- No Recommendations yet - go add some!
- It's important to know that all chapters of ACLU do not agree with the NJ chapter. Two chapters, Oakland, MI, and SW Florida chapters published Policy Statements in support of adoptee access to OBCs in 1987. Here is the text of the FL statement:
This chapter agrees with the policy statement accepted by the Oakland County Chapter (Michigan Affiliate) and hereby accepts their policy which has been adapted to conform to Florida.
In recent years, the issue of adoption has increased in complexity and has involved the interest and efforts of the courts, social agencies, and media. A person adopted in infancy, unfortunately continues to be referred to as an “adopted child” even after reaching adulthood. If this person chooses (or in some cases needs) to discover his or her birthparents or birth records, they find such records are sealed by the courts and are inaccessible.
Historically this was considered to be for the protection of privacy, and maintenance of secrecy was ostensibly for the good of all involved. However, careful scrutiny of adoption statutes and practices has indicated that legal changes are necessary, and that civil liberties of adopted adults are being violated in the absence of any state or national policy on this matter, and with the belief that adopted persons should be treated no differently than other citizens, the Southwest Florida Chapter Board has voted to endorse the following policy:
“Numerous states have laws or procedures which impede the ability of adopted adults, their birthparents and other relatives to ascertain each others’ identities. The ACLU believes that so long as state and/or local governments choose to maintain birth records, such records must be maintained and accessible without discrimination by virtue of adopted or non-adopted status.
Toward this end, the ACLU believes that laws suppressing information about adoptees and/or their birthparents, and laws allowing access to such information only upon consent or registration, or laws allowing access to such information only upon court order, deny adopted persons, their birthparents, and their relatives equal protection of the laws and constitutes unwarranted interference by the government with the right of people to choose whether to associate.”
The political debate on the adoption issue has tended to be framed in terms of psychological issues; emotional issues; medical issues and sociological issues. The above policy confines itself to a civil liberties analysis.
- Thank you, Erich from Brooklyn!
Your acknowledgement that there is a great deal more to the adoptee rights issue than meets the eye gives us hope. When we first speak to our legislators, we get largely the same reactions you exhibited early on. These "urban legend" arguments against granting adoptees access to their own authentic documents are difficult to put to rest. However, when most reasonable folks are presented with all the facts, they begin to see what a grave injustice has been to adoptees and they join us, in spirit at least, in our efforts.
So...for your understanding and well wishes, we say, "God bless you!"
- Record sealing
An old newspaper clipping from California demonstrates the primary reason for sealing records in that state: preserving adoptive parents' secrecy if they chose not to tell their child he/she was adopted. Here's the text of the clipping, and notice that nowhere does it mention "protection" of birthmother privacy:
Bill To Keep Adoptions Secret Is Introduced
Assemblyman Charles W. Fisher of Alameda County introduced two bills yesterday which would require all adoption records to be filed with the state department of vital statistics and would place the records on a secret file.
Fisher said there have been cases in Southern California where unscrupulous persons have obtained access to the adoption records and blackmailed the adopted parents by threatening to tell the child it was adopted.
- Erich
I suggest you visit the following website for more history on what was stripped from adoptees, and which may help you understand their present efforts at restoration.
http://www.uoregon.edu/~adoption/archive/UscbTCNOBR.htm
The U.S. Children's Bureau, predecessor to today's Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) issued a policy statement in 1949 entitled "The Confidential Nature of Birth Records." Excerpts here will give you a picture of how this organization felt about the "sacred right" to identity that Grace Louise Hubbard proclaimed in my earlier post:
(Quote)
The original goal of confidential adoption records was not to prevent adoptees from obtaining the information on their original birth certificates. As this 1949 excerpt makes clear, the U.S. Children's Bureau considered it “very important that the child’s original birth certificates be identified so that his complete birth record will be available to him when needed.”
The following clarifies the purpose of sealing the records:
"It is also essential that in such cases the records in the local office be fully protected from inspection by the public."
The right to inspect or to secure a certified copy of the original birth certificate of a legitimated child should be restricted to the registrant, if of legal age; his parents or parent, guardian, or their legal representative; or upon court order.
