Comments on The Declassified Adoptee: Is This Really Ethical? An Open Letter to America...

http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/confident...

2012-01-31T21:12:53.101-05:00

http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/confidentiality.htm

"In 1917, the Minnesota adoption law was revised to mandate confidential records, and between the world wars, most states in the country followed suit. Confidential records placed information off limits to nosy members of the public but kept it accessible to the children and adults directly involved in adoption, who were called the “parties in interest.”

Sorry I misunderstood, Mei-Ling. OTOH, it gave me ...

2012-01-31T09:35:27.688-05:00

Sorry I misunderstood, Mei-Ling. OTOH, it gave me an opportunity to tell the mothers' story again, even if it was preaching to the choir. 6:o}

Wonderful post. Seems like the Unsealed Initiativ...

2012-01-30T22:16:55.953-05:00

Wonderful post. Seems like the Unsealed Initiative is making some headway here in NY. I have tried to educate my state senator (majority leader) on the history of the NY law that you cite here.

Awesome blog. I will say that program totally made...

2012-01-30T21:21:03.999-05:00

Awesome blog. I will say that program totally made my stomach flip flop. So sad.

Amanda, I took a somewhat different tack on the sa...

2012-01-30T18:06:34.647-05:00

Amanda, I took a somewhat different tack on the same Kimberly Leighton over at firstmotherforum (link below), and linked to your blog. It was hard to believe she was adopted--which Rehm ought to have said earlier, me thinks--but I have met and argued with adoptees who think as she does. It always surprises me when I find this happening. The last time was with a lawyer on the faculty of a law school. Maybe academia clouds reality and feelings.

I find it frightening that anyone adopted so easily gives up the right to know who she is. Is it fear that does that? Or a skewed sense of self? It will be interesting to follow her career and published work.

Oh lord, how long will this take? Great job with your answer to her. I hope you have put it in the mail to her.

When adoptees' Right to Know becomes a philosphical debate, adoptees lose

I totally second what Mei-Ling said. Most people I...

2012-01-30T17:03:49.087-05:00

I totally second what Mei-Ling said. Most people I know outside of adoption circles think that women make a free decision about relinquishment and that if a child is given up it is simply because the child was unwanted. As we all know in the large majority of cases, nothing could be further from the truth.

MeI- Ling, Your satire was lost in translation (by...

2012-01-30T09:29:07.319-05:00

MeI- Ling,
Your satire was lost in translation (by me). Thank God! I thought that if you, an educated person of adoption, felt that way we were totally sunk.
Off to fight unnecessary adoption for another day!

@ Priscilla Sharp: Please see my response below to...

2012-01-30T05:34:28.466-05:00

@ Priscilla Sharp: Please see my response below to Barbara. I know many relinquished children are loved and wanted. I was presenting the viewpoint behind the reasons why people believe open records should not be allowed, aside from the legalities themselves.

headdesk Dear Barbara, You misunderstood me. I...

2012-01-30T05:32:16.468-05:00

*headdesk*

Dear Barbara,

You misunderstood me. I've only read the first two lines of your response because my comment was totally misinterpreted. I was playing Devil's Advocate in that I brought up the misconception that many children are given up because they are unwanted. The logic that goes behind defending open access to records is: If the family wanted the child, they never would have given it up.

It is really quite sad, because to change this perception means writing a novel of all the various reasons as to why relinquishment happens and most people just don't want to invest that much time. To them, it really is: Mother wants child, mother keeps child.

Amanda, Thanks for putting all the effort you have...

2012-01-30T00:14:02.195-05:00

Amanda,
Thanks for putting all the effort you have into your blog in general and this response in particular. You are concise, thorough and impassioned. Our adoption rights movement is blessed to have you as a champion.

@ Mei-Ling when I read "why would a family want to track down a child they had 'given up' to begin with?", it made me want to cry. I have seen your name in the adoption blogoshpere quite a bit and am saddened that you correlate a child being placed for adoption with a child being unwanted. Many times the pregnancy came as a shock and yes, the pregnancy was unwanted. But as the shock wore off and the maternal instinct kicked in, these children almost always were wanted by their mothers. I come from the post BSE era. The way they got my baby and how they continue to get children is by telling us that we are not able to take care of our children because we are young, unmarried, and poor. Without family support, every 14 to 22 year old woman is poor!. Almost all mothers place their babies because they are coerced into thinking that their child will be better cared for by a moneyed, married couple.
Furthermore, we were told not to interfere with the adopted family. Adoption agencies said that if our children never searched it was a sign of a good adoption. I spent countless hours putting my information on the internet in hopes that my daughter would find me. But I never felt that I should intrude on her life. If she was blissfully happy with her adopted family I didn't want to come along and mess things up for them. I knew nothing about the identity issues adopted persons must deal with. I truly thought my daughter was a blank slate. Oh how misinformed I was.
I'm forever grateful that my daughter did come and find me. And I wish every mother could have the same opportunity.
Open records is all about equal rights for adopted persons. As I see it, the original family and the adopted families feelings or preferences really are of no concern.

