USA Today

Adoptees demand right to past

Activists fight for access to their birth records, but mothers say they were promised anonymity. Now, two sides take battle to Ore. court.

By Patrick McMahon
USA TODAY

MANZANITA, Ore. – Nothing may seem more central to a person’s identity than a birth certificate, the proof that you are who you say you are.

But for millions of American adults who were adopted as children, their original birth certificates are a state secret. They cannot see the documents without a court order.

Those documents are at the center of an intense battle here after Oregon voters passed an initiative last year to grant wide access to birth records.

On one side is Bastard Nation, an in-your-face group of adopted people dedicated to opening up birth records. On the other side are birth mothers who say they were promised anonymity when they gave up their children years ago.

The initiative, which is being challenged in an Oregon courtroom, has forced some birth mothers to speak from the shadows. Because some of those children were the product of rape or incest, as well as youthful indiscretion, many mothers say they feel disclosure now would wreck their lives.

“We were repeatedly assured that the bond was severed permanently,” says an Oregon birth mother who asked to be identified only as Nancy. She says she was promised anonymity when she gave birth as a college senior in the early 1960s. “Every decision I made was based on promises of confidentiality.” … Continue Reading

Illegitimate Complaints

Washington CityPaper
Washington’s Free Weekly Vol. 19, No. 20 May 21-27, 1999

Illegitimate Complaints

Veterans of a D.C. home for unwed pregnant women demonstrate for open adoption records.

By Susan Gervasi

In 1966, after two months behind the walls of a spooky mansion called the Florence Crittenton Home, unmarried Virginia teenager Karen Wilson bore an infant daughter she surrendered through legal adoption to strangers (“Wayward Past,” 3/19). “The caseworkers said if we kept them, our habies would be called bastards, probably outright, to their faces,” she recalls. “I knew what ‘bastard’ meant. It meant a child horn out of wedlock, it meant a baby was illegitimate, it meant shame and humiliation, and it meant ‘social outcast.”‘

Thirty-three years later, on an overcast spring Friday, Wilson, now Karen Wilson Buterbaugh, is waving placards along with 30 or so others on 17th Street NW to change that definition. Working with a group called Bastard Nation, the protesters are as dedicated to the broader goal of detoxifying the B word as they are to the more immediate cause for today’s demonstration: making original birth certificates and other court-sealed information accessible to adult adoptees. … Continue Reading

The Great Debate

By Jessica Branch

Do adopted children have the right to know about their birth parents?

Do you have a right to find your mother? Does she have the right to stop you? As courts and legislatures debate whether adoptees should have full access to their birth records, some birth mothers and children are pleading very different cases from opposite sides of the family divide. … Continue Reading