Better Times for Adoption Searches

The search of birth parents and adopted children for each other is becoming a political movement as well as a. private struggle, propelled by the Internet and the longing of aging Baby Boomers.

Today 1s the second annual International Search Registration Day, the movement's equivalent of Independence Day.

The organizers want to make it painless for people touched by adoption to search for each other.

Outside shopping centers, bookstores and cafes in San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose and four oother Bay Area cities, they will have tables staffed by adoptees and birthparents who know how to get people started on the trail of their adoptive history.

In addition, adoptees and birth parents can add their names to the International Soundex Reunion Registry; a roll that has been around for a generation but is still not that well known. The registry is an attempt to get around the societal secrecy that has blanketed adoption since at least the 1930s.

Leaders in the push to get adoption out in the open say that behind today's folding tables, pamphlets and friendly banter is a venting of bottled-up outrage from years of having to stifle essential truths about their lives. In the winter before the Summer of Love, highschool senior Laura Ingram handed her out-of-wedlock newborn boy to the authorities at the Florence Crittenden home in Nashville, Tenn.

Ingram, now in her late 40s, recalls the moment after birth when she saw that her child had his father's feet and his grandmother's family's forehead. To this day.Ingram doesn't know if her son is alive or dead. Her breakthrough in coming to terms with her past came when she joined an Internet chat group and got in touch with many women with stories much like hers.

"The whole secrecy of the '50's and '60s is being broken asunder by people in my age group" said Ingram, who lives in Oakland. "There's a huge bulge of women who were sexually active before Roe vs. Wade (the l972 US Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion)" and before the birth control pill came into widespread use. "As a result; there's a bulge of adoptees in their 20's and 30's who were relinquished under the closed adoption system who now want to know where did they come from and who do they look like," she said.

Alfia Vecchio, 31, calls herself a "founding foundling" of Bastard Nation; an adoptees' organization that blossomed out of a computer user's group called alt.adoption on the Usenet portion of the Internet.

"Our organization has a shocking name, but if you don't shock people into really thinking about what's going on, they're just going to sit back and not ask any questions," said Vecchio.

The movement "has to do with basic human respect for knowing your ethnic and biological heritage, as well as to look somebody in the face who looks like you", she said. "This is a civil rights issue".

ADOPTION SEARCH REGISTRATION SlTES

Where to go for today's adoption search registration event:
Berkeley: Cody's 2454 Telegraph Ave.,10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
San Francisco: The Grove Cafe, 2250 Chestnut St.,10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
San Rafael: Borders, 588 W, Francisco Blvd.; Noon to 8 p.m.
Vacaville: Sam's Club,1500 Helen Power Road,10 a.m to 3 p.m.
Walnut Creek: Barnes & Nobles,1149 South Main St.,10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
San Jose area: Super Crown Books, Market Place Shopping Center, Cupertino,19640 Stevens Creek Blvd:,10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Sacramento area: Borders, 2030 Douglas Blvd., Roseville,10 a.m. to 4 p.m: