Writing to Gov.Cuomo about unsealing records--just do it!

Lorraine and daughter Jane, 1981

Sent today via the post office

June 9, 2018

The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of New York State
NYS State Capitol Building
Albany, NY 12224

Dear. Gov. Cuomo:

When you were nine, I had a child in Rochester as an unmarried woman of 22. I felt I had no choice at the time but to give her up for adoption. I was horrified to learn during the process that she would never be able to have her original birth certificate, and that if I wanted to do a legal adoption in New York, I had to agree to take away her right to know who she is, who she was at birth, what her story is—for her entire life.

It wasn’t my birth certificate that I was sealing—it was hers and I was participating in this obviously unwarranted and unjust system of social engineering by making this unholy bargain with the state. The state and I were making a lifelong decision over a third party. I anguished over this but in the end had no real choice in that era and signed the relinquishment papers at North Haven Terrace—the euphemistic name for the adoption agency in 1966—and tried to put my life back together.

That included leaving my job at The Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester and finding one at The (late) Knickerbocker News in Albany. At The Knick I covered the state legislature on issues of health, including abortion, which was making its difficult way up the food chain there in the late Sixties. I know what a tortuous battle that was. Yet the battle for ending discrimination against people who are adopted has taken much longer.

In 1976 I was back in Albany testifying for unsealing the birth certificates of adopted individuals; Richard Gottfried was the young assemblyman from Manhattan who co-chaired a joint Senate-Assembly hearing on the issue. The words we heard from the opposition—from Shad Polier, in fact, representing an adoption agency, Louise Wise—were “tragic” and “disaster” should the state unseal original birth certificates. Nothing happened.

While absolutely nothing continues to happen in New York State, since then nine states now allow adult adoptees the full and unfettered right to their own original birth certificates. The sky has not fallen; mothers are not driving their cars into the river.  

The whole story, warts and
all, from an era of secrecy
and shame, up to today. 

Richard Gottfried and I are still at it on this very same issue, though he’s gray-bearded now and I am the grandmother of a 25-year-old teacher, daughter of the daughter I gave up. I paid someone to find her and we were reunited in 1981 when she was 15. Because she had seizures, with her parents’ blessing her doctor had already tried to locate me. In fact, her doctor and I both were contacting the agency in Rochester around the same time, but the agency was constrained by New York law, and did nothing. Her doctor never even received a response; I got a few letters telling me to “get on with my life” and that she was “fine and happy with her family.” When, in fact, she was far from “fine and happy.”

My story is only one of thousands, but beyond the personal tales of grief that sealed records causes both adoptees and mothers in New York, the law itself is unethical, immoral, unjust for it denies a whole group of people the right to self-governing by stealing their identities at birth and into eternity.

Adopted people were never asked if they, when adult, wanted this erasure of their original families scrubbed from their records, yet they have it. The only other situation where anything like this happens is in slavery. And that is what New York perpetuates by not passing a bill that would do away with sealed birth records that came to be under adoptove father Gov. Herbert H. Lehmann.

A bad bill with all kinds of garbage verbiage that you did not sign last year—but sent to committee for study—did nothing but delay a vote on the issue. There will always be two sides of this issue. Powerful legislators—Helene Weinstein has the loudest foghorn—say they are concerned about the privacy promised birth mothers when they relinquished their child, and wish to give mothers the right to redact their names. But the law never promised, nor was intended to give, natural mothers that kind of cover. Men in paternity suits were never granted “anonymity.”

In reality, I think it’s more than possible that some legislators are worried about secret children themselves, but if not, certainly they are empathizing with the parents in the closet rather than the adopted individual stripped of his personhood with this archaic law. 

David Weprin (D) and Anthony Lanza (R) have companion bills that give adoptees the right to know who they are. The bills (A9959-B and S7631-B) do not allow birth/first mothers (fathers of unmarried women are usually not on birth certificates) to enforce a continued violation of the rights written into the old law. Insisting that these women be given the right to redact their names if so desired is not an equal right, for it gives birth mothers say over their adult children that no parent has in and other area. It allows a minute percentage of women—New Jersey’s recent experience shows that to be fewer than two percent, in other states it has been far lower—to hold authority and power over another group of people.

Adoption's myriad
effects on the individual 

Cyril Means, the (late) attorney on the suit brought by the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association (ALMA) to unseal birth records for the adopted, stated it this way: "Apart from slavery there is no other instance in our laws, or in any other jurisprudence in civilized system of jurisprudence, in which a contract made among adults, in respect of an infant, can bind that child once he reaches his majority."

Earlier this week, (June 5) a clean bill without restrictions was voted out of the Health Committee in the Assembly and sent to Codes, that last stop before a bill goes to the floor for a vote. Joe Lentol heads Codes and has been against a clean bill for time immemorial. I do not expect anything to be different this year. Only you, Gov. Cuomo, might be able to get the bill on the floor. The bills have bi-partisan support, and thus just might be legislation that both houses would pass and break the logjam in the legislature. It would certainly look good in the news that the two houses could agree on something, and actually pass important legislation that has been kicking around Albany for decades. 

Since a Cornell University survey long ago showed that most adoptive parents were in favor on unsealing records, today you would not lose noticeable votes over this, and you would certainly gain the support of adopted people and many if not most mothers who relinquished their children to adoption from around the country. New York, with an estimated 640,000 adopted people in the state, would be the first large state to give adopted people the same rights as the non-adopted: to have their original birth certificates, no simply "amended" ones. I will add that Kansas and Alaska never sealed the original birth records of adopted people, and they do not have higher rates of abortion, as some have suggested will happen if women are not allowed to maintain their anonymity. A child has the right to know at least, at the very least, her or his mother. 

As noted before, nine states (Alaska, Alabama, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon and Rhode Island) have similar legislation. You would get credit for making it happen in a state with a large population.   

It is impossible to overestimate what a difference this would make to adopted people. But what a difference it would make!

Sincerely, Lorraine Dusky                                          

PS: In one of those weird twists of fate, the father of my daughter was the Democrat & Chronicle’s political reporter who later went to Newsday, Patrick XXXXXXX, and he probably professionally knew your father. Jim XXXXXXX a good friend who lives in Sag Harbor, says that he’s known you since you were a kid. So it goes.  

I am the author of hole in my heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption(2015), as well as Birthmark(1979), the first memoir from a natural mother, as well as other books and numerous magazine pieces. I also have a popular blog for adoptees and first mothers, First Mother Forum.

 ___________________

TO ADD YOUR VOICE, EMAIL Gov. Cuomo at this address: 
https://www.governor.ny.gov/ 

JUST DO IT!

Anne Heffron's book, You Don't Look Adopted is a powerful indictment of adoption, and demonstrates the far-reaching impact that adoption has on every aspect of the adopted individual's life, despite their relationship to the new family. One wishes the non-adopted would read only a part of it; their understanding would change forever. It makes a great companion to hole in my heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption.