January 27–February 3, 2000

slant

Secrets and Lies

by Cynthia Bertrand Holub

The few weeks since a three-judge panel of the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled in favor of upholding Measure 58, the Adoptee Rights Initiative, have seen a veritable onslaught of venomous, anti-adoptee opinion pieces in newspapers from coast to coast. These editorials and columns seem cut from the same template, obligingly provided by the so-called National Council for Adoption, a misleadingly named trade association and adoption industry lobby.

These themes concern the so-called promises made to birth parents in the past and their alleged right to privacy; assertions concerning the relation between open records and the abortion and adoption rates; and the claim that adoptees now have adequate means for locating and reuniting with their birth parents, and therefore do not require access to their records.

Courts in federal (Sixth Circuit) and state (Tennessee and Oregon) jurisdictions have found that there was no contract between the state and birth mothers to keep the latter anonymous from their offspring, nor a fundamental right to privacy which extends that far. Complete confidentiality could never have been guaranteed in any event, as records are not sealed at relinquishment but at finalization of adoption.

Permitting adult adoptees, not the general public, access to their original birth certificates would not violate their birth parents’ privacy. Rather, adoptees’ rights to documents which define their genetic, legal and historical identities, are being violated.

The NCFA and the journalists parroting its line also claim that abortion rates would go up and adoption rates down if adult adoptees were permitted access to their own records. The fact is that open records do not increase abortion rates, as statistics in Kansas and Alaska, the two states which allow adult adoptees to access their birth records, clearly show (see data compiled by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, www.agi-usa.org/pubs/journals/3026398.html). The adoption rate in England (www.plumsite.com/tn/ex2.htm) has declined for the same reasons it has in the U.S.: the fact that most single women no longer relinquish their children being perhaps the foremost, but the rate actually declined at a slower pace after records were opened there.

The fundamental issue here is not one of adoptees searching for and reuniting with their birth parents; thousands do that every year under the sealed records system. It is instead a matter of restoring the rights of an entire class of citizens to equal protection under the law. Reunion registries speak only to the first issue, and not at all to the latter.

The National Council for Adoption was founded in 1980 by well-heeled adoption agencies to fight the open records provisions of the Model State Adoption Act of the Carter administration. It has been the single most influential force for keeping records sealed in this country. Although its membership has dwindled as a result of the dramatic shift in contemporary adoption practice toward openness — even some founding members have left — its influence is still strong as a result of its decades of posturing as an authority in adoption matters. It would behoove the nation’s press to not accept NCFA’s assertions at face value.

As the sealed records system starts to crumble, the representatives of those sections of the adoption industry which fear evidence of their own past misdeeds coming to light are scrambling to hide behind the skirts of birth parent "privacy." Adoptees and birth parents, on the other hand, have nothing to fear from the light of day. The legislatures of a few states and the electorate of one have come to see the wrong in this system and, in time, so will the rest. The era of sealed records will soon end. We will end it.

Cynthia Bertrand Holub, a resident of Germantown, is a member of the Bastard Nation Executive Committee (www.bastards.org). If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own, contact Howard Altman, City Paper news editor, 123 Chestnut St., Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.