Amanda, I can't tell you happy I was to read y...

2012-01-29T19:38:27.095-05:00

Amanda,
I can't tell you happy I was to read your response to Ms. Leighton and this radio transcript. When I read it, as an adult adoptee who has been involved in the NJ effort to amend adoption law, I was just totally depressed at the apparent lack of knowledge and sensitivity concerning this issue. You have responded with all the pertinent facts, and we can only hope that your efforts, along with those of so many others, will one day pay out in the legisltive arena, hopefully before I expire! (I am 61!) It seems that some continue to want to see us as "forever children," incapable of handling our own affairs and needing a "confidential intermediary" to bridge the perilous waters. My intermediary experience was demeaning and futile -- if I had known then what I know now, I would have hired a private investigator from the get-go. It was so much simpler, and so much less aggravating. Thank you for all that you do. I just stewed when I read the transcript. You sat down and wrote a contructive response. Your efforts are so appreciated. Keep up the good work!
Susan Perry

Mei-Ling ~~ If I may respond to your question tha...

2012-01-29T14:49:16.865-05:00

Mei-Ling ~~ If I may respond to your question that why would a family want to find a child they had "given up to begin with" with a suggestion that you do some research on the history of adoption, as Amanda has suggested, first with a visit to www.babyscoopera.com and "The Girls Who Went Away - The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Babies in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade" (Ann Fessler). There is a conservative estimate of 1.5 million of us women who were forced to relinquish our babies for adoption. We were not given a choice. And there were many of us who would have tracked our children to the end of the earth, if we could have. And the adopters and adoptoraptor agencies and lawyers knew that.
We were forced to give birth without celebration and spent the rest of our lives grieving in silence because we were shamed, shunned, banished, demeaned and demoralized. We were considered deviant and immoral, and our infants were taken from us and put into "good" (read, married) families in a misguided belief they were "blank slates" who could be absorbed into these stranger families and would thereby be cleansed of the psychological and social impurities that being born of us had tainted them with.
It's amazing to consider the power of a small gold band on the third finger left hand because, just five years after losing my first-born to adoption, I was miraculously cured of all of these psychological and social ills that justified taking my first baby and deemed "fit" to raise my second daughter.
Priscilla Sharp
Mother of Loss 1964, reunited 1986
Mothers of Loss (to Adoption) on Facebook

Thank you for working on WA adoption law. I still ...

2012-01-29T13:54:51.653-05:00

Thank you for working on WA adoption law. I still have hope that HB 2211 will pass the judiciary committee in some way, shape or form this year.

I listened to the NPR piece and it fired me up! I ...

2012-01-29T13:48:58.427-05:00

I listened to the NPR piece and it fired me up! I had been toying with the idea of ordering a DNA kit and have now done so, just because I can. As an adoptee who is ethnically ambiguous (i.e. I have 61 pages of non-identifying information where the social worker identifies me as every race under the sun while carefully pointing out that I am NOT Puerto Rican, which is completely ironic considering that my birth mother was teaching in the Bronx when I was conceived), I am hoping that I will uncover some possible answers from the DNA test as my birth mother (Irish-American) will not respond to my contact nor identify my birth father.

In reaction to Professor Kimberly Leighton, it is a fallacy that birth mothers ever 'move on' from having birthed a child and relinquished that child for adoption. If they did move on, would we, as adoptees, be considered to be disruptive, unethical and/or lacking compassion by contacting our original families? The discomfort felt by original families seem to be brought on by lying/omission of the truth and failure to radically accept reality. This is not the responsibility or fault of the adoptee.

I am a woman and I support a woman's right to make choices. Amanda, you do a great job in pointing out the feminist conundrum - "Placing one woman and her (alleged) desires as being more important than the rights and autonomy of the adopted woman is just as sexist and paternalistic as placing a woman's needs as inferior to a man's." If my birth mother wants to 'move on,' more power to her! I hope that she can get out of the way of me being able to access my own documents that accurately account for the details related to my birth.

It is very frustrating to hear and read folks who oppose adoptee rights. It is as if they are trying to empower the formerly powerless (birth mothers) by granting them the ability to oppress adoptees. It also seems as if they are encouraging birth mothers to just hide their shame (rather than healing) and be dishonest with their families - how is that for living??

Kudos to you, Amanda, for being on the frontline and writing powerful messages about the adoptee experience.

I think every OBC access lobby needs to do the sam...

2012-01-29T13:47:05.815-05:00

I think every OBC access lobby needs to do the same thing in their state. (Kudos to you for doing it for Washington!) Get the ACTUAL legislative history and legislative intent. Find the newspaper articles that showcase the "new" sealed records law. One particularly telling example is from California
pacer-adoption.org/education_editorials/closed_adoption_record_california.htm

"California was one of the early states to seal original birth certificates of adopted individuals from those individuals. This was done in 1935, in the
middle of the Great Depression. Oakland's Assemblyman Charles Fisher, citing problems of blackmail of adoptive parents in southern California, presented a bill in January 1935 to make original birth certificates of adoptees unavailable to *anyone,* including the adoptive parents, birth parents and
"the child," except by court order.

Assemblyman Fisher's concern, noted in the Sacramento Bee (January 22, 1935), was that a blackmailer could threaten to tell the child he or she was adopted. This tells a lot about the social stigma of adoption at the time records were sealed in California. It appears that the original purpose of sealing records in California was to give adoptive parents complete control over whether to tell their child of the adoption and to protect the adoptive family from any outside interference, including blackmail."

Yes. Exactly. The person who created this whole ...

2012-01-29T11:22:03.904-05:00

Yes. Exactly.

The person who created this whole thing, Georgia Tann, kidnapped (and horrifically abused and even murdered) the children she arranged the adoptions for. She had ties with the court and would target a poor family, take their child, and alter the records so that the family searching for the child could not locate the child, take him or her back, and prosecute Tann. Tann, and other adoption workers who unfortunately were like her, arranged adoptions across the country. The New York law that seals birth certificates was signed into effect by a governor who had "adopted" two children from her. Adoption facilitators pushed for these sealings and they did the most business because (unfortunately) a lot of the adoptive parents who wanted to adopt wanted to be assured that the original family would not interfere. The ratio of PAPs to babies was once flipped the opposite way it is now: the "as if born to," the "blank slate" and the "original family can't ever find you" movements not only made adoption very attractive to people, it made it into a billion dollar business. The "legal" and more "ethical" agencies soon had to start pushing for their own records to be sealed in order to compete. This was not necessarily ill-intentioned on their part; they were trying to make adoptions more attractive in the legal sector of the growing industry because illegal adoptions put women and children in much more considerable danger.

The first wave of closures solved the "problem" of the original family finding the adoptee. The second wave of closures solved the "problem" of the adoptee's "curiosity" in finding their original family and "upsetting" the adoptive family in doing so. Often times, the adoptive parents knew who the original parents were and had some sort of identifying information on them. The secondary sealings allowed disclosure of the original family's identity to be in their hands. It was about their rights, not the adoptees or original family's.

We see these waves and movements rise and level out, ebb and flow, in U.S. history in correspondence with each new generation of adoptees growing into adulthood and being the new ones to make the newest ruckous about inequal rights. I suspect that the secondary wave of closings may have been due in part to silence adoptees (or prevent more adoptees in the future from becoming likewise empowered) like Jean Patton (the Mother of Adoptee Rights) from the 1930's who were the first ones to state they did not appreciate their records being sealed. It didn't work because in the 1970's, people in the next generation of adoptees like BJ Lifton and Florence Fisher stood up and said the same thing "stop sealing our records." The most recent movement to squash adoptee rights by making Adoptee Rights activists look anti-woman is just another tactic by adoption facilitators who want maintain the right as the "middle man" as well as maintain confidentiality, not for women, but for their own purposes and practices.

The Adoptee Rights Movement had another strong surge in the early 90's and has gradually increased in strength since. I predict that in the next 10-15 years, the adoptees from the "open era" will join us and at that point, the anti-rights special interest groups will be scrambling for a new argument to refute us. In that era, they'll probably finally fail.

Sorry for writing a book here, as you can see, it's a topic I'm really interested in lol.

Thanks for your blog entry as well! :-)

2012-01-29T11:09:18.423-05:00

Thanks for your blog entry as well! :-)

Amanda, I know you already understand this but I...

2012-01-29T10:26:31.680-05:00

Amanda,

I know you already understand this but I thought it might be good to put it in the comments of your excellent post.

I recently went through the WA adoption laws from 1946 when records sealed from the public through the major revision in 1955 through my birth in 1961. It was a fascinating review and time consuming documenting it out but well worth it.

1. The law does not speak to privacy for the natural parent/s anywhere, in the 1946 version or any of the subsequent revisions. No mention of confidentiality at all.

2. The law does speak to privacy for the adopting family from public access to the records.

3. The law does speak to the adopting family being able to make the choice of having the records open to the public or sealed - not the state, not the natural family - the adopting family held that right.

4. The law speaks to the right of the adopting family to access those records using the good cause petition which based on the above and the language used provides access but stops the public via a judicial gate-keeper.

5. In the early years (1946) if the orginal birth certificate was to be sealed the court had to prompt that sealing at vital records (operates under different laws). In a later revision (late 1950's) they reversed the prompt where the court needed to advise if the adopting family did not want the original birth certificate sealed.

I see the arguments that the state has to weigh the best interests of all four parties (state, natural, adopting, adoptee) and find the best solution but that argument fails when you read the actual laws of the time and the intent spelled out.

So it was about control (by the government) on the...

2012-01-29T09:51:35.446-05:00

So it was about control (by the government) on the basis of the adoptive families not wanting the original family to be intrusive, and facading it as original families wanting promises of confidentiality?

I am confused as tomwhat you are saying, Mei-Ling....

2012-01-29T09:06:45.891-05:00

I am confused as tomwhat you are saying, Mei-Ling. We know that records were sealed to protect the a-fam not the o-fam because we have corresponding documents, such as statements from govenors and legislators as to why the records were being sealed. When all this was started, no one gave two hoots about the o-fam. In fact, they used to publish the name of the unwed mothers in the newspaper! Amending and sealing was specifically designed to hide the adoptee. By changing the adoptee's name and not telling the original family the new name (even in todays semi-open adoptions they do this) they prevent the o-fam from finding the adoptee. The records were usually always open to adoptees. That closure was a secondary wave that was largel based on a movement among adoptive parents to control what their adult sons and daughters could and could not see.

Thank you, thank you, for a thoughtful, insightful...

2012-01-29T08:52:12.027-05:00

Thank you, thank you, for a thoughtful, insightful and beautifully written piece -- and for referencing my commentary at pushingonarope.com

The way I see it as an adoptee; is that "sham...

2012-01-29T04:13:52.757-05:00

The way I see it as an adoptee; is that "shame" is the guiding principle in the process. Why would governments condone secrecy to avoid a perception and deny the rights of the individual who was not able to make decisions regarding the matter? People who have sex without birth control or who are unable to care for a child should be sanctioned if a government wants to intervene. Personally I don't believe that there should be any sanction but if people feel obliged to sanction something don't impact the child; impact the two people who produced the child. Why are their feelings so important? Then we have the shame of "giving up a child" that mostly affects the female it seems. If there were no shame than there would be nothing to keep secret. If it were a good idea in the first place to give a child up there would be no shame. It should be up to the child whether or not they want contact not the people who gave the child up. Protecting the adoptive parents is ridiculous. As if no one would notice that the child dropped in. Signing away an ancestry like you would sign a check is outrageous. If a person who gave the child up has aspirations to regain contact; then get involved. It could be circumstances have changed. That's when you need Solomon. If the adoptive family is not treating the child properly the extended family and the people who gave the child up should be contacted. This ridiculous notion that the bonds should be severed is crap. If people don't understand in this day and age that a person's birthright is important we are lost. No person should be able to keep the details of the adopted person's ancestry secret. It should be considered a criminal offense to withhold this type of information.

"People make the mistake of believing that th...

2012-01-29T03:33:50.857-05:00

"People make the mistake of believing that the change and sealing of the adoptee's identity was to provide "promises" of "confidentiality" to surrendering parents."

Then why else would it have been changed?

If an adoptee's identity is changed on the basis that the family of origin cannot 'track down' the adoptee, the idea here is - why would a family want to track down a child they had 'given up' to begin with?

Henceforth, that family would want anonymity.

Oh yes !!!!!! Tag all adoptees, the world would b...

2012-01-29T01:31:59.539-05:00

Oh yes !!!!!! Tag all adoptees, the world would be a much safer place! Great post and linking if I may.

Comments on The Declassified Adoptee: Is This Really Ethical? An Open Letter to America...

http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/topics/confident...

Sorry I misunderstood, Mei-Ling. OTOH, it gave me ...

Wonderful post. Seems like the Unsealed Initiativ...

Awesome blog. I will say that program totally made...

Amanda, I took a somewhat different tack on the sa...

I totally second what Mei-Ling said. Most people I...

MeI- Ling, Your satire was lost in translation (by...

@ Priscilla Sharp: Please see my response below to...

*headdesk* Dear Barbara, You misunderstood me. I...

Amanda, Thanks for putting all the effort you have...

Amanda, I can't tell you happy I was to read y...

Mei-Ling ~~ If I may respond to your question tha...

Thank you for working on WA adoption law. I still ...

I listened to the NPR piece and it fired me up! I ...

I think every OBC access lobby needs to do the sam...

Yes. Exactly. The person who created this whole ...

Thanks for your blog entry as well! :-)

Amanda, I know you already understand this but I...

So it was about control (by the government) on the...

I am confused as tomwhat you are saying, Mei-Ling....

Thank you, thank you, for a thoughtful, insightful...

The way I see it as an adoptee; is that "sham...

"People make the mistake of believing that th...

Oh yes !!!!!! Tag all adoptees, the world would b...

headdesk Dear Barbara, You misunderstood me. I...