Groups seek to unite adoptees, birth parents

BELLEVUE — Julie Dennis set up a table in Factoria Mall yesterday, offering information to adopted children who wanted to find their birth parents. She had a lot of takers.

“ They feel unfulfilled,” Dennis said. “There’s something missing in their sense of who they are and where they are from.”

Dennis would know. A few years ago, she set out to find her birth mother and succeeded. The experience got her involved in Bastard Nation, a group lobbying to have adopted children’s records unsealed.

Bastard Nation was one of a number of groups at an Adoption Search Fair at Factoria yesterday. The fair offered tips on how to find one’s birth parents, as well as information on support groups for parents who have given up children for adoption, counseling groups and so on.

Dennis only knew that her mother was 15 years old when she was born in Seattle in 1962. She started her search by going to court and filing a request for “Non-Identifying Information” about her mother. The completeness of that information can vary a great deal from place-to-place and depending on the thoroughness of the person who filled out the original paper work. … Continue Reading

Reunited mother and daughter enjoying their time together

By LORI MARTIN

Staff Writer

Together again. it’s a refrain Susan Thompson and her daughter, Betsy, are singing these days. Ever since they reunited July 10, after being separated for 32 years.

The last time Thompson saw Betsy Jo, her daughter was 2 years old. It was the 1960s, and at that time, Thompson was a I6-year-old unmarried mother, living at home. Ever since her daughter was taken away from her, against her will, Thompson searched for her.

“It was so funny,” Thompson said Saturday morning, of meeting her daughter for the first time. “I was real apprehensive at first. I wasn’t sure she was going to like me. But, I guess it’s because I’m her mom, and she’s my daughter. It fits like a glove.”

Thompson, who works at Westside Daycare and attends classes at Coffeyville Community College, tried various means of finding Betsy Jo, but had no success until contacting Ohio Adoptee Searches. Jolin DeHaven, of Ohio Adoptee Services, was able to locate, within two weeks, the names of the couple that adopted Betsy.

DeHaven described, in an email Saturday, how he located Betsy’s adoptive parents. … Continue Reading

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