Memo to Gov. Cuomo: Repeal the 1935 law sealing original birth certificates

Lorraine

It's lobby time in New York again, and this year the prognosis looks good and members of Unsealed Initiative, under the guidance of Joyce Bahr, are scheduled to meet with the governor, Andrew Cuomo, or members of his staff, to discuss the Adoptee Bill of Rights giving adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates. As far as I know, this is the first time the group is scheduled to meet with the governor or his representatives. I won't be able to go to Albany, Below is the letter I will be sending Gov. Cuomo tomorrow. 

If you have any connection to adoption in New York State--whether as a first/birth parent who relinquished here, an adoptee who was adopted in New York, or an adoptive parent who adopted in New York--please join our fight to get records open in New York State. If you live in New York state, so much the better, but if you have an adoption connection to New York, it matters not where you live, just that you be heard. The laws of New York affect you. Be sure to mention your connection to New York, and add any credentials that will make a staffer sit up and take notice high up in the letter. Borrow freely from here, but use your own way of expressing why repeal of the 1935 law is important to you personally. And to become more involved in the effort in New York, please contact Joyce Bahr at:

unsealedinitiative@nyc.rr.com 

One last thought: Snail mail via the post office is more effective than an email. If you must do an email, put your address at the end.

                                                                                Your address here

                                                                                                April 22, 2011

The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of New York State
NYS State Capitol Building
Albany, NY 1222

Dear Governor Cuomo:

I am writing to ask you for your support of bills in the Senate (S1438) and the Assembly (2003) that would let adopted people know whom they were when they were born.  The Adoptee Bill(s) of Rights would repeal the 1935 legislation that sealed in perpetuity the original birth certificates, and thus the original identities, of anyone adopted in the state of New York.

I am a journalist who has written extensively about this subject for numerous publications, including The New York Times, Newsweek, USA Today and Parent’s, as well as others. As a woman who relinquished a child myself in Rochester, I am also the author of Birthmark (1979), the first memoir to break the silence of women who gave up their children to adoption, and have been a spokesperson for adoption reform for several years. I have testified for open records both in Albany and in Washington DC before legislative committees, and in court for adoptees seeking their records.

The 1935 law that sealed the original birth certificates of anyone adopted was presumably passed with good intentions--both to reassure adoptive parents there would be no possibility of interference from the natural mother, and to make the adopted understand they were indeed an integral part of the new family. But we now know this facile deception causes physical and psychological consequences later on, none of them healthy. Cicero summed up the effect of identity ignorance this way: To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. 

Physicians want and need medical histories to provide the most informed treatment, and adoptees grow up and want answers. Simplistic stories that worked when they were young become unsatisfactory as they grow into adulthood, for it is part of the human condition--because we can think--to want to know where we came from. Shows such as Who Do You Think You Are? attest to this; most of the people featured are flooded with inchoate emotion as they trace their ancestors, walk the very same paths and roadways their great grandparents did, and learn what hardships they endured. This need to know is primal. 

Denying people the right to know their real name, along with the unvarnished but true story of their birth, reduces them to a class of people denied a right so basic that the rest of us take it for granted, that is, the answer to the question: Who Am I? It is well past the time for this archaic law to be repealed.

Original birth records are not sealed upon relinquishment, but only when upon adoption.  Consequently, mothers legally could not be assured anonymity from their offspring: no adoption, no sealed birth certificate, no amended birth certificate issued. Yet the main objection legislators give for opposing repeal today is the supposed confidentiality “promised” the women who relinquished their children. The problem with this reasoning is that it allows the will of a supposed group of people to negatively impact another.

For a great many of us, anonymity was a terrible condition imposed by statute. We had no choice if it were necessary to surrender our children. When I protested, my social worker replied: Well, You have to agree to it or we can't help you. There could be no legal adoption without sealing for all time the original birth certificate.

Times have changed, attitudes have moved forward. Many--if not most--natural mothers welcome reunion with their children; a 1997 Cornell University survey[i] of more than a thousand adoptive parents found that the overwhelming majority are in favor of open records. Yet the records remain sealed because a few powerful legislators hold fast to the archaic attitudes of another generation steeped in secrecy. The imagined specter of these women's lives being ruined continues to be the stumbling block to repealing bad law. Given that there are some who would remain anonymous from their own children, yet their temporary discomfort is not reason enough to deny anyone the right to know the truth of his or her origins.