- Grace Louise Hubbard, continued:
Sometimes........they want to know about themselves, and when this happens their interest may range from a sort of general curiosity about such things as their nationality and the first names of their parents and how they looked, to an active desire to find out all they can, and perhaps even locate and meet their relatives.
My agency has always recognized the right of the child to know about his own family, if he wants to - at a time when he is adequately prepared for the knowledge - and if the foster parents sympathize with his interest and are ready to have him know.
The agency knew the mother who had to choose how her child would live - with her or apart from her - and is in a position to give him not only the facts but some interpretation that led to her choice.
When a child asks, "Who am I?" he does need to know his name and lineage, but what he is really seeking is to sustain his awareness of self so that he can achieve a unity and persistence of personality, in spite of the break in the continuity of his life. This is his right, a right that we are under obligation to secure to him to the greatest extent we can.
Careful and accurate recording of one's birth is a basic step, and the right of every person. But a sense of one's heritage is also every person's right, and if a child does not have his own parents to give him a sense of his heritage as well as his birth identification, interpretation should be given by someone with understanding, as well as knowledge, of the facts.
A child's identity is his sacred right.
- Erich
Perhaps a little history will help you understand. The rights adoptees seek today are not new rights, but the restoration of rights that originally were theirs decades ago but got swept from under them.
In a paper delivered at the 1946 National Conference of Social Work, presenter Grace Louise Hubbard, Supervisor of Intake, Child Placing and Adoption, State Charities Aid Assn. of New York, said:
Who am I? is a question that cannot be answered completely by any birth record, no matter how expertly devised or carefully handled. Every individual has a right to accurate and complete identification of himself, but he has also the right to understand his identity in its broadest meaning. Webster's dictionary defines identity as 'unity and persistence of personality' - a dynamic concept, implying something that comes from within, something made by the person himself.
A right to our identity really means the right to be able to create for ourselves that degree of unity and persistence of personality that gives us a sense of self-direction, of relatedness to people, and to our environment. It includes what we know about ourselves and about our origin, and also what we have been able to take out of our life experience.
A young person who is trying to fuse an unknown past with his present, needs more than to know his ancestry. He wants to know his heritage.
A person who as a child was placed by a social agency in a foster-family home, whether for adoption or for permanent supervised care, is assured of a record of his origin and identity, and of a source of help in finding out not just what the record shows but what human experience lies behind it.
- There has always been a significant disconnect between what surrendering mothers are claimed to have been told and what the courts and agencies did in implementing the adoptions. Here in Michigan, as in many other states, for a long time the birthmother's full name was included on the adoption decree given to the adoptive parents. And even after the code was revised, it still allowed for the child's full birth name - which, of course, revealed the birthmother's surname - to be included on the decree. For over thirty years, I have been helping adoptees successfully complete their searches, armed with their birth names, provided to their parents by the courts. I have downloaded nearly 3,000 listings from Internet adoption reunion registry sites posted by Michigan adoptees who list surnames - often full names - of their birthparent/s. An adoptee friend gave me copies of documents his parents were given: the decree revealing his mother's surname, and a letter from the adoption agency mentioning his birthmother repeatedly by her first name. Were all these birthmothers "promised confidentiality?" Were some promised it and others not? Where is it recorded which mothers received the "promise" and which didn't? And if it was promised, or even implied, why was it betrayed by the very entities that "led them to believe" it" as Tom Snyder argued?
My daughter's adoptive parents were provided with my surname in 1960. They were also told the approximate area of the state I was from and general information about my age, the year I graduated high school and more. I've been reunited with my daughter for 26 years now, but recently I decided to try a little experiment to see how long it would take for her to find me today, given only the info her parents were given about me. The whole search process on the Internet took me roughly fifteen minutes, including a Google Earth photo of my house! If I was "promised confidentiality," should I have bought any stock in it? The judge who presided over my relinquishment explained to me all the rights I would be forfeiting by signing that document. He did not, however, explain the rights that my child would lose in tandem with mine. He did not tell me that, despite the wording on the surrender document - where I stated that I would "...lose all rights to, in, and concerning said child, forever" - that certain rights were nonetheless preserved to me - like control over my child's authentic record of birth. Why did he not inform me of that? And if I was not so advised, why is my daughter denied her authentic birth certificate based on an alleged "right" reserved to me by virtue of having given up all my rights?
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