A Search Triggers New Laws:
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Wary Parties Weigh Impact of Adoptees Obtaining Records
NASHVILLE -- A historic shift in the adoption world started with a tiny growth near Caprice East's right eye.It was nothing serious, really, but East's doctors wanted some medical background: Was there a history of glaucoma or other eye disease in her family? Were her parents or siblings allergic to any drugs? Just the basic information anyone can provide.
Her quest evolved into a case before the Tennessee Court of Appeals, which is expected to rule any day on whether adoptees in the state can obtain records about themselves. Whatever the outcome, activists on both sides believe events here signal where the rest of the nation is headed.
"I wish it wasn't the first wave for the future, but I think it is," says James Savely, owner of Small World Adoptions in Nashville, who vehemently opposes opening records for fear it will lead many birth mothers to keep or abort their babies. "I think open records will eventually be allowed here, and I think it won't be too long until they're allowed everywhere."
Whether the approximately 5 million to 6 million adoptees in this country should be able to obtain documents about their roots, particularly birth certificates and other records that identify their biological parents, is the hottest issue in adoption today. Only Kansas and Alaska routinely give adoptees such access, but they have always been the exceptions.
Activists have seized upon the Tennessee case as a live wire to spark changes elsewhere, to make records as available to adoptees in the United States as they are in countries ranging from Great Britain to Israel to Australia.
This subject arouses vehement disagreements because of what adoptees invariably do when they get their documents: seek information about their birth parents, or even find them.
The process is simply called "search." And the decision of whether to search is an essential component of the "who am I" question that most people confront, but that adoptees face in a particularly acute way.
When teachers tell students to bring baby photos to class, children who have none because they were adopted at later ages often find themselves embarrassed and upset. Adopted children in a class asked to draw a family tree frequently are left feeling awkward or confused about
their identities.
Joyce Maguire Pavao, who has been counseling members of the adoption "triad" for 25 years, says even the words commonly used to describe adoption have an insidious effect on adoptees. On television, in movies, and in daily conversation, they hear biological children being referred to as their parents' "real" or "natural" offspring -- leaving adoptees to wonder, "What does that make me?" Experts say two other realities -- that someone gave them away and that adoption costs money -- also play important roles in the personal development of adoptees. "How much did you pay for me?" is a tough, core question many adoptees ask their parents.
Grappling with such issues, adopted children sometimes act out aggressively or become so distracted that teachers conclude they have a learning disability. Studies a decade ago showed that 28 to 38 percent of adoptees wound up in special-needs programs, but the number seems to be declining.
"These are kids who are making sense of very difficult personal things while they are learning, so the problem is a teaching difficulty and not a learning difficulty," says Pavao, who runs the Center for Family Connections in Cambridge. The standard training for teachers, psychiatrists, and social workers, she notes, doesn't include adoption issues.
Social workers and counselors stress that adoptees typically surmount their problems just as other people do -- and tend to have comparable scholastic, job-performance and personal-satisfaction levels. They also say adoptees' issues have eased considerably in recent years as adoption has become more open.
"When people are keeping secrets about you, you think there's something really bad about you," says Pavao, an adoptee herself. She and other advocates of opening records argue that search is a healthy process that helps adoptees, and often biological parents, cope with identity and separation issues. Adoptees, they point out, are the only group in America denied the right to obtain data about themselves. "I wasn't political at all before the Department of Human Services told me I couldn't see my own information," recalls Caprice East, who persuaded Tennessee state senators to take up her cause and eventually to rewrite Tennessee's adoption laws. "But I got mad and I thought, mass murderers in prison can find out about themselves, and I can't? That file has my name on it, nobody else's. How dare you keep it from me?"
Opponents counter that identifying birth parents breaks the promise of anonymity they were given; some say the importance of adoptees' knowing their personal histories has been overblown. Most pointedly, the critics focus on what they say would be dire consequences if search becomes commonplace.
"What it leads to is a big drop in adoptions," says Bill Pierce, president of the National Council for Adoption in Washington. Pierce arguably has been the most influential lobbyist/activist on adoption for decades and has led the resistance to giving adoptees access to records "The point is, if you want any pregnant woman to choose adoption, it has to be as confidential as abortion," says Pierce, who insists more women will choose abortion -- which he and his backers in Christian organizations oppose -- if they think relinquishing a child might someday become public. "How many women do you know who want to wear a red `A for adoption' across their chests for the rest of their lives?" Pierce's view is a minority one; the prevailing wisdom appears to be that search has positive long-term effects.
Today, the number of adoptees who look for their relatives is estimated to be at least 15 percent, though many authorities believe the figure is far higher. More significantly, most lawyers and adoption agencies foresee a not-very-distant future in which search becomes routine.
As adoptions become more open, however, the process will be a moot issue for a growing number of adoptees: They will always have information about or contact with their biological parents. Potentially most important, the Internet increasingly is nullifying confidentiality laws and promises. Already, there are hundreds of adoption-search web sites and people-locating devices that make it relatively easy to find just about anyone.
"All this discussion of right, wrong, good, bad is gobbledygook," says Marge Garfield, a 53-year-old adoptee who lives in East Calais, Vt. "People are finding each other daily, right now." The desire to know is so fundamental, she says, that many adoptees go through life studying strangers for shared physical characteristics.
Like most adoptees, Garfield stresses that her desire to search was never an indictment of her adoptive parents, who gave her "as loving and wonderful an upbringing as anyone could want." She says she knows they meant well even when they lied to her, saying her biological mother and father died in a car accident.
"I think because I wasn't allowed to know more, though, I grew up identifying myself as someone who was given away. . . . I was always curious, but I learned that I had to bury it early on, because it was not an approved subject," says Garfield, who at 41 quit her job as a merchandise manager in New York for a quieter life as a photographer in Vermont.
The following year, after deciding she had to confront her past, she started to hunt. Researchers agree the vast majority of adoptees who seek out their biological parents do so when they're at least in their 20s, often while they are thinking about or are starting their own families.
New York agencies and courts were no help, so Garfield joined a class-action suit against the state. Several years and $7,000 in legal fees later, she won.
Garfield was handed over the records, along with another $3,000, to a "searcher" Garfield could contact only through third parties. He was one of a network of searchers, many of whom work anonymously and sometimes for big fees, who track down biological family members for adoptees and, sometimes, adoptees for birth parents.
In 1989, Garfield's searcher helped her reunite with her birth mother. Three years later, Garfield met her biological father, who had shipped off to the South Pacific with the Marines soon after impregnating his then-girlfriend in 1943.
Her search complete, Garfield immersed herself in adoption issues and served on a commission that revamped Vermont's adoption laws last year, liberalizing access to birth records. Though pleased that Vermont has acted, she is scathing in denouncing the slow, state-by-state pace of change: "It's like granting the slaves freedom one at a time."
Adoptive parents, adoptees wary of search ramifications
Other controversies also roil the adoption world. The high cost of the process is key among them, as is the adoption of black children by whites. Some social workers and black activists complain, as do critics of adoption from foreign nations, that the adoptees are deprived of their cultural identity and that adoptive parents don't fully appreciate the difficulties caused by that separation.
Adoption by single people or homosexuals also remains the subject of ongoing discussion and legal disputes. Two states, New Hampshire and Florida, forbid adoptions by gays and lesbians.
None of these issues, though, has the pervasive and even frightening impact of search.
Adoptees worry about what they might discover and fear being rejected again. That happened to East, who found her birth mother only to learn the woman wanted nothing to do with her.
For many adoptive parents, the nightmare is that their children will want to return to the women who carried them. Or that they failed as parents if their children want to form ties with other families. Adoption professionals, and adoptees who search, agree those concerns are understandable, but agree they are almost always unwarranted. Professionals agree that East's experience with her biological mother was unusual, and that an overwhelming majority of birth mothers eventually want to be found. That seems true even if they originally asked for anonymity, and even though they often dread what their offspring will think of them.
A growing number of these women, particularly those of past generations who were coerced or shamed into surrendering their babies, are searching for their adult children.
Critics of opening records to adoptees argue that "mutual consent registries" are the best way to ensure no unwilling birth parent or child will be contacted. Twenty-one states, including Massachusetts, have established such registries, which facilitate reunions if both participants agree.
Some states offer more than one kind of registry. In 26 states, if any party to an adoption signs its "active" registry, court-appointed intermediaries confidentially talk to the other parties to see if they want contact.
Twenty states have veto or nondisclosure provisions that allow birth parents -- and sometimes adoptees -- to sign affidavits saying they do not want to be found. Eight states register only birth parents, and the information is available exclusively to adoptees.
Advocates of openness generally don't like the registries, primarily because so few people know they exist and partly because adoptees whose birth parents have died are effectively locked out.
"It may seem trivial to most people who don't even think about things like birth certificates or knowing who their parents were," says Abigail Lovett, an adoptee and vice president of the American Adoption Congress. "But what a birth certificate means to adoptees is that we're flesh and blood of a woman born, and not just a product of a bureaucracy."
Tennessee law seen as start of national trend
One way or another, many states are moving to overturn the sealing of adoption records, a practice which took root in the 1920s. Only in adoption from the public-welfare system, where adoptees are often older and most have shuttled in and out of their biological families, has openness remained the norm.
That is why the Tennessee case is pivotal.
The state's new rules essentially allow adoptees 21 and older to see their own records, while giving birth parents a "contact veto" against unwanted reunions. Since its passage, the law has provoked a ferocious legal war that is being monitored by politicians, adoption professionals, and judges nationwide.
The first major battle ended with a landmark victory for backers of openness: The US Supreme Court last October decided the new state law passed federal muster. Opponents then turned to the state courts, arguing that the statute violates Tennessee's own constitution. Regardless of how the state court rules, most observers believe the Tennessee law heralds the start of a national trend.
Particularly telling was the transformation in attitudes that led to the unsealing of records by the legislature, where a majority of lawmakers initially opposed or were skeptical of the reform proposals. "As they became educated for the two years we were working on this, things changed," recalls East, a 46-year-old interior decorator. "What I think we showed here is that the more you know about this issue, the more you move in one direction."
On March 18, 1995, the state Senate approved the legislation, 30-2, and the House followed suit with a 99-0 vote. When the roll call was done, the lawmakers gave East a standing ovation.
For more information, please contact:
Adam Pertman, Executive Director
Adoption Nation Education Initiative
apertman@peoplepc.com
www.adoptionnation.com
617-332-8944 (work)
Credits: Adam Pertman
