h♥le cont.: As a first mother, testifying for adoptee rights in New York, 1976

Lorraine 

By 1976 the New York state legislature amazingly enough is considering a bill that will allow individuals born and adopted in New York to obtain their original, unamended birth certificates.

Florence [1] is planning a lawsuit to have the amended birth certificates be declared unconstitutional, but holds back now. If New York’s law fell, could the rest of the country be far behind? Florence and I troop up to Albany with a handful of others—adoptees, adoptive parents, a phalanx of psychologists and social workers, attorneys, adoption-agency heads, and another natural mother who turns out also to be an adoptee, a double-whammy that is way more common than most people know.[2]

h♥le, cont.: Testifying to unseal the birth records of an adoptee

Lorraine testifying a a public hearing on
unsealing records in New York City, 2014

An excerpt from Chapter 8 in hole in my heart. Previous sections can be found by scrolling down on the HOME page.

February, 1974

I’m in an airless, overheated courtroom in the Bronx, where I will soon testify—as a natural mother—that we do want to know our children. An accountant named Ann Scharp is trying to get the records that were sealed thirty-seven years earlier when she was adopted. Her identity is likely to be sealed in papers at Spence-Chapin Adoption Services. She’s there to show that she has “good cause” to get her adoption agency records. If any adoptee has taken the trouble to go to court to learn their identity, doesn’t that  prima facie demonstratethat she ought to be able to find out who she is? But never mind—we know that whether her “cause” will be deemed good enough depends solely on this one person, this man in a black robe sitting up high in the judge’s seat.