Imagine that you are at a family gravesite. A grandmother is being laid to rest alongside her husband, perhaps a sibling or two, and other relatives connected by birth. You are standing there, head bowed, but you can’t squelch the awareness that when you die you do not really belong in this family plot.

You should be elsewhere. You have a whole other passel of relatives, but you don’t know who they are or where they are. You are adopted.

You have no knowledge of who you really are, where you came from, or how you got here, and you have no family medical history. You don’t look like anyone in this family, and you wonder where you got your flat feet or why your second toe is longer than your big toe when nobody else in the family has feet like yours. You were raised Jewish, but maybe you were supposed to be Episcopalian. You are expressive and talk with your hands, and your family finds it uncultivated and vulgar. You are dreamy and poetic, and you are in a family of deliberate and logical engineers. You are, always and forever, something else. You are an orphan in the world.

You’ve known since you were five or six that you came from another life, but you understand that you are not supposed to question or wonder what that life would be like or ever ask about those people who gave you life. You have a birth certificate, but the information on it doesn’t tell you who gave birth to you, only who adopted you. When you were adopted, the state sealed your original birth certificate (OBC) forever, thus taking away your right to know who you were when you were born. Call it what you will, it is state-sponsored identity theft. For the vast majority of adopted people in America, this is the way the world works.

As of this writing, thirteen states grant adopted people the full sovereignty of self-knowledge: Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The Hawaiian law is the broadest of all, giving access to the entire adoption file not only to the adult adoptee at age eighteen, but also giving that same access to the birth and adoptive parents. But for those born in Hawaii and adopted elsewhere, the law is murky, and those unfortunate individuals cannot get their OBCs. Elsewhere, adoptees are subject to a crazy quilt of laws with various restrictions: a natural mother (fathers are seldom listed on adoptees OBCs) can request that her name be redacted; a state-appointed confidential intermediary will do a search for the mother or the adoptee, but either party may simply say no to being revealed; the OBC is available only to adoptees born in certain years (before the law sealed the records) but not others (those born

in the years after the records were sealed). One can appeal. The decision is up to the courts. I’ve heard of some cases where the judge routinely grants the request and, conversely, where the opposite happens. Lawmakers in those states with “partial-access” laws have insisted on such vetoes because they ostensibly smack of fairness, as it requires both parties to agree to openness. Equal and fair, right? There is nothing fair about these vetoes. The mother named on the birth certificate, unless adopted herself, has always had the right to her own original, unamended document. Yet these vetoes give the person who wishes to remain anonymous the right to deprive adoptees of the self-knowledge that the rest of us have always taken for granted. For those of us who know who we are since the age of reason, the enormity of this blank wall in the mental makeup of another is impossible to fully grasp.

Someone in your adopted family has taken up genealogy as a hobby, and now suddenly something as simple as a family tree makes you the exception, with an asterisk or a note announcing you really don’t belong there. Or you are left out completely. You were never asked if it was okay to erase your history, your ancestry, your family of original record. Yet by virtue of being adopted in the wrong state, your records are sealed, and until the law changes, you are stuck behind a wall of ancestral anonymity. Until the law changes in your state, you are always going to be a second-class citizen. Reflecting the zeitgeist of an earlier era when a birth outside of marriage was the cause of great scandal, these half way measures are chauvinistic holdovers. Legislators who enact them insist they must protect these scandalous women from – whom?

Their own children. But the laws that sealed birth certificates were never designed to give mothers anonymity. The goal was quite the opposite: the laws were written to shield the adoptive family from the natural mother’s interference, It was presumed that she would want to know what happened to her child, and these laws would prevent her from intruding. Despite how desperate a woman may have been to keep her baby’s birth a secret at the time, today that assumption has been turned into the excuse to allow her to hide from that child. That is wrong.

Adopted individuals were never asked whether stripping away their identities and histories was their choice or in their best interest. These infants and children grow up into adults with all the rights and obligations of the rest of us, yet – due to a contract made by others and long ago, when that now-adult was just an infant – they are denied basic facts about themselves. Sealed birth records codify the same kind of appalling reasoning that allowed slavery to flourish in centuries past.

Slavery is the only other institution in which a contract made among individuals about another individual binds them not only as a child but into adulthood. It takes from the individual full autonomy; it makes them subject to the preferences of another, and it does so indefinitely and for all time. Anything other than full autonomy – which surely includes the right to know who one was at birth – is wrong morally, wrong legally, wrong any way it can be interpreted. These laws make a mockery of justice for all. These laws set up a two-tier system of life: those who have free agency in the world, and those who do not.

Courts in the past have held – and unquestionably courts in the future will find – that the mother has no constitutional right to remain anonymous from her child, and thus the state has no obligation to keep her identity secret from her offspring. In states where adopted individuals may obtain their unamended OBC, a mother may attach a “no contact preferred” proviso. Few women choose this option. A 2016 survey of several states revealed that only one-half of one percent did so. The bottom line: one out of two hundred mothers requested no contact. It is important to note that while adoptees were given no voice when the records were sealed, neither were mothers asked if they wished to be anonymous for eternity. Women giving up their babies had no choice.

While opponents of unsealing birth records have promoted mutual- consent registries to match adoptees and natural parents, such registries have turned out to be largely ineffectual. Most people are unaware such registries exist, dead parents and dead adoptees can’t register, some adoptees do not know where they were born, teenage mothers who were living in secrecy when they gave birth may be uncertain of the correct date or location of their child’s birth, and both parties must file with the same registry. Even worse, some registries have inane restrictions. New York and California once required that adoptive parents give their consent before their adult child could register.

Registries, intermediaries, halfway laws – none are a solution to the central issue, which is the right of the adopted to answer a simple question. Who am I? Lacking information about their name at birth and the circumstances of that birth, adopted individuals remain a subordinate class of people, denied a right the rest of us have never questioned. This is social engineering gone awry. Who opposes the unsealing of original birth certificates? It is not a hidden mass of natural mothers. It is legislators themselves – still largely male, who empathize with the man or woman in the closet. It is legislators listening to the ghosts of the past. It is legislators themselves who may fear that a child they know about, or suspect, may come knocking at their own door. It is adoption agencies and their agents-adoption attorneys, paid lobbyists, and search companies who perpetuate the image of the vulnerable, fearful woman at the time of her greatest anguish and place her in the present, needing protection from her own flesh and blood. But she is a straw woman created by an industry fearful of change and of being discovered to have been wrong all these years.

Inexpensive DNA testing is also changing the equation in this debate. Adoptees are finding second cousins or someone even more remote, and via a friendly relative linked by DNA the identity of many