When you read a book, do you highlight the important stuff? If you're like I am, you always keep your highlighter handy. When I read Growing in the Dark, my pages turned yellow. I realized that I was highlighting almost every single sentence of every single paragraph. That's because this book is so chock full of fascinating information, I wanted to remember it all.

Long ago, when I first timidly set foot into the adoption reform arena, a fellow adoptee/law student advised me to first read every law in my own state that concerned adoption. "After all," she told me, "These laws are about YOU." It was the best advice I have ever received.

That's why I love Ms. Baer's book so much. It takes me beyond the borders of Illinois as it chronicles the history of adoption laws throughout the country. And that's about ME too.

Ms. Baer studies her own state of California, but not in isolation. She integrates the changes in California law with the broad philosophies and social mores prevalent throughout the country.

Growing in the Dark is also a history of the consequences of adoption laws; how keeping secrets has affected adoptees. Ms. Baer reveals the shame-based consequences of secrecy laws through the eyes of psychologists, child welfare advocates, adoptive parents, birth parents, feminists, and baby sellers.

In the first chapter, we're hit squarely on the head with a most ironic and largely unknown fact - the first step in adoption was KEEPING records, not sealing them. At the turn of the 20th century the movement to register all births was intended to curb the dangerous and often fatal fate which met "foundlings" or "abandoned children." Too often, these children were abused, sold, and even killed, with no one being the wiser. With the advent of mandated birth registrations, disposing of a child unseen became much more difficult.

In the early years of the Great Depression, legislatures began to pass laws forbidding the word "illegitimate" to be used on birth certificates. Children presenting their birth certificates to enter school would no longer have to face the public humiliation of illegitimacy. Also at this time many states began sealing adoption records to everyone BUT the parties of record. The legislative intent was to keep the records away from public inspection.

In 1935, California quietly passed a law that removed that exemption; it made adoption records available only by court order. Other states were not far behind. The era of state enforced identity change had begun! Why? 

At this time, private adoption agencies had much to gain by keeping records sealed. They could pretty much do as they wanted and no one would ever know. The Cradle's Eleanor Garrigue Gallagher, in her 1936 book The Adopted Child, recommended to adoptive parents that curious adoptees be told that no records existed. Shades of Georgia Tann!

The Adopted Child also counseled adoptive parents to tell their children that their birth mothers were the ones who believed that secrecy was best for their children. This subtle "twist" seems to me to have been a turning point in adoption policy. The agencies were now slyly slipping their secrecy plans into the mouths of unknowing birth mothers. No one would know what birth mothers really thought because the records were safely sealed. She who holds the secrets holds the power!

During this same time period, The Child Welfare League of America was developing its own policies. They were mostly supportive of adoptees accessing their records and learning more about their birth parents but they were also concerned enough about the stigmas inherent in adoption to recommend some degree of secrecy. They suggested, in their 1938 Guidelines, that birth records be "revised" to avoid the embarrassment of illegitimacy to the adoptee.

Somewhere along the way, the Child Welfare League of America's voice became muted. The post World War II years saw sealed records become the norm all over America.

It wasn't until the 1970s that people began challenging these laws. Organizations such as CUB, AAC, and ALMA were some of the first to advocate for change. Bastard Nation: The Adoptee Rights Organization was born in 1996 and was instrumental in bringing about the 1998 historic ballot measure, Oregon's "Measure 58," opening original birth certificates, unconditionally, to all adult adoptees.

Now grab your favorite color highlighter, settle down in your easy chair, and begin reading Growing in the Dark. You won't be able to put it down.