Here we go again. This article discusses the open records issue as legislation is under way in North Carolina to change laws re acess.

"This is a very tough thing to balance -- the privacy of a birth parent against the search by an adoptee for their own personal information," said Brinton Wright, a Greensboro adoption lawyer and board member of a children's home.

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Advocates for closed adoption records tout the secrecy and closed nature of adoption and infer that is how it has always been. However, when legal adoption began in the United States, all records were open. Adoption records were open in every single state in the country.

Yet by 1960, more than half of all states had shut down access to modern adoption records, often in response to a 1941 amendment to the Social Security Act that required child welfare records be kept confidential. Some states took this to mean that adoption records needed to be sealed.

A... more

A newspaper in Indiana is fighting to open adoption records in Indiana in a specific adoption case. A law is currently being considered in the state as well to make it a misdemeanor to accept anything of value for arranging surrogate births in the state.

The Indianapolis Star on Thursday filed a petition to open records in the case, which is pitting Indiana's adoption secrecy law against the public's right to know how the courts do business.

Their efforts to open adoption records in Indiana is detailed in this... more

This bill has been proposed in Illinois to help provide more medical information for adoptees.

But the bill touches on one of the sorest spots in the national adoption debate.

At issue is how much information should be provided to adult adoptees about their parents.

A 29-year-old Port Byron woman after suffering two miscarriages, now has a healthy son. She wondered about her family medical history with each miscarrage.... more

Mr. Harrison had been thinking about getting in touch since reading in an article in The New York Times 15 months ago that two teenagers whose mothers had used his sperm to conceive were looking for him.

Since there is not much etiquette to refer to for sperm donors, this man arbitrarily picked Valentine's Day to announce himself whose mothers had used his sperm to conceive. Hmmm, I do not quite know what to think of that! Apparently, he did announce himself to children that he already knew wanted to know his identity.

The... more

The photo accompanying this post is the State Capitol of Tennessee, the state where I grew up. Tennessee is one of the few states where an adoptee can get their original birth certificate at age 21. Their state law does allow for the birth certificates to be restricted, however, if a veto is in the file from a birth parent.

I found this article at adoption.com which gives some background information about how the quest to open the records... more

Effective January 1, 2007 adult adoptees may get their original birth certificate in CO if certain criteria is met. It is my understanding that CO passed this law a year ago and was supposed to have a state and national awareness campaign but that hasn’t seemed to have happened for whatever reason.

You can access the CO law on Lexis Nexis at http://198.187.128.12/colorado/lpext.dll?f=templates&fn=fs-main.htm&2.0 and click your way to title 19 section... more

An interesting article appeared in the opinion section in the Courier Post Online on December 7, 2006. The link to the article is listed above.

Apparently, the legislation in NJ that would provide adoptees access to their birth records was changed prior to the vote on Monday. The original legislation proposed one million dollars over 12 months for advertising the open access to adoptees birth records being granted. The thought... more

Marley Grainers blog on the Daily Basterdette makes a lot of sense and she is right. If this legislation or any other legislation gets passed that contains a contact veto, changing it down the road is going to be very difficult. Just as getting legislation passed in the states that currently have closed or sealed records to open them up and give adoptees everything they are asking for is difficult. However, isn't meeting the needs of 99% of the adoptees who would be able to obtain their original birth certificate better than zero? Especially in the states... more

Bruce M. Rappaport, a trailblazer in the open-adoption movement who pushed for the right of birth and adoptive parents to choose and know each other decades before it became the norm, has died. He was 64.

Rappaport died Oct. 27 after a brief illness at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Walnut Creek, Calif., said Kathleen Silber, associate executive director of the Independent Adoption Center in Pleasant Hill, Calif., which Rappaport founded in 1982.

"He was very passionate about adoptions occurring with truth and not with secrecy,"... more