April 6, 2004

Supporting materials, footnotes and talking points for testimony before the Children and Family Law Committee of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, on Senate Bill 335, by Adam Pertman, Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute

• The proposed NH law comports with good adoption practice, balancing the rights of adoptees and birth parents by permitting adopted adults to access their information, while allowing birth parents to indicate that they don’t want to be contacted.

• Public policy is decidedly moving in the direction of providing access to birth information because it is what people involved with adoption want.

• Almost 15,000 adults who were adopted have requested their original birth records from the four states with open records in as many years.[1] Over 80 percent of the 854 birth parents who contacted the four states (Alabama, Delaware, Oregon and Tennessee) consented to the adult adoptees contacting them. Just 15 birth parents in Delaware have vetoed the adoptees' request for records, while 472 of 502 adopted persons have received their records.

• The Georgia Office of Adoption reports that “about 85-90 percent of the birth parents we contact do want contact” and each year about 1,000 people sign up for the Georgia Adoption Reunion Registry.[2]

• Confidential intermediary programs statistics presented in favor of TN open records law showed ninety-five percent of birth parents wanted to be contacted by their children. [3]

• New Jersey - almost all (94.9%) of “350 living birth family members contacted in a four-year period wanted contact if adoptees requested it; in 4097 contacts with birth mothers between 1981 and 1996, 7.5% refused contact with adoptees.”[4]

• A 1989 Maine Department of Human Resources Task Force on Adoption study found that all birth parents surveyed (130) “wanted to be found by the child/adult they had placed for adoption and ninety-five percent of the adoptees [164 adoptees] who were surveyed expressed a desire to be found by their birth parents.” [5]

• A 1991 study reported that over 80% of both birth parents (85.5%) and adoptees (81.1%) favor access to identifying information.[6]

• Research “uniformly finds that birth parents do not forget the children they relinquished for adoption and express strong desires to be found by them; wonder whether they are alive and healthy; and find that the grief they experienced in having relinquished their children for adoption was intensified by the secrecy surrounding adoption and the walls the adoption system has erected against any contact.” [7]

• The vast majority of Americans – 84 percent – believe adult adoptees should have full access to their adoption records, while only 12 percent believe they should not, according to a new study.[8] The Findlaw Birth Records survey asked 1,000 adults, “Should adopted children be granted full access to their adoption records when they become adults?” Eighty-four percent of respondents with children answered yes. The results, released November 25, 2003, have a 3 percent margin of error.