A Brief History of Adoption Records - Part 2

This is the second in a series of articles on the history of adoption records. I hope this information will help you better understand how our present system developed and what information and resources are available to you today.

In the period prior to World War II, there was a shift in the personnel who ran the homes for "unwed mothers" that provided infants for adoptions. Instead of volunteers, the staff began to include professional social workers. The social workers viewed these single mothers as psychologically, not morally, flawed and believed they were best served by separating them from their newborn children.

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Social workers had increasingly been coming under the influence of reigning psycho-analytic ideas of the time. During the late thirties and through to the late fifties, the unmarried mother was seen as "neurotic," guilt-ridden, and basically unsuitable for raising her child. Such a view fit the profession's vision of adoption as a "new beginning" which was best served by sealing the records from review by the principals to the adoption.

At the same time as these psychoanalytic, "scientific" ideas were recasting the unmarried mother, to justify the availability of her child for "deserving" childless couples, the post-war idealization of family life reinforced the emphasis on children as the necessary linchpin of the new suburban, white middle-class family. A marked increase in the demand for white infants resulted from the growing number of white middle-class couples who were willing to acknowledge infertility.

The struggle of social workers to gain professional stature and lay claim to adoption as their professional turf fed into these trends. In turn, these trends interlaced easily with the prevailing cultural uneasiness with infertility and the stigma associated with illegitimacy. Social workers working through public and private agencies increasingly competed with lawyers and ministers who arranged less restrictive independent adoptions. Throughout the middle three decades of this century they argued that only social workers working through licensed agencies could guarantee the anonymity and confidentiality that their profession's view of adoption and the cultural atmosphere reinforced. Eager to eclipse its origins in unpleasant realities, they preferred a view of adoption as a single event completed with the child's transfer. According-ly all parties to this event were best served by a "clean break" with the past: the birth mother, the adoptive parents, and the child were to act "as if" the family so formed was no different from other families. Sealing the records, in effect obliterating the past, served as an instrument to this profes-sionally orchestrated view of adoption. It was in the middle of this period that Illinois, in 1945, sealed its records.

Next month's article will focus on the consequences of sealing records and changes in adop-tion law from 1945 to today.