Tag Archives: adoptees

Unseal Records

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Well, not that kind of record. An ADOPTION record. Sign the list to unseal adoption records.
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Sign to unseal records!

Birthparents can now sign a petition to unseal adoption records. I joined American Adoption Congress recently and saw their call to action asking for birthparents to sign their list in support of open records for adoptees.

No gatekeeper!

I’m not much of a joiner. I don’t especially like meetings. I don’t have the business skill-set to be a good organization volunteer. But I liked the idea of this list. Birthparents willing to write their names on a list to say, yes, I believe adoptees have the same rights as other adults. And no, I’m not hung up on confidentiality. Studies and surveys have shown that many birthparents do not feel the need for a gatekeeper.

And here are some further thoughts on open records.


I was pleasantly surprised when their newsletter,”Decree” appeared in my mailbox. Essays and poetry with multitude of perspectives. I recommend it.

Open Records. Do Your Part.

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Why open records?

Open records are a crucial part of adoptee rights.

As as 17-year-old about to place a child for adoption, I wondered exactly what was meant by sealed records. Just a humble envelope? Closed with sealing wax, maybe? An envelope with the state seal? A locked file cabinet? A vault? I still don’t know exactly how they seal those records.

Birthparents

But I do know this, birthparents can help the adoptee access movement in their struggle to obtain original birth certificates for adult adoptees. You can sign this form: Birthparents for Access .


Because “birthmother confidentiality” is often trotted out as an argument opposing open records, it really can help the cause if birthparents sign. Only a handful of U.S. states grant adoptees access to their own original birth certificate. Even worse, some state claim that adoptees have access to their original birth certificates, but they don’t really. They’re only conditionally open. As an adoptee in a state like this, you have the right to request your original birth certificate, but it might come back redacted. What good is that? I think more birthparents would be in favor of unsealing those records if they really considered what’s at stake for adoptees..

Never Let Me Go

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The movie

On Saturday night I saw the movie, Never Let Me Go. Adapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same name, the film opens in an alternative version of the 1970s and then jumps ahead to the 1990s as the main characters grow into adulthood. The initial setting is an idyllic, but mysterious, boarding school in the English countryside. In this revised version of our recent past, medical science has made great advances. People now live to be well over one hundred.

During a shocking and moving scene, some of the children find out that they exist simply to be living donors of  vital organs and other body parts. Consequently, they learn they will begin their mission when they are young adults, donating three times or more. If, that is, they survive the surgeries before they succumb to premature death. In other words, these children are clones, or “modeled” as the movie calls it. They have no parents and will never know life outside of the institution that houses them.

A birthmother’s perspective

My head exploded.

Children exploited for the purposes of adults who need something they don’t have, I thought. Children who don’t have a say in their own fate. Children wondering about the person they were “modeled on.” What does that sound like to you?

Later, in one particularly moving scene, the 20-something protagonist pages through  a stack of magazines, looking for the woman who is her model. The protagonist has accompanied a friend on a mission into town to view a woman who might be her friend’s model. Don’t you know they don’t model us on people like that? the friend cries when she see’s the photo in the magazine. If we want to find the person we are modeled on, we have to look in the gutter. Winos, prostitutes, addicts–the dregs of society. Those are the people they use for models.

Holy moly.

An adoptee’s worst fears, I thought. A birthmother from the dregs of society.

The movie does not disclose what happens to the modelers. Whether they are destroyed in the cloning process or not. They are societies’ throwaways.

In the movie, there’s a serpentine cloning bureaucracy, threaded with myths and lies. No one can find the information they’re looking for. Because there is no viable information. In other words, searching leads nowhere.

Searching leads nowhere. Like adoption and closed records.

The movie was excellent and thought-provoking in many ways.


However, I brought my own experience to it and saw it from a point of view that the author and the filmmaker most likely did not intend.  Whether or not you share the perspective of someone involved in adoption, I highly recommend Never Let Me Go.

Birth Mother, First Mother

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Illustration from Alice in Wonderland by Sir John Tenniel

Through the rabbit hole

I’ve been lurking around over at Birth Mother, First Mother Forum. Their blog has 117 followers. I’ve been clicking on each little picture, wondering who all of these women are and what their stories are. If there is a link on the profile, I click on it and read a bit of their blog. And then I look at their followers and I click on those little pictures and see if they have blogs and who their followers are, and then……

Are you following me? I mean, this is a journey through a cyberspace rabbit hole where there are birthmothers around every turn!

One thing I’ve noticed is this: Many of the followers and the followers of the followers, etc. do not have blogs of their own, so I don’t know for sure if they are are birthmothers or not. But I bet they are. Or adoptees. There are quite a few adoptees who follow Birth Mother First, First Mother Forum, too.

There are so many of us. So many birthmothers. So many adoptees. From the Baby Scoop era alone, there were four million adoptions.

So now I’m hooked. Every day, I’m going to click on a couple more pictures. And of course the blog itself is very thought-provoking. I admire the writing team of Lorraine Dusky and Jane Edwards. They have a lot to say. And they say it well.

In addition to Birth Mother First Mother Forum, there are more resources here.

 

Sealed Records

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Sealed records for adoptees is one of our most poignant examples of the lack of political progress in our current times. I’ve been thinking a lot about social progress vs. political progress.

I saw the movie Milk the other night. A lot has changed for gays since the 70s. Nowadays, many gays & lesbians carry on with their lives without keeping secrets about their sexual orientation. There’s a fair amount of social acceptance for them. But legislated equal rights is another story.  

There are no overt social prejudices against adoptees. Though, I don’t think there’s a high level of discussion about adoption or what the practice of adoption means to adoptees or birth parents. People are not against adoptees, per se. However, most states have yet to pass legislation that will grant adoptees access to their birth records. The fact that those sealed records remain sealed and off limits to adult adoptees is a political wrong.