Adoption battle rages

Advocates of open adoption records say they’ll continue fighting for the rights of adopted children to discover the identity of their birth parents, despite recent setbacks for their cause.

Earlier this month, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, signed a law on “sealed” birth records in adoptions.

Lee Allen of the National Council For Adoption (NCFA) says the Colorado law is a hard-fought victory for upholding birth parent confidentiality and privacy. “It’s really a common-sense thing,” he said.

Denver adoption activist Rich Uhrlaub and other adult adoptees say the new law “accomplished nothing in terms of adoptee rights” because it still doesn’t allow them their original birth records without someone else’s permission.

“It’s about a piece of paper and adulthood,” Mr. Uhrlaub said. “Everyone named on [birth records] should have equal access to it. States shouldn’t intervene when everybody’s an adult.”

What Colorado’s adoption battle shows is that, even after 35 years of debate, the “open records” issue is still personal and volatile.

The Colorado law, for instance, was introduced as a bill giving adult adoptees access to their original birth records upon request. But at the last minute, lawmakers voted to change the bill and keep birth records private unless birth parents authorized their release.

This, of course, is a Catch-22 for most adoptees because “it’s hard to get consent from someone whose name you don’t know,” Mr. Uhrlaub said.

In the past century, adoption-record policies have gone through similarly dramatic changes. Birth records used to be public, which meant anyone could see anybody else’s birth certificates, including those stamped “Illegitimate.”

Eventually, states started sealing birth records so the public couldn’t snoop and birth parents couldn’t track down the children they had given up for adoption. However, even under these restrictions, adoptees were always allowed to see their own birth records as a normal and natural right, according to research by Elizabeth J. Samuels, who teaches at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

In the 1950s, states slowly began sealing original birth records to everyone, including adoptees, unless they had a court order to open them, Ms. Samuels said in a paper published in 2001 in the Rutgers Law Review.

The primary motivation for these sealings was to stop birth parents from finding and “interfering” with adoptive families, she wrote. But there also was an intent to support the new idea that secrecy was good for adoptive families and their children, who would be protected “from any possible stain of illegitimacy.”

Contrary to modern arguments, “lifelong privacy rights” of birth parents wasn’t a concern when the records were sealed, Ms. Samuels noted.

By the 1970s, only two states — Alaska and Kansas — allowed adoptees to see their original birth records. The resulting outrage, written in books and articles by distraught adoptees such as Florence Fisher and Betty Jean Lifton, launched the “open records” battles.

To date, four states — Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and, as of January, New Hampshire — have joined Alaska and Kansas in allowing adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates upon request.

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