I stand before you today as a New York woman born and bred. From the South Shores of Long Island, to the depths of New York City, to the green of the Hudson Valley, I am more of a patriot to New York, then America.

I am also a mother to four children, one of whom I did not raise. I let him slip away to adoption in the fall of 1987. My first born ,never forgotten, relinquished son.

I have spent the last five plus years of my life reading and researching and studying adoption in my preparation for my son turning 18 and our eventual reunion. In that time, I have spoken to more adoptees, more mothers of loss and more adoptive parents than I could ever have imagined. Adoption is a complex issue and one that is filled with many personal emotions. On one issue almost all conflicted parties can agree. Many times it seems on one issue only, but here they all come together, the scales are very defiantly weighted to one side, and that is on the side of open adoption records.

Despite what is, to me, so glaringly obvious, the myths of “promises of confidentiality” seem to color the acts of the legislative branches so much that I can only assume that you know not of which you speak and the lies of which you believe.

I do not ask for this protection. I do not want it. I was never promised nor implied. I have no need to be protected from my first born child. I signed the rights to have him find me before I signed off to let him go.

Look at me. Do you see someone who would pose a threat? I am a mother. I am a tax payer. I bake cupcakes to bring to my daughters school. I carpool my son. I pick paint colors and design window treatments. No threats there. Yet only I know the secrets of his nose, the lines of his smile, the origins of his love for reading, the Pulitzer Prize in out blood that enables us to write the way we do. This is what you would keep from him.

I do not need your laws. I have found my son. He knows his story, he will know his blood, but thousands of other adoptees in New York must be dependant now on your ability to hear the truth. Please listen for them.

Adoption has changed much in the last 20 years, even in the last 18 when I last held my precious baby. The “growing interest in … open adoptions, in which birth parents and adoptive parents exchange contact information and often stay in touch with one another”# is a clear indicator that the secrecy of past adoption experiences has been rendered to be harmful. If confidentiality is so important then why is open adoption “being embraced by pregnant women who previously might have been reluctant to consider giving up a baby if it meant no chance of contact later in life”# My own research also concludes with the previous stated facts. Too many natural mothers# to count have said that they would not have relinquished at all if they had no chance of knowing their children though open adoption.

If the very nature of adoption itself is changing, is it not the responsibility of those who govern us to also change with the times? If the institute of adoption itself is continuing to right the wrongs of it’s predecessors by reflecting on what it less painful for all involved, especially the one for whom it is all about, the adoptee, then should not the laws also take a more human and compassionate view on what the people want? As said by another mother: Adoption ‘laws’ are archaic. People seem to think they are cast in stone, and this I do not understand. No laws, except God’s commandments were EVER cast in stone. Those we cannot change, but others are changed constantly.# Laws change as society changes. They change upon new information, they change upon new technology, they change upon new threats. Can they not change to stop abrogating the civil rights of 6,000,000 adopted persons in the US ?

The myth of confidentiality is just that, a myth. Even the “professionals” are beginning to see that they had no idea what the natural mothers really wanted nor needed; ”Having talked with many birthparents in recent months, I have come to believe, first, that the birthparents were not interested in perpetual anonymity but rather, that we, the agency representatives, have thought they were interested in this, due to the stigma attached in past years to the out-of-wedlock pregnancy.”#

In speaking to many mothers, I have been told that they had no confidentiality promised and if the agencies were promising that to them, it was long since broken. Many had found that the “agencies” slipped names, that social workers allowed the supposedly “confidential” paperwork to be had by the adoptive parents in the very beginning
and this has occurred on many, many occasions. Adoption decrees issued (and provided to adoptive parents) continued to include the birth mother’s name more than 90% of the time—a clear indication that the only birth parent confidentiality the law was concerned about was that between birth parent and birth child, not between adoptive parent and birth parent#

Further argument is supported by physical facts including copies of relinquishment papers dated 1938 and 1998, neither of which contain language concerning “privacy” and/or “confidentiality,” as well as copies of adoption notices published (as required by law in many states) in legal newspapers (in 1937 and 2000) which contain information identifying both birth and adoptive parents, and an adoption decree given to adoptive parents containing the child’s full birth name.#

Instead of protecting the privacy of the mother of birth, more women were given a line such as this one “I was warned over and over during this period that I had to honor the adoptive family and my son’s confidentiality, and that I could never search for him or break this contract that I had to sign. If anyone had informed me that I was being offered confidentiality, even at the young age of 17, I would have told them not to bother with the promise. I wanted my son to know that he was loved and if I was ever needed by him that I would be there for him.”# I have yet to meet a mother who has not wanted to speak to her child again. But I have met many who felt that they had no right to and would be “in trouble” if they did. Who feared “imposing”, who didn’t want to “intrude”, who had no choice but to pray. Their only hope is to keep waiting for that precious day to finally come.

