h♥le cont.: As a first mother, testifying for adoptee rights in New York, 1976

Lorraine 

By 1976 the New York state legislature amazingly enough is considering a bill that will allow individuals born and adopted in New York to obtain their original, unamended birth certificates.

Florence [1] is planning a lawsuit to have the amended birth certificates be declared unconstitutional, but holds back now. If New York’s law fell, could the rest of the country be far behind? Florence and I troop up to Albany with a handful of others—adoptees, adoptive parents, a phalanx of psychologists and social workers, attorneys, adoption-agency heads, and another natural mother who turns out also to be an adoptee, a double-whammy that is way more common than most people know.[2]

                                       
“If I had known that someday I could meet my daughter it would have been
so much easier to sign those papers, “ I say, speaking in a microphone in a
cavernous and largely empty chamber, looking up at the men sitting high above
me—maybe they aren’t so far above me but that’s how I remember it—the men
who could change the rules looking down on us. “My social worker and I went
over this point again and again and again. Never, never, could I see her, not ever,
time heals all wounds, she would say. It does not heal this one.”

I am asked about the women who do not want to know the children they
gave up for adoption—do I agree that they have the right to not have their
identities revealed?

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“No, I don’t.” You have a child, you owe them an identity, you owe them at least this—their place in the chain of life.”

But Senator Joseph Pisani, co-chair, needs more convincing: “Suppose she said, ‘I don’t want anyone to know anything about me. This is a final act on my part and one of the considerations of surrender of this child is that I retain anonymity for the rest of my life. I want to get it behind me.’ Let’s assume she has that attitude. Right, wrong, or indifferent. Should she be entitled to have it as a matter of right, or should she, somewhere down the line, suffer the trauma of a confrontation?”

Trauma of confrontation—from her own child? How about surfeit of joy instead? I mentally respond. Besides what gives her the right to deny a person knowledge of his ancestry, his history--hit mother? Because she is going to be embarrassed? But this is not a time to be flip.

“A, I don’t believe a confrontation would be traumatic. And B, No, I don’t
believe she has the right to that privacy. I think that woman’s right is infringing
upon the rights of adoptees.”

Somewhere in the room, a man lets out a loud, disgusted sigh. I turn to look
at him. He is Shad Polier, the attorney representing the Louise Wise Services. The
enemy. Tall, distinguished, a graybeard. The old order.

I refer to one of the earlier speakers, a representative of the New York
Foundling Home, who spoke of the adoptees who come back looking for names
and answers. She said her agency had found about half of the hundred or so
women adoptees had asked them to look for in the last year. No one on the panel
had asked her how many of the mothers refused to meet their children;  I had
sought her out during a break before I spoke. “I asked her how many women did
not want to meet their children—the ones they contacted,” I speak loudly into the
microphone now: “It turns out there were none. She said that there was one that
was reluctant at first, and then changed her mind.”

Then the other side is up. Polier goes on in a windy, sonorous voice for a
long time. He is here today, he says, to speak for the poor, downtrodden “girls” the
agency had helped by placing their children. He rattles on about how the poor
women/girls who give up their children go into hiding, how they never want be
reminded of this trauma. I am the outlier, the unusual exception. His lengthy
soliloquy is peppered with words such as “disaster,” “havoc,” “pathology,”
“harmful.” He makes me furious. He knows nothing. [6]

The next morning my picture is on the front page of The Knickbocker News, the
newspaper in Albany where I had been a reporter after my daughter's birth. There
had been no possibility of going back to my going back to the newspaper in
in Rochester whereI was working when I became pregnant. Her father was the
political columnist; the scandal of my pregnancy precluded my going back. I had
to move to another city. In fact, my old boss at the paper in Rochester--who eventually
knew about our affair and our baby--helped me get the job in Albany. Now I had gone
fromcovering the news in Albany to being the news. I had revealed something I once
had been so freaked out by that I even had lied to doctors when they asked if I’d ever
been pregnant. Oh no, not me!

Three months later riding uptown on a jammed New York City bus, sweaty bodies stuffed like olives in a jar—there is no air conditioning—I am reading the Times and come upon Shad Polier’s obituary. With some amazement I read that Polier had been one of the many lawyers involved in the defense of the Scottsboro boys, but am not surprised that he had drafted the first law in New York terminating parental rights. The obit includes nothing about his grinding opposition to giving adopted people their rights. I want to point out the good news to the person sitting next to me. I want to say, Look, the enemy is dying off, they will all be dead, and we will win this yet, do you know what great news this is, that Shad Polier can no longer testify against us?

