July 21-27, 2005

city beat

Birth Rights

Why do reunion advocates oppose a bill to improve the state's adoption registry?

by Doron Taussig

Thirty-five years ago, Eileen Galentine of Bucks County gave birth to a baby boy. Last year, she decided she wanted to meet him.

Galentine, who had given her son up for adoption, conducted an internet search that led her to a man who had been born at the same time as her son. "We knew we were probably a match," she says. But they wanted to be sure, so they sent their information to the Pennsylvania Adoption Registry, a service run by the Department of Health that matches willing biological parents with their adopted children. Then, they waited.

After more than a month, they called up the registry and were told that their requests had never been filed. So they re-sent the information, and waited again. They called and were told a response was on the way. And again, they waited.

Others have complained about the Pennsylvania Adoption Registry, and indeed, there are some problems with the service's design. Back In February, a bill appeared before the state House Committee on Children and Youth that would correct some of these flaws. For instance, the current registry allows birth parents to register and adoptees to pay $10 for a one-time "search," to see if their parents are registered — meaning that if Galentine's registration had been processed after her presumed son's request, the pair would not have been matched. The bill would establish a new registry allowing both birth parents and adoptees, as well as adoptive parents of children under the age of 18 and some other relatives, to register permanently — a fairly commonsense improvement.

But the bill hasn't gone anywhere.

Its prime sponsor, state Rep. Linda Bebko-Jones of Erie, has withdrawn her support -- usually a strong signal to other representatives to stay away — and aides to the committee chairs say no one else is pushing the bill forward.

Bebko-Jones did not return calls to explain her withdrawal but it is clear that, after introducing the bill, she was contacted by a number of people voicing objections to her proposal and threatening to make a big stink about it. Strangely, these were people who believed strongly in making reunions more convenient.

Sue Romberger, founder of the support and search group PAFind, says there are several reasons that she and other advocates, such as the members of Adoption Forum, Pennsylvania's largest adoption support group, oppose Bebko-Jones' bill. For starters, the bill includes a provision for mandatory counseling, which the advocates find offensive.

"Are birth parents too flaky? Adoptees too angry? What are they trying to say here?" Romberger asks in an e-mail.

But what really bothers the advocates is not so much what the bill does as what it doesn't do: establish open adoption records in Pennsylvania [Cover story, "Who Am I?" Frank Lewis, April 22, 1999]. Romberger and her allies believe that all adoptees should have access to their original birth certificates, or OBCs. This, they say, would make searching for one's biological parents much easier. More importantly, says Romberger, herself an adoptee who has found and maintains a relationship with her biological family, even if someone chooses not to search, she still has a right that she is presently denied: the right to know "who you are."

Patti Dunbar, the editor of Adoption Forum's newsletter, opposes Bebko-Jones' bill because it would be a Band-Aid on a huge, structural mistake: "It won't fix anything."

Mutual consent registries, she believes, just don't work — many of the interested parties aren't even aware that the registries exist. And, as Romberger says, Bebko-Jones' bill just "re-endorses the registry system."

A small minority of states have open records. Neither Alaska nor Kansas ever sealed their records, and a few other states have opened them back up. These systems allow all adoptees to obtain their OBCs while enabling birth parents to file a contact preference form indicating whether they would like to be contacted (and if so, if they'd like mediation).

"In this way, people can speak for themselves, and not through paid intermediaries of the court, of an adoption agency, or the state unless requested," Romberger writes.

But there are those who vehemently oppose open records.

Lee Allen, spokesman for the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), a nonprofit adoption advocacy group, says open records "weaken the position of the adoptive family" and violate a right to privacy for birth parents.

"What they're interested in," he says of open-records advocates, "is finding and reuniting with someone who may not want to be reunited." He points out that a majority of adoptees never start a search.

There is another consideration as well — one that mixes the open-records issue with one of the fiercest political debates of our time. Some women considering adoption, Allen says, may require confidentiality — and if you take that away from them, "their only confidential option is abortion." Locally, the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference is said to have the same concern, though a spokesman would not comment on Bebko-Jones' bill except to say that his organization favors the protection of confidentiality.

Romberger argues history should allay this concern, observing that states with open records have not seen a rise in abortions. Allen calls this argument disingenuous, saying that abortion rates have been dropping across the country, and that there are many factors involved in that.

There is very little space for compromise between those who push for open records and those who prefer mutual consent registries. Allen calls his opponents fringe radicals, and says that bills like Bebko-Jones', which strengthen the registry system, are "the answer" to this problem. Romberger shoots back that the NCFA is using abortion as a political ploy, and that it is just trying to make adoptions more convenient for adoptive parents and attorneys.

As for Eileen Galentine, after more than three months of waiting, she finally got a response: She had found her birth son. The Health Department says the wait she experienced was abnormal. Whether a registry like the one in Bebko-Jones' bill would have served her better is unclear. Galentine herself says she'd like to see Pennsylvania adopt open records, but there is one thing that is clear to all parties. Says Galentine, "I think the whole system in Pennsylvania sucks."