Again, in places where open records exist, the numbers speak for themselves. From 1985 on, in New Zealand, only 6% of birth parents placed information vetoes. Some veto recipients sidestepped the veto successfully, searched for and found the birth mother. In all such cases, the birth mother was glad to be found and professed to be ‘protecting’ someone else. There were no complaints. Ten years later, when information vetoes had expired, virtually none were renewed.#. Oregon, New Hampshire and Alabama report similar percentages leaving one to conclude that the feelings of mothers are international. We do not forget our children. We long to see them again.

What adoption law cannot control is the emotional aspect and need to know one’s true self. Genealogy is one of the most popular past times in America today. Yet we tell a segment of our population, our adoptees, that they are not entitled to their heritage, genetic history, and in most cases, they aren’t allowed even updated medical histories. When people adopt a child, the child legally becomes theirs, but this does not erase who that child is genetically, nor does it erase any emotional or physical needs the child may have in regards to their natural families. I find it highly hypocritical that we tout our history, yet deny our own citizens theirs.#

One has to wonder really whom the laws protect?

More often than not it is not a birthparent, or a group representing birthparents, which is voicing this concern. The National Committee for Adoption, for instance, is an organization representing adoption agencies which has lobbied to keep the records sealed. Bill Pierce, now deceased, long head of the NCFA argued in an affidavit in Doe v. Sundquist, without any basis in fact, that Open Records for adult adoptees will cause women to abort rather than have their dirty little secret show up on their doorstop 20 years later (of course he didn’t use those words, but that’s what he meant), despite statistics from Kansas, Alaska, Australia and England, which indicate that just the opposite is true: where adoption records are open, abortion rates drop and adoption rates rise.#
This holds true in this country where resent legislative changes have allowed adoptees to have their records of birth. In states recognizing open records, abortion rates are lower than their surrounding closed-record states. Alabama Right to Life stayed neutral when the open records bill passed there in 1999. Since then, abortion rates in Alabama have decreased by 1.3%#. So open records is good on that hot bed of an argument too.

Many states did not originally have sealed records. Only when adoption began to sweep the nation after WWII, and the natural tendency for adoptees to know their heritage took force on adult adoptees did this bizarre sealing of records begin. …adoptive parents and others who had truly believed “no one would ever know” began banging on legislator’s doors……and demanding that the “bread crumb trail” be swept under the legislative rug.# Then the laws began to cave under the pressure of the adoptive parents and professionals. They say that they compromise by disclosure vetoes, contact vetoes, white-outs and any other compromise that some bureaucrat or reformer may devise, but even then one has to wonder at those systems put in place by those who hold the lock and key. A number of agencies believed that offering search assistance to “their adoptees” and “their birth mothers” was a far safer proposition than allowing state-appointed investigators to start poking around in their files.
In addition, numerous private adoption agencies hoped that search assistance dollars would help bolster their revenues. Although agencies that put the heftiest price tags on their search programs are quick to protest that they “are not making money on this,” the simple math (the cost of locating a person for whom you possess both the person’s name and date of birth is $75 to $150, making the mark-up for agency searches between 100 and 300%) does not support their allegations.#

How insane is it to have to pay money to talk to the person that created you? How much more insane if they are the people who helped you lose her in the first place? How crazy is it that we need laws to protect us from the people who share our heritage, our DNA, our medical history? And why is it OK for every other person in this state to have the right to decide as an adult to whom they would like to have a relationship with?

Give our New York adoptees equal rights and show this nation how it should be done.
Society stressed that once the papers were signed, birthparents lost ALL rights to their offspring. So… if we have no parental rights, why would we have any say in what our children now want

(AGGGG…lost all my footnotes and sources in the copy and paste!! I swaer I credditted sources on the typed version!!)