What was not in the obit was that Shad Polier had been married
to the daughter of Louise Wise, whose namesake agency he
represented.[3] The Wise name is mentioned several times in the obit, but I would not learn
that crucial link until I looked him up online years later. The legislature in Albany offered a
prospective  bill—the original birth records would be open for adoptions only that occurred
after the bill became law. It excluded anyone adopted from 1935 until the new law went
into effect. It would not affect my daughter, me, or thousands of others. Florence was livid.
“The only adoptees affected positively by this bill are those who have just been conceived!!!”[4]
she opined in her irrefutable logic. The others would be forgotten.

She had too many plaintive letters from people in their seventies and eighties to
quietly fold her tent and disappear.  She took the fight to the courts, hoping that
one good decision would open the records for adoptees everywhere, since it was
generally assumed that we would have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to
get these laws repealed. Using ALMA members as the basis for a class action suit,
she filed a federal lawsuit[5]against New York’s sealed adoption records law. The suit
claimed that the right to know one’s origins was found in the First, Thirteenth, and
Fourteenth Amendments. In brief, adopted people were denied the right to useful
information and ideas (First Amendment); adopted people bore a badge of slavery,
just as slave children were sold before they were able to know their parents and were
foreverdenied the right to know their parents (Thirteenth); adopted people were made
a“suspect class” by being deprived of information that the rest of us have; and their
right to privacy infringed, by not allowing them knowledge of their own origins
(Fourteenth).

We lost. We lost in the district court for the Southern District, we lost on
appeal, and the Supreme Court refused to hear our case. The reasons given:
unsealing the records would not only disrupt the adoptive family, it would have a
negative effect on adoptions to come—that is, that because natural mothers might
be found one day, they would not give up their babies. Despite how skewed this
argument is, or how presumptive, or how dated it sounds, such was the logic of a
Judge James L. Oakes who wrote the opinion. If women couldn’t be assured of
anonymity, they wouldn’t keep the adoption mills churning. Today we know that
whether birth certificates are sealed or not has absolutely no effect on the rate or
adoptions—or abortion.--lorraine from hole in my heart: memoir and report from 
the fault lines of adoption. Previous excerpts available in scroll; go to Home Page, 
and scroll down. 
______________________________

[1]Florence Fisher, who jump-started the modern adoption reform movement. Her
impact on the adoption reform movement cannot be overstated. For many years
she was the face of adoption reform and search in the media, as well the the leader
of the legal quest for open records. She retired from adoption work some years
ago. She is the author of The Search for Anna Fisher.

[2]Joint Public Hearing, New York State Senate/Assembly: Sealed Adoption Records and Identity, April 28, 1976.  Retrieved at http://web.archive.org/web/20081109045659/http://www.bastards.org/activism/local/ny/hearings.html

[3]Louise Wise Services went out of business in 2010 after a couple of well-publicized
lawsuits. In one, a couple was  told that they were adopting the son of a bright, accomplished
college student who helped support her mother and whose fiancé had unexpectedly died,
and she got pregnant soon after during a rebound affair. In fact, the mother was a
lobotomized schizophrenic, and the father was also a mental patient;  the couple conceived
when both were institutionalized. At the adoptee’s insistence, his parents sued Louise Wise
Services. He had schizophrenia and died at 29 of undetermined causes. The agency also
separated identical twins as part of a social experiment.

[4] Carp, pp. 178-181.

[5] Alma Society, Inc. v. Mellon, 601 F.2d 1225 (2nd Cir., 1979), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 995, (1979).
123

[6] What is so pathetically striking about Polier's dire prognostications--and even the words he used-- is that they are the same ones used by the opposition judges when we testified in New York City in 2014, when it appears we had a shot at getting a clean bill without a veto passed. In a half century, hardliners against opening records are the same broken record. Have they no pity, have they no heart, have they lost the ability to understand that a woman's right to anonymity in the case of childbirth is no right at all, but a ill-conceived social contract that denies others the right of self-governance? The tenacity this old mindset has on judges and legislators baffles me, for it condemns adoptees to a permanent childhood without the basic right to self-knowledge and awareness, while the world around us has changed.

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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Now a Hulu Original Series garnering RAVE REVIEWS (We haven't seen it yet.)
The Handmaid's Tale is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States and is now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birthrate by reverting to, and going beyond, the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the Book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the women (fertile women have the babies for others to raise) and men in its population. 

Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self (Anchor Book)
This  groundbreaking book uses the poignant, powerful voices of  adoptees and adoptive parents to explore the  experience of adoption and its lifelong effects. A major  work, filled with astute analysis and moving  truths. (I highly recommend this book for both mothers--biological and adoptive--and adoptees. I learned a great deal. Maybe a bit outdated today, but the psychological insights are golden.