The fact that adoption information
has been both highly regulated and extremely controversial is one
of the hallmarks of modern adoption. At first sketchy and incomplete,
data contained in the adoption records of early twentieth-century
courts and agencies was available to anyone curious enough to search
it out. The same was true of uniform birth records, which were products
of state efforts to standardize birth registration during the first
third of the twentieth century.
In 1917, the Minnesota adoption
law was revised to mandate confidential records, and between
the world wars, most states in the country followed suit. Confidential
records placed information off limits to nosy members of the public
but kept it accessible to the children and adults directly involved
in adoption, who were called the “parties in interest.”
Confidentiality was advocated by professionals and policy-makers
determined to establish minimum standards
in adoption, decrease the stigma associated with illegitimacy,
and make child welfare the governing
rule in placement decisions. In practice, confidentiality placed
a premium on adoptions arranged anonymously, without any identifying
contact between natal and adoptive parents. Confidentiality also
meant that when courts issued adoption decrees, states produced
new birth certificates, listing adopters’ names, and sealed
away the originals, which contained the names of birth
parents, or at least birth mothers.
Many adopters, especially those whose infertility
made them long for exclusive parent-child ties, surely preferred
anonymity as well. Confidentiality made it possible for some of
these parents to avoid telling their children
that they were adopted at all. The relatives of many unmarried birth
mothers also favored confidentiality. Especially during the postwar
baby boom, when more out-of-wedlock births occurred in middle-class
families than had been the case earlier in the century, mortified
parents argued that their daughters should have a second chance
to lead normal, married lives. Maternity homes proliferated to shield
non-marital pregnancies from public view and helped to make adoption
a topic of embarrassment and shame.
Anonymity and new birth certificates were both consistent with
matching, which set out to make new
families “as if” they had been made naturally. Confidentiality
was converted into secrecy only after World War II. Secrecy meant
that even adult adoptees, to their great surprise and frustration,
could not obtain information about their births and backgrounds.
The intentions behind confidentiality were benevolent, but sealed
records created an oppressive adoption closet.
Even though sealed records were recent inventions, rather than
enduring features of adoption history, they were largely responsible
for the adoption reform movement that gathered steam in the 1970s.
New York housewife Florence Fisher set out to find her birth mother
and inspired adoptees around the country when she founded the Adoptees’
Liberty Movement Association, a pioneering reform organization that
called sealed records “an affront to human dignity.”
At the time, few adoption activists realized the newness of the
policies they sought to overturn by opening sealed records, facilitating
search and reunion, and advocating
open adoption. Records activism attracted great sympathy but achieved
relatively few practical victories and sealed records continue to
provoke heated controversy today. Many states have established mutual
consent registries, which aim for compromise between the rights
of adult adoptees to obtain birth information and the assurance
that many birth mothers were given that their identities would remain
confidential. Sealed records are also the target of militant activism
by such groups as Bastard
Nation, which succeeded in passing
Ballot Measure 58, an open records law, in the state of Oregon
in 1998.
Until 1945, however, most members of adoptive families in the United
States had perfectly legal access to birth certificates and adoption-related
court documents and most agencies acted as passive registries through
which separated relatives might locate one another. Disclosure—not
secrecy—has been the historical norm in adoption.
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