NCFA no longer opposes unsealing adoptee birth records--Yea!!

Reunited without birth certificate, Jane (l) and Lorraine

All birth certificates will be unsealed one day, William (Bill) Pierce, who founded the National Council for Adoption, once told our reform firebrand, Florence Fisher, founder of ALMA. When NCFA (pronounced Nik-FA) was opposing us regarding unsealing birth records at very opportunity, Pierce privately said this to Florence, who then told me, close to three decades ago.

Yet as the years rolled by NCFA continued to oppose us. When Florence and I testified in Washington DC in the late 70s for unsealing birth certificates at a Senate hearing in Washington, DC, NCFA handlers literally held up a weeping natural mother who was testifying for keeping records sealed. Forever.

She spoke before I did. By the time I was called to testify I was livid. I started out by saying said something to the effect of her anonymity disqualified her from being taken seriously--as it would on any other issue--but I might have well been
whistling in the wind. Of course she couldn't use her name--or any name at all--as she was asking that her name not to be even included in the Congressional Record--let alone be covered by the press, who were not there anyway. I asked, is there any other issue where an anonymous person would be taken seriously?

I don't remember much more of what I said--it must be there in the Congressional Record--but when I got back to my seat, the anonymous mother was weeping profusely and literally being held and sheltered by two NCFA handlers. I have often wondered who she was and what happened to her and if she ever reconnected with the child she so desperately--at that moment--wanted to stay anonymous from. It certainly seemed that her feelings were so raw that she must have been saying words that she didn't really feel, or understand, but I knew no matter what, she was managing to do a hell of a lot of damage to unsealing the birth records. The people running the committee were going to keep that image in her in their minds.

ADOPTIVE PARENTS AGAINST UNSEALING OBCs
That bill, the Model Adoption Act of 1980,* went down in flames as the drunken, womanizing senator from Texas, Sen. John Tower, led the fight against that provision in Washington. (I'm not saying anything about Tower here that hasn't been reported elsewhere; his loutish behavior was primarily the reason he was rejected as the first Bush's Defense Secretary. But I digress. I still get mad when I think about all the people--and many or most of them adoptive parents and legislators--who have stood in the way of giving adoptees what should never have been taken away from them.)

My original birth certficate

Tower wasn't acting alone, however. Before we got to that point, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare held public hearings across the country. Florence, the late Betty Jean Lifton and I testified the same day at Columbia University. Adoption lawyers testified. Social workers testified. Agency owners and directors testified. Psychiatrists and psychologists testified. Lots of adoptees and other first mothers testified. Our friend Lee Campbell, founder of Concerned United Birthparents, was on the panel writing the bill itself. When it included a provision for unsealing birth records, the collective adoption-reform movement was floored and credited Lee with being the spark plug behind that.

NCFA watched over the while thing, lining up adoptive parents to testify. Comments were also solicited from the public: More than 3,000 letters rolled in, and more than 82 percent of them were against unsealing birth certificates, according to E. Wayne Carp in Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Ninety percent of the adoptive parents who wrote were adamantly against the open records provision. Florence heard that NCFA had solicited adoptive parents to write in and object.

Later, NCFA would send someone to various states to testify when unsealing birth certificates were on the agenda: Tennessee, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, et cetera. Weirdly enough, NCFA is a non-profit and non-profits are not supposed to take political stands, yet NCFA certainly has. Their status as a non-profit should have been yanked a long time ago, but it's a cozy circle of non-profit adoption agencies with directors who make big salaries supporting a lobby organization to push for the legislation they want, and what they have wanted in the past is sealed records, and because adoption is always thought to be a Good Thing, no one has questioned their questionable practices. Piece, incidentally, I was told by a source at the Child Welfare League of America, started NCFA in 1980 when he was not appointed the head of that other organization.

But after all these years of dogged and effective opposition from NCFA, there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Quietly and without making an announcement, NCFA is apparently no longer actively opposing allowing adopted individuals to obtain their original birth certificates. Read that again: NCFA is no longer actively opposing unsealing original birth certificates for adoptees. Slowly but surely we are winning.

