WRITTEN TESTIMONY IN SUPPORT OF SB 335:

 OPEN RECORDS FOR ADULT ADOPTEES

The New Hampshire House Children and Family Law Committee

April 6, 2004

 

Marley Elizabeth Greiner

Executive Chair, Bastard Nation:  The Adoptee Rights Organization

 

Dear Honorable Members of the Children & Family Law Committee:

 

My name is Marley Elizabeth Greiner and I am the co-founder and Executive Chair of Bastard Nation:  the Adoptee Rights Organization.  Bastard Nation is the largest adoptee civil rights organization in North America.  Our membership includes adopted adults, birth parents, and adoptive parents.  Bastard Nation is dedicated to the recognition of the full human and civil rights of adult adoptees.  We advocate the opening to adopted persons, upon request at age of majority, those government documents which pertain to the adoptee’s historical, genetic, and legal identity, including the unaltered original birth certificate and adoption decree.  We believe that it is the right of people everywhere to have their official original birth records unaltered and free from falsification and that the adoptive status of any person should not prohibit her or him from choosing to exercise that right.  In 1998, Bastard Nation was behind Ballot Measure 58 in Oregon, which restored the right of record access to adults adopted in that state and in 1999 legislation in Alabama, which likewise restored that right.  The national media including the three major networks, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Self, Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone has covered our work.  Just this last week Adoption Politics: Bastard Nation & Ballot Initiative 58 by historian E. Wayne Carp was published by the the University Press of Kansas.

 

The New Hampshire House Children and Family Law Committee at this moment, as it listens to our testimony in favor of SB 335 has a great task before it—to begin to right an enormous wrong done to adopted persons decades ago during an age of social engineering and experimentation:  to unseal their state-held birth and identity records.  The passage of SB 335--the righting of this wrong-- will do nothing to disrupt or harm the lives of those involved in adoption. Instead, this unsealing will restore dignity to adopted persons, to their birth and adopted families, and to the institution of adoption in New Hampshire.

 

SB 335 is inclusive. Members of this committee, unless they are adopted, have the right to their own birth certificates.  You do not have to justify to a bureaucrat why you want that document.  You do not need the permission of your parents, you are not obliged to sign a registry, you are not required to go to court and beg a judge’s permission, and you certainly do not have to go before a legislative body to request permission, or wrangle with a trade lobby that wants to keep your records hidden from you “for your own good.”  Yet, if any of you here today were to learn this afternoon that you are adopted, this is exactly what you would face if you wanted to assert a right  to your own information. And God forbid you or your child or grandchild should ever need medical treatment, which required genetic information or a bone marrow or organ transplant. In the words of one sealed records advocate, “you could just mount a media campaign.”

 

Rights are commonsense one-size-fits-all policy and protection for all citizens without exception.  Rights are not a favor or a privilege to be doled out on the whim of lawmakers, bureaucrats, and special interests.  In a democratic society, rights do not discriminate against race, religion, ethnicity, age or gender.  Yet adopted adults are discriminated against daily by a parallel system of closed records for us and open records for everybody else—a system based solely on adoptive status.  The passage of SB 335 is simply a corrective that will do away with this double standard and embrace all citizens of New Hampshire as equal partners with equal rights to personal identity.

 

SB 335 breaks no promises to birth parents.   Advocates of the antiquated sealed records system argue that the unsealing of the government-held personal information of adopted adults will abrogate “promises” or “guarantees” made by adoption professionals to birth parents, especially birth mothers, that their identities would never be revealed to anyone.  These so-called promises made by professionals—if they were made at all-- reflected adoption agency policy, at best and were made outside of the scope of the law where there were no codified guarantees.  The state has no obligation to honor them.  In over two decades of fighting against adoptee civil rights not one single document promising “privacy,” “confidentiality” or “anonymity” has been submitted anywhere by sealed records lobbyists.  Why?  Because these documents don’t exist.  Many birth parents, in fact, claim that social workers and lawyers made no such promises to them.  Just the opposite.  They were told that upon the age of majority their relinquished children would have access to their own records. 

 

Once a termination of parental rights is signed, any rights to that child are terminated.  Any wish, desire, or demand birth parents may have regarding that child holds no legal relevance.  Even in traditional closed adoptions, birth parent identities are often recorded on court documents given to adoptive parents without birth parent consent.   Statute-mandated legal advertisements with identifying information are placed in newspapers for anyone to read without birth parent consent.  Courts open adoption records for “good cause” without birth parent consent.  In some states, such as Ohio, Illinois, and Oregon, at adoption finalization, the judge will order the record to remain open upon the request of the adoptive parents without birth parent consent. Countless secretaries, receptionists, court workers, law clerks, and interns handle adoption documents with identifying information without birth parent consent.

 

Most important:  records are sealed at the time of adoption finalization, not at the time of relinquishment. If a child is never adopted, those birth records remain open and available to the person whose record of birth they document.  If the sealing of birth records by the state were intended to protect the identity of birth parents then those records would be sealed at the time of termination of parental rights, not at adoption finalization.  Whose privacy is being protected?  And why?

