Openness Is The Norm In Adoption Today “Closed” infant adoptions have shrunk to a tiny minority (about 5 percent), with 40 percent “mediated” and 55 percent “open.” In addition, 95 percent of agencies now offer open adoptions. In the overwhelming majority of infant adoptions, adoptive parents and expectant parents considering adoption meet, and the expectant [...]
Secrecy Harms Adoptees and Adoptive Families. “Secrets within any family distort reality, undermine trust, and destroy intimacy. Secrets create exclusion, destroy authenticity, product fantasies, evoke fear, and kindle shame. For those touched by adoption, there is a high cost to pay.” For The Records II: An Examination of the History and Impact Of Adult Adoptee [...]
Birth Mothers Weren’t “Promised Privacy”: Secrecy Was Imposed, Not Chosen. Many Birth Mothers Were Banished and Shamed. “In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe [...]
Complete Birth Parent Anonymity Is An Illusion Under Connecticut law. Connecticut Probate Courts have the ability to order access to the OBC in their discretion if the birth parents cannot be located, and they determine it does not harm the public interest, the adoptee, or the birth or genetic parents. In doing so, the Court [...]
Adoptees, Birth Parents and Adoptive Parents are Natural Allies, Not Enemies. Research has shown repeatedly that members of the adoption triad have mutual, not antagonistic, interests related to adult adoptee access to identifying information. Madelyn Freundlich, Confidentiality Becomes Political: The New Strategy in Opposition to Open Records. American Adoption Congress Decree, Winter 1997/Spring 1998, at [...]
Contact Preference Forms Allow Birth Parents To Communicate With the Adult Adoptee Without Contact The bill proposed by Access provides a system for birth parents to file a Contact Preference Form, like this form succcessfully used in Rhode Island, which gives them the following options: I would like to be contacted; I would prefer to be contacted [...]
The Vast Majority of Birth Mothers Want Contact “For statistical evidence of birth mother’s preferences, access proponents rely on a variety of types of data. With respect to New Jersey searches on behalf of adoptees, the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services reported that 95% of the birth parents it contacted agree to [...]
No “Horror Stories” Have Resulted From Access “By the end of June, [Oregon] Ballet Initiative 58 attorney and adoption activist Thomas McDermott suggested that most adopted adults and birth parents were reuniting quietly because, as Helen Hill, founder of the Ballot Initiative 58 campaign put it (Taylor, 2000b), “it’s a personal and private experience for [...]
Substitutes for Access Don’t Work “Critics of mutual consent registries – also sometimes called “passive” registries – point out that they make few matches; reunion rates through them range from “a high of 4.4% to a median of 2.05%…. Another limitation of mutual consent registries is that they are state-specific, so they cannot facilitate matches [...]
“In 2009, the U.S. Surgeon General established a Family History Initiative, which recognized that familial medical history can be of vital important in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions and illnesses that are genetically based. Similarly, The Centers for Disease Control, Office of Public Health Genomics (CDC OPHG), in 2002 established the Family History [...]