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| Jane |
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| Jane |
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| Lorraine |
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.
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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."
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
