How Adoption in
Birth Records Weren't Closed for the
Reasons You Might Think
by:
Elizabeth J. Samuels ã
-o0o-
The
October 21, 2001, Sunday
Final Edition, Updated
They've become a standard of news
features, magazine articles and movie plots: the stories of men and women,
adopted at birth, who decide to seek out their biological parents. The urge for
reunion seems so elemental that a plethora of organizations has sprung up to
assist adoptees in their search. Today, the Internet
is replete with Web sites offering registries to help adoptees
and their birth families find each other by matching up information such as
dates and places of birth.
But many adoptees
"in search" are not able to find information through these
organizations or official state registry systems. Their only hope is access to
original records, such as their unamended birth
certificates. And this, unfortunately, is a source of information that remains
largely closed to them, even though, as studies now show, most birth parents
are open to being found.
In fact, most birth parents may never
have objected. The general public assumption seems to be that, from the
beginning, adoption records were closed in large part to protect the birth
mother's identity. But that isn't the case at all -- as I discovered when I
undertook to research a question arising from my own family's experience. The
child my sister had surrendered for adoption was able to locate us in the late
1980s because my sister had given birth in
As I saw what profound satisfaction mother and
daughter experienced getting to know each other, I began to wonder why almost
every U.S. state had decided to close records to the adult children of adoption
in the first place. What I found surprised me.
Legal adoption in
One of the most prominent actors in the
development of adoption law in the mid-20th century was the Children's Bureau,
an arm first of the U.S. Department of Labor and later of the Department of
Health, Education and Welfare. In the 1940s and '50s, the bureau advised that
birth and adoptive parents who did not know one another should not have access
to information about each other. But it also said that original birth
certificates should be available to adult adoptees.
As one of the bureau's consultants put it in 1946, "every person has a
right to know who he is and who his people were."
In the '40s and '50s, most state laws did
permit adult adoptees to view their birth records.
But by 1960, 26 states were making both original birth records and adoption
court records available only by court order. Twenty other states still made the
birth records available on demand, but over the following 30 years, all of
those states but
Why were states closing their records even
before 1960, when the reasons being advanced were all about protecting adoptive
families, and not birth parents? The historical record suggests that birth
mothers were in fact seeking a measure of confidentiality. What the mothers
wanted, however, was not to prevent the adoptive parents and the children they
had surrendered from discovering their identities, but to prevent their
families and communities from learning of their situations. A powerful reason
for the earliest closings of birth records to adult adoptees
may simply have been that it was consistent with an emerging social idea about
adoption: that it was a perfect and complete substitute for creating a family
by childbirth, so the adopted child had no other family and would never be
interested in learning about any other family.
Once most states sealed records for everyone
except adult adoptees -- and many states foreclosed
access even to them -- the record-sealing laws themselves may have helped
foster the notion that lifelong secrecy is an essential feature of adoption.
Adult adoptees increasingly felt discouraged from
seeking information about their birth families, and those who did were viewed
as maladjusted. By the 1970s, legal comments and court opinions started to talk
about the reason for permanently sealed records in terms of birth parents'
rights to lifelong anonymity. And states continued to pass laws foreclosing
adult adoptees' access to birth records.
Since the adoptees'
rights movements began in the 1970s, it has encountered stiff opposition to its
efforts to win legal access to birth records. Only in the past six years have adoptees won an unqualified right to view records in three
states --
Recently, celebrating Family History Month,
Sen. Orrin G. Hatch encouraged Americans to "find out more about where
they came from" because "researching ancestry is a very important
component of identity." As more state legislatures contemplate giving
adult adoptees the right to research their ancestry,
they should understand that once it was considered entirely natural and
desirable to let adoptees learn who their people
were.
Elizabeth Samuels is a professor at the
University of Baltimore School of Law.
Last Updated January 6, 2012
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