Ask the man on the street if people who were adopted as babies should be able, as adults, to find out the identities of their original parents, and the typical answer is: Sure, isn't that their right?
Only for the fortunate few. In all states but six -- and New York isn't among that half-dozen -- individuals adopted at birth are still denied the unrestricted right to even look at a copy of their original birth certificates. Without that piece of paper, it's hard to have that longed-for mother-and-child reunion.
"Birth mothers believe, in fact are told, that relinquishing their child is the best thing all around. Rarely do they comprehend, until it is too late, that they may live the rest of their lives with secrecy, grief, and
Riding on a train not so long ago I struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me, and in time I was talking about the sealed birth records of adopted people. He was surprised--no, amazed is more like it--that adoptees couldn't get their original birth certificates and find out who they are justlikethat. By asking for them. And ditto for birth/first parents when the kids are adults.
I explained that no, it wasn't like that, and all the movies on television (of which he has some knowledge) and just plain old common sense about what is right to the contrary, adoptees in all but ten states are unable to get their original birth
Today is the day of the demonstration for Adoptee Rights in Louisville, KY where the annual summit meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures is being held. When last checked, adoptee activist Jeff Hancock, the organizer of this year's event, had 791 signatures (including moi) to be linked as symbolic of those who are there in spirit. This was a Facebook gathering, but only 791? Where is the angry mob, demanding their rights? The ones who want their original, unamended, non fake birth certificates? Until they come out of the woodwork, efforts to repeal the archaic and unjust legislation that stripped them of their birth right upon adoption--their one true identity--will be stymied.
In that vein, I came across this passage this morning from Robert J. Lifton, author, psychiatrist, thinker, and husband of Betty Jean Lifton:
"The origin of the secrecy is the specter of illegitimacy in the background. Instead of confronting these issues openly, there is the pretense that they don't exist and the whole subject becomes pervaded with guilt in a way that harms that relationship between the adopted child and his or her psychological parents. Every adopted person I have spoken to has confirmed that process....
"A name is an enormously important element of identity over the generations and over the course of one's individual life. Moreover, by learning the name, by learning about the person--one's mother and father--he or she becomes an actual vibrant human being rather than fragmented bits of information. Such bits and pieces, ethnic or social characteristics, medial background, only become further stimulants to curiosity.
"From my own experience with adopted people from from the literature, it apparently seems as though every single aodpted person has some significant curiosity about this. Some are blocked from further effort by that layer of guilt; others make no effort. But the desire to find out is probably universal."--from Birthmark.
Yes, it's my memoir, published in 1979. I was leafing through it this morning and came across Lifton's testimony included in a chapter about a 1974 trial in which both he and I testified in the Bronx. It was my first public admission of being a woman who had relinquished a child to be adopted. I don't recall that the term "birth mother" was in use yet. I do remember being a somewhat terrified and nervous (I'm about to admit in public I gave away my child!!!), but determined. The judge was kind. I found my voice.
It was the case of Ann Smith versus Spence-Chapin Adoption Services; she wanted to look at her case file. The judge denied her claim, but noted that anyway, that the file it did not contain the names of her natural parents. Unless Ann Smith was dropped off without any identifying information, her original birth certificate would have given her what she sought. I'm thinking about all this because Jane has a good post in the works about what the original birth certificate signifies, and why it's been so hard to unlock them from the damn vaults where they are hidden away from the eyes of the people to whom they rightfully belong.--lorraine ___________________ PS: If you are going to order any of the books advertised here, please order by linking through from the blog.
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?
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.
Now is the time for all good women and men to come to the aid of adopted people and let legislators know that everyone should have a clear and unfettered right to their identities, the one locked up with their original birth certificates.
Texas, California, Missouri, and my home, New York, are the states with legislative action going on (that I'm aware of) that would give adopted people the same rights as those not adopted.Now while the legislators are still in session is the time to make our voices heard. Instead of just sitting back and reading and venting about what went wrong in our lives when we took a left turn instead of a right, or why our reunions are not better, turn that emotion and passion into action. Please take a few minutes to write your own state assemblyman and senator and speak up and speak out! If I had a megaphone like Harvey Milk to get this crowd going, I would use it. So today instead of writing about feelings, or the latest adoption-related outrage, I'm posting there the letters I am sending to legislators in New York.
Please join me. Use any parts of the letters below but always tell who you are in relation to the bill in your own words. That will be a hundred times more effective than using someone else's words. These letters of course are for New York legislators. If you are from a different state (see notice about Texas in the sidebar alongside this blog)
Dear Senator:
I am writing to ask you to support The Adoptee Bill of Rights, S5269, that would give adopted people their original birth certificates without restrictions.
I write as a birth mother who relinquished her daughter in Rochester in 1966, when the world was a far different place. I kept my pregnancy secret, as I did not want to be known as someone who “got in trouble." But I—like the vast majority of women who have been in this position—never sought or desired anonymity in perpetuity from my child. I desperately wanted to know her one day.
I did find her, and had a rewarding relationship with her—and her adoptive family—for more than 26 years. But I am not alone. Records from other states and other countries that have open records have found that the vast majority of birth mothers wish to be reunited with their children, if only to learn that they are all right. The sorrow of now knowing is great. We do not wish to stay hidden from them. In Oregon, where the records have been open since 2000, more than 9000 adoptees have requested their original birth certificates. During that time, fewer than one percent have found letters on file with the state that their mothers did not wish to be contacted.
change 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.
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, 
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