 

SB 335 will open records to the individual adopted person only; not to anyone else.  When adoption records are opened, they are opened for the adopted person to whom they pertain.  The records remain closed to everyone else.  Birth parents, adoptive parents, and the general public cannot read or copy them.  When Oregon’s M58 was appealed on privacy rights, the court rule and was affirmed by a subsequent appeal that birth mothers have no constitutional guarantee of privacy regarding the fact the they relinquished a child, despite promises that may have been made outside of the scope of the law. 1  In Tennessee, the 6^th District Court of Appeals ruled that parents do not have the right of anonymity from their own offspring.2

 

If birth parents believe they were guaranteed privacy, confidentiality or anonymity, then they need to address this issue with the agencies, social workers, and lawyers that made spurious promises to them 20 or 30 or 40 years ago or more.

 

SB 335 will not increase abortion.  Some argue open records for adult adoptees would force women today who want to maintain “privacy” and “anonymity” to abort.   This simply is not true.  In states that recognize that adoptees have rights to their records; the abortion rates are lower than their surrounding states.3 (Exhibit E)  During the Measure 58 campaign Oregon Right to Life, the largest pro-life organization in the state remained neutral, as did Catholic Charities. 4  Alabama Right to Life held a similar position finding nothing objectionable in the law.   Abortion rates in Alabama, have, in fact, decreased by 1.3% since the opening of records

 

SB 335 reflects best practice adoption standards.  Open records is not a radical idea promulgated by unhappy adopted persons.  The Child Welfare League of America, the agency that sets best practice standards in child welfare, in the United States endorses open records.  CWLA’s  “Standards of Excellence in Adoption,” says “The agency providing adoption services should support efforts to ensure that adults who were adopted have direct access to identifying information about themselves and their birth parents.  The National Association of Social Workers also supports open records saying that the right “extends to requests by adult adoptees for identifying information.”  The North American Council on Adoptable Children supports the “right to this information and supports access to original birth certificates to any adult adoptee at age of majority,” The National Adoption Center  “supports the adult adoptee’s unencumbered access to all medical and historical records.”  (Exhibits A,B, C, D.)

 

SB 335 reflects adoption reform priority.  Open records is a top priority throughout the adoption reform community: Bastard Nation, The American Adoption Congress, Concerned Untied Birthparents (CUB), The Green Ribbon Campaign for Open Records, Ethica, numerous state and local adoption reform groups, and your near neighbor to the north, the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers/Counseil canadien des meres naturelles all support open records.  In Oregon 57% of those who went to the polls in 1998 supported open records.  In Alabama, a near unanimous count of the House and Senate along with the Lt. Governor and Governor supported open records.  The average “person on the street” believes that records are already available to adopted persons.

 

SB 335 reflects adoption practice throughout the world.  Unrestricted open records are the norm in most of the industrialized West.  England, Scotland and virtually all members of the European Union have open records as well as Mexico, Argentina, Vietnam, Korea, and even Croatia.  No social disruption has occurred.   Kansas and Alaska have never sealed records. No social disruption has occurred.   In Oregon, since 1999 over 7,000 adoptees have received their original birth certificates. No social upheaval has occurred.   In Alabama, nearly 3,000 adoptees have received their original birth certificates.  No social upheaval has occurred.  In Ohio, in 1980, because I was adopted before the sealing of adoption records, I obtained my own original birth certificate. No social upheaval has occurred. 

 

Unfortunately, the voice of the majority who support adoptee rights—has been consistently and shouted over by a small, but loud minority of well-heeled conservative adoption agency lobbyists who fear…well, I don’t  know what they fear.  Perhaps they’ll tell us today.

 

SB 335 should give unconditional access to adoption records. Adopted adults are responsible members of society, not dangerous criminals who cannot be trusted to handle their own personal relationships without government supervision. The State of New Hampshire has no compelling interest in hiding personal identity information and papers from adults who were adopted as children. Any open records legislation, therefore, must clearly reject the idea that conditions and restrictions such as disclosure vetos, contact vetoes (a priori restraining orders) and state-mandated confidential intermediary systems, are acceptable.  They are not. 

 

SB 335 must support unrestricted access of state-held records for the adopted person to which they pertain.  Any modification or amendment is simply a continuation of parrallel rights and double standards.

 

In closing, the case for opening records to adult adoptees is clear:

 

§         All adults should have the same access to government-held records of their births, whether adopted or not.  Preventing adult adoptees from obtaining this information is discriminatory.

 

§         The state should not be in the business of concealing basic, personal identity information from its own law-abiding citizens.

 

§         The fundamental right of adoptees to have access to our own government-held identity information is a separate issue from whether or not adoptees and birth parents should contact each other.

 

§         Adult adoptees and birth parents contact each other all the time, even in sealed records stats.  As competent adults, we are capable of negotiating our own relationships, if we choose to form them.

 

§         The state should not block adults from their own birth documents in an attempt to prevent contact between two adult parties.  In what other capacity does the state regulate contact between law-abiding citizens?

 

§         There is no evidence that granting adult adoptees access to our own identity information is detrimental to the process of adoption.

 

§         There is no evidence that granting adult adoptees access to our own identity information causes any increase in the rates of abortion.

 

Adopted adults do not make money off adoption.  We do not have hidden agendas or political axes to grind.  We simply want dignity under law.  We, have a right to our own public documents just as the non-adopted.  Adoption is not a ticket into the Witness Protection Program.  We are nobody's dirty little secret and should not be treated as one

by the government.  I trust that the House Children and Family Law Committee will agree.