How open birth records for adoptees have worked in other states is telling: Following a state-wide referendum, Oregon opened it records to adult adoptees in 2000. The Oregon Center for Health Statistics website, [ii] as of May 31, 2010, the tenth anniversary of open records, reports that more than 10,000 original birth certificates were released; fewer than one percent of birth parents (85) had filed a "no-contact" preference, and 79 of those in the first year. Open-record states (there are five others, including Kansas, which never sealed its records) report no problems. Abortion rates are not affected either. [iii]

Some states have half-way measures that allow the release of the birth record if the parents so named do not file a veto. This is a particularly inimical provision, as there is no other contract in the U.S. that so determines the fate of an individual who was never party to the contract restricting his rights. His only crime was to be adopted. Adoptees were never asked if they agreed to this perpetual identity theft, yet the supposed contract with the state affects them most of all, and most directly.

The demand to give people the truth of their origins has been around for a while. In 1980, the then U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, after holding numerous hearings of adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers and other experts around the country, wrote a Model Adoption Act that stated:

“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.”

While other parts of the act became law, this provision was removed. The proposed legislation of 1980 would also have given natural mothers the right to learn the identities of their children. Remember, this was not some hair-brained proposition; it was the concerted opinion of the various adoption experts working on the bill that both parties involved in a birth should know the identity of each other. It is not such a crazy idea. It is human to want to know, and many of us signed the surrender documents under duress as we objected to this provision we were powerless  to delete. 

In a few weeks representatives of Unsealed Initiative, the New York organization whose goal is unseal original birth certificates of the adopted, will be in Albany to lobby, and we understand they will meet with you, or members of your staff. They will come with additional supporting information.

I write today as a natural mother without a pony in this race. I was happily reunited with my daughter 15 years after I relinquished her in 1966 in Rochester.  At the time we were reunited in 1981, she was living with her adoptive family in Madison, Wisconsin. 

The discovery of her new identity and whereabouts was accomplished speedily after I paid $1,200 to someone who had already identified her from the clues in my memoir—even though they had been fudged somewhat. Not only could he (or she) locate adoptees for birth parents--as he did for me--but he could also locate the natural parents of adoptees searching. In other words, he had quick access to both sealed birth records and adoptive papers throughout the United States, long before records were computerized.

Jane and Lorraine in 1983

Clearly this was illegal, but I did not find my daughter a moment too soon. Because my daughter was epileptic with frequent and severe seizures, her physician had tried to locate me through the agency in Rochester--at the same time I was writing to them because I had a feeling she needed me. In the agency’s response to me, I was informed--erroneously--that she was well and happy; I would later learn from her adoptive mother that her physician's letter was not even answered, but after we were reunited, it was referred to in a letter to them, indicating it had been received. This would still the situation today in New York. Court orders to open records may be obtained, but getting one requires expense and fortitude many adoptees lack, and anyway, a judge may deny the petition, as many have. In the Seventies, I knew people in New York who were able to get their records by paying a hundred dollars to people who worked in the records bureau; a copy of the original birth certificate would be passed to them in the rest room.

Desperate people will resort to any means. And where there is money to be made, it will be.

While you can't work miracles with the New York legislature, you might be interested to know that it was another New York governor, Herbert H. Lehman, who was largely responsible for the law that sealed the records. It happened in 1935 under his tenure. I am sure he thought he was doing the right thing for this three adopted children.

Your firm support of the Adoptee Bills of Rights (A2003 and S1438) might unglue the bills from the committees where they have died as previous sessions came to an end in the spring. We have well over a hundred co-sponsors and supporters in the two houses. This year we also have enthusiastic sponsors in Rep. David Weprin (D) from Queens, and Sen.Velmanette Montgomery (D) of Brooklyn and Sen.William Larkin (R) from the Newburgh/Kingston area.

I ask you for your support--your wholehearted support--to help pass A2003 and S1438 and give adoptees their original birth certificates. It seems like such a small, but basic, right we are asking: The right to let individuals adopted as children know who they were when they were born. 

As has been said before, justice delayed is justice denied. Our cause is just. It is right. It is time.

Cordially,


Lorraine Dusky 

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[i] http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/jan97/adoptionrecord.ssl.html

[ii] http://public.health.oregon.gov/BirthDeathCertificates/GetVitalRecords/Pages/58update.aspx#0531201

[iii] http://www.americanadoptioncongress.org/reform_adoption_data.php