understood this, and my husband and I became a part of their lives.
Issues just such as this were considered by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare nearly three decades ago, when, after holding numerous hearings o the issue around the country, the agency included these words in a proposed Model Adoption Act in 1980:
“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 some provisions of the act were promulgated, the late Sen. John Tower of Texas, an adoptive father, led the opposition to this provision in the bill. He succeeded. He was on the wrong side of history.
The time to correct this is long overdue. It is time for bold action. Please release the adoptee’s birthright bill for a vote, and join other the states (Alabama, Alaska, Oregon, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware, Tennessee), all which have corrected legislation made in a different era that has become cruel and unusual punishment in this day. Kansas, in its wisdom, never sealed birth records from individuals adopted as children.
People who were adopted as infants were never asked what was in their best interest, and women like myself were never given a choice regarding anonymity from our offspring. I did not seek it at the time; I did not ever. Confidentiality, then, was in effect forced upon me if I were to place my child for adoption, and at the time, I did not feel I had an option.
The time is long overdue to give adoptees the right that the rest of us take for granted, that is, the answer to the question: Who Am I? Identity is many things, but surely it begins with the knowledge of one’s true origins—the real names, the accurate date and place of birth, information that is contained on an original birth certificate. To say that it is inconsequential is to deny reality. One can not imagine what it is like to spend a lifetime wondering where he or she came from, and what is the story of one’s birth. Adopted individuals deserve to have the same rights as the rest of us--the right to one's own true history--and the state should not be in the business of protecting the very few birth mothers who seek anonymity from their children. You do not similarly protect fathers named in paternity suits.
The bill that would give adopted individuals the same right as the rest of us, A-752, has been passed by the New Jersey Senate in a 31-7 vote and has the support of 50+ member of the Assembly. Gov. John Corzine has said he will sign the bill, but time is running out.
It is your time to be on the right side of history. It is time to shepherd this bill to the floor for a vote. As Martin Luther King has said: Justice delayed is justice denied.
I wish I had the magic words that could unlock the hearts and minds of those women who reject the idea of their child coming back!
Though my pregnancy was certainly unplanned, and I admit that I tried to have an abortion in 1966, everything changed for me when my daughter was born. Everything. Giving her up was the worst/hardest thing I have ever done in my life, and I will spend the rest of my life accepting that. So I can't figure these women out.
Several years ago I read about a type of personality in the New York Times that is able to put aside, or internalize, bad things that happened to them--the total opposite of "let it all hang out," and there was some thought that this might be psychologically healthy--perhaps even healthier--than keeping the hurt alive. Well, all that is fine, but when you have a child, no matter what, you end up with a certain amount of responsibility to that child. Even if you are unable to have a relationship--because of the constant pain that resurfaces--you owe that individual at least as much information as you can give, and one face to face meeting at the very least.
The best understanding I can have of these women is that the birth and relinquishment was so painful that they can not deal with having it resurface, as it all does during a reunion. Oh, it does. During that time of initial reunion it feels as if the scabs are all ripped off the grief and you're back to where you were when it happened--but at least with the knowledge that you are able to know your child. Which is the relief. I used to look forward to my daughter's visits (which might be the entire summer) but she had a myriad of psychological problems, many relating to her epilepsy, that drew me and the rest of my immediate family into her vortex. Consequently, when she left there was always tremendous relief, and guilt over feeling the relief. I've hated to admit this, but it's true.
Yet despite any difficulties...
The need for the vast majority of adoptees and their first mothers to reunite was considered by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) nearly three decades ago. After holding numerous hearings on the issue around the country, the agency included these words in a proposed Model Adoption Act in 1980:
“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 some provisions of the act were promulgated, the recently formed National Council for Adoption (and, FYI, for closed adoptions) led the fight to keep this out the bill. According to E. Wayne Carp in Family Matters,HEW received more than 3,000 comments from the public, 82 percent of which opposed the model act entirely. Ninety percent of the adoptive parents who responded objected to the open-records provision. I'm going to project that if the bill came up today, adoptive parents would not mount this kind of opposition, because a Cornell University survey of more than a thousand adoptive parents found that the majority of them (80 percent) supported reunion. Or at least, giving their children the tools to effect it--that is, the information of their birth.
When the bill passed, the open records provision was rewritten "to protect the privacy of the birth parents."
Every woman who surrenders a child deserves our understanding, but...how do we reach those who reject a reunion? Maybe just by getting more of good reunion stories out there. The biggest hurdle for many is likely to be that they never told their new families, and how are they going to spill the beans? The husband/family is certainly going to feel as if they were lied to for all these years. Just as adoptees who were not told and find out when they are older feel betrayed. Lied to. And on the other side, there are adoptees who reunite and then walk away, leaving the mother bereft and feeling worse than before the reunion. Adoption is always painful. We are always making the best of a sad situation.
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Although the New Jersey ICare asked that letters be sent yesterday, if you were too busy, please write and send a letter or a post card today. But time is running out. Corzine will soon leave office. 
