Hair New Era

It passed, yesterday 4-21-10.

Tough to weed through all the buzz about the bill--it's controversial and there are many misperceptions out there. Full text of the bill is supposed to be posted here, but it's not. However, here's what I can discern:

The bill is a restricted access bill, which--for now--restores rights to original birth certificates only to adoptees born before January 1, 1946. For adoptees born after that date, we're still potentially blocked--access is restricted according to preferences of the birth mother.

Again we see the confusion between access to birth certificates and search/contact between adoptee and birth parent: the first is a right, and the second is a choice. A birth mother should not have the right to block adoptees' rights to their own original identity. A birth mother should have the choice to request no contact. It's conflating rights with reunion, which are two different things.


P.S. Oregon, Alabama, New Hampshire and Maine have restored unrestricted access adoptees' original birth certificates in recent years. ~17,000 birth certificates have been unsealed, with none of the “social unrest” that was feared. (Bastard Nation)

In some ways, it's a victory, because more people have access to their birth certificates, which is a basic civil right (adoptees are the only people who are blocked from accessing their own birth certificates.) But it's not a full victory, because many, many people are still blocked. And, as Bastard Nation points out, having a partial-restoration-compromise-type bill often just adds more red tape and makes it difficult to convince legislators to revisit the issue in the future.

Now, in November of 2011, if no contact veto has been filed by a birth mother, then supposedly ANY adoptee can apply for his/her birth certificate. This date seems arbitrary, and the term "supposedly" was used by a fellow adoption advocate (have these provisions failed in the past?) It seems to me a light at the end of the tunnel, though a lot can happen in 18 months.