Let's put to rest the myth that mothers were promised confidentiality

Prof. Elizabeth Samuels

Legal scholar Elizabeth J. Samuels, who has written about the laws surrounding sealed birth certificates before, has published a new report in the Michigan Journal of Law and Gender that counters the "promised confidentiality" myth. In "Surrender and Subordination: Birth Mothers and Adoption Law Reform,"* she writes that an analysis of 75 surrender documents, dated between 1936 to 1985, from 26 states "definitively supports birth mother advocates' reports that women were neither offered a choice of nor guaranteed lifelong anonymity." And, since all state laws allow records to be unsealed under some circumstances without notice to first mothers, they could not have been intended to protect mothers.