NCFA is not lobbying in New York against our bill (A909 in the Assembly, and S2490a in the Senate), nor did they oppose the bill that did pass in New Jersey, one that only awaits Gov. Chris Christie's signature. (Whether that will happen is anybody's guess, since he vetoed a similar bill two years ago--though he has an adopted sister.) NCFA was not active in Ohio when a bill that opens almost all the records for every adoptee was passed, nor did it show up in the state of Washington last year. I haven't heard about the other states with live bills this year--Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania--but it appears that NCFA is no longer yammering about the ruination of the adoptive family and the devastating consequences to mothers like the one I so well remember. We don't expect NCFA to come out for adoptee rights that include identity, but if they have at least gone silent on the issue, we will rejoice. RIP Bill Pierce. You were right, truth is going to win. Adoptees are going to be free to know who they are.

Yes, there is good news.

IF NOT YOU, WHO? IF NOT NOW, WHEN? 

Other groups that have stopped testifying in New Jersey are the Lutheran Office of Social Ministries and the New Jersey State Bar Association. In New York, the bar association opposition is weakening though not yet dead. While the chair of the adoption committee of the Family Law Section of the New York Bar, Aaron Britvan, testified against our bill (A909) at a recent hearing, his speech was rambling and was mostly about the wording of the bill--I think he was trying to make more work for lawyers. He and I go way back as enemies on adoptee rights. (Incidentally, he is one of those adoptive parents we spoke about in recent comments who, as he put it, was "blessed" with a biological child--after he and his wife adopted.)

The Catholic Conference of Bishops in New Jersey, which speaks for Catholic Charities, is pushing for the natural/birth-parent veto, thus letting adoptee rights be subordinate to the mother's wishes. The same is true in Pennsylvania. Interestingly, it adds that if an adoptee can prove he already has had contact with one of his birth parents, it does not object to his having his original birth certificate. NOW, that National Organization of Women that ought to know better, is actively opposing the bill in Pennsylvania. The New Jersey ACLU also continues its staunch defense of mothers in the closet at the expense of the rights of adoptees. How the ACLU and a state chapter of NOW arrived at this absurd and unjust position is beyond me. When I got a call from the ACLU a month ago soliciting funds, I gave the person calling a vivid earful of what the ACLU in New Jersey--and I have just learned, Pennsylvania--is doing and why they are wrong. You might as well take every opportunity to educate, right?

But it's not over until the bills pass and governors sign them. So I beg, urge, coax every single individual with a connection to any or several of the above states and who believes adoptees should have the right to find out who they are to write letters--to the governor, to the legislative leaders, to your own representative or senator if you live in the state or it is where you relinquished or were adopted. Keep it short but heart-felt and to the point. Do not let this great opportunity to go by without making your voice heard. It won't happen if you do nothing. And if not you, who? If not now, when?--lorraine 

__________________________
To be involved in the effort in New York, contact Joyce Bahr of Unsealed Initiative at unsealedinitiative@nyc.rr.com. The group recently had a successful day of lobbying in Albany, and now has numerous sponsors and supporters of the bills, A909 and S2490a. We need you!

In New Jersey, Contact NJCare at njcare.staff@gmail.com. And see sidebar on left about writing Gov. Christie. There is not too much time left. Refer to the Birthright Bill, S873.


RECOMMENDED READING
Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption by E. Wayne Carp

In this lucid and thought-provoking book, Carp reviews the controversies surrounding the management of adoption records in the United States. Identifying the concerns of adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents, Carp surveys changing social attitudes toward the importance of family history, governmentally dictated secrecy, and the recognition of often conflicting rights of everyone involved in the adoption triad. Over the decades, government-supported, legally mandated concealment has prevailed, but the rise of search and reunion groups, adoption registries, newsletters, Internet bulletin boards, and web sites as well as experimental consensual open adoptions are beginning to force the records open. The debate continues (see, e.g., Katarina Wegar, Adoption, Identity, and Kinship, LJ 4/1/97), and Carp makes an important contribution. Highly recommended for academics, professionals, and the interested public.--Library Journal

WE THANK YOU FOR ANYTHING ORDERED THROUGH THE PORTALS HERE, AMAZON OR THAT OF BLOGHER. 

NOTA BENE:
Incidentally, Carp's authoritative book, from myriad sources, puts the percentage of single (birth) mothers who relinquished their children to adoption before the seventies at 80 percent, and that is the combined figure for both white and black mothers. Since we know that nearly all black mothers kept their babies, the figure for white mothers is considerably higher, more like 90 percent. More on this later.