Do birth mothers have the right to know who their children became?

Lorraine

It's legislation time in all of the states and provinces where there is any activity regarding changing the laws. A partial list includes Rhode Island, Missouri, Montana, and of course New Jersey and New York, two states were we've been involved in the process.

But as an adoptee (Robert Wilson) wrote to me recently, why aren't we working for access to the new name and identity
of the children we gave up for adoption for birth/first mothers also? It's a good question. Why not? Back in the old days, when I was considered a "young birth mother",  just in my thirties and not the "grannie" that some call me today, there was a push to open the records to not only adoptees, but to us first mothers as well.

In 1980--31 years ago! a lifetime--after numerous hearings around the country, the then U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued a Model Adoption Act stating:

“There can be no legally protected interest in keeping one’s identity secret from one’s biological offspring; parents and child are considered co-owners of the information regarding the event of birth….The birth parents’ interest in reputation is not alone deserving of constitutional protection.” 

We just about fainted with delight! Lee Campbell, the founder of Concerned United BirthParents, was on the committee that wrote the proposed legislation. Florence Fisher, founder of ALMA, and Betty Jean Lifton, both adoptees, and I went up to Columbia University to testify for openness in the late Seventies. The room where we testified was packed with people I did not know. Most of them were there to testify against opening the records, and let me go out on the proverbial limb...and say most of them were probably adoptive parents. A lot of social workers were beginning to agree with us, so I don't think they were the lawerly looking gentlemen and good ladies in suits I saw that day. I could feel the hostility when I spoke up on the microphone. A real live women-who-gave-away-here-baby! So that's what she looks like!!! OMG, almost normal. The term "birth mother" had not yet really crept into the lingua franca. In fact, natural mother was still being used, alongside with biological mother.


I don't have a copy of my remarks, but I'm sure I talked about how I was not given a choice when I signed the consent papers: it was anonymity or nothing. I've written before about being outspokenly adamant with my social worker when I discovered that the damn law said I was to be forever anonymous; I had been seeing Mrs. Mura off and on for weeks when she dropped this stinking bomb; I had no idea this was the case--dumb me, I figured that when she was 18 I'd be given her name and last known address, and she mine. Ha! In fact, according to the law of the land in New York, without my consent to this law, as it was, no caveats attached, my daughter could not have been adopted. Mrs. Mura said that "they couldn't help me," if I didn't got along with the bitter anonymity poison pill.

So here we were thirteen years later, and there was a possibility of undoing the anonymity? Hallelujah!

But we were not there yet. A joint Senate-Congressional hearing was to convene in Washington, and both Florence and I were asked to testify. Along with Lee Campbell and a few others, I was one of the very few openly out natural mothers. I can remember that day in DC as if it were yesterday. Before I testified, the National Council for Adoption, the anti-adoptee rights organization, a lobby front for a slew of adoption agencies, including all the Bethany Christian agencies and--oh, here we go again--the LDS agencies, came up with an "anonymous" birth mother who had surrendered a few years earlier. She was against opening the records; somehow if this happened, it would wreck her life.


I could hardly believe my ears and was quite riled up by the time I got up to speak, immediately after her. I made my remarks about never forgetting the daughter I had given birth to and felt I had to give up, as a single woman, about always wondering who she was, how she was--did she need me?--and if that girl I passed on the street who was about the right age might be her. By the time I went back to my seat, Ms. Anon was crumpled over and sobbing as her two NCFA handlers were comforting her. Florence and I were seated a couple rows behind her and I could see how openly she was now weeping.

I do have such a hard time believing that these mothers who are against open records, or who file vetoes, are normal, no matter what religion they belong to. Isn't  it normal to want to protect our own children? To know who they are, who they have become if we didn't raise them? Normal to want to have a relationship with them, unless they hurt us constantly and at every opportunity?

Some provisions of that 1980 act indeed became law, but the late Sen. John Tower of Texas, an adoptive father (and a famous drunk and womanizer in DC, why mince words here?), led the opposition to this provision—in the name of the birth mother who doesn’t want to be found. He succeeded. According to E. Wayne Carp in Family Matters, some 3,000 letters were sent to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare about the Model Act; 82 percent were against the Act in general; 90 percent of the adoptive parents who responded objected to the open records provisions. If we had 90 percent of the adoptive parents in favor of changing the law today, and writing letters to that effect, it would probably happen.

So while, yes, I would be thrilled to be working for openness for birth mothers as well as adoptees, we are having such a difficult time moving the chess pieces here for adoptees that I can't put my energy into birth mother access, as well as adoptee access. In Ontario, however, they did succeed at just that. Not only did adoptees over 18 gain access to original birth records, birth parents could ask for the name of their child once the child was 19. 

But alas, there is always a small minority who file vetoes, and Ontario finally opened its records in 2008--but adding that both birth parents and adoptees can file a disclosure veto. I could not locate a number who have filed such vetoes in Canada since the law went into effect. If anyone can, please let us know. As of 2009 (seemingly the latest information available on line), out of a total of 250,000 adoptions in Ontario since 1921, 3,700 filed outright vetoes--1.48 percent. Others filed no contact preferences, but neither can prohibit the names from being released. I do not know how many of them were adoptee vetoes, how many birth parent, and of that, how many birth mother. In Ontario, however, as in Oregon, it was not adoptive parents who stood in the way of the legislation as it moved forward; as Jessica, one of our Canadian commentators noted, it was birth parents and (in the case of Ontario) adoptees who brought the legal challenge to the original law, which did not have a veto in it. Rather than continue the fight and keep the records sealed during that time, the veto was added to the bill. (For more see: CNW.)

This fight to give adoptees the right to own their original identities is taking so much longer than I ever could have anticipated, that tacking on first mother rights--even though I surely champion the concept--I believe is more than we can accomplish now. Prove me wrong, that would be lovely.--lorraine
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Three excellent adoption books above: The Adoption Triangle, a history of the adoption reform movement and why it is necessary; Without a Map, a beautiful memoir from a birth mother by a first-class writer; and How It Feels to be Adopted, a collection of essays and photographs of adolescents and teens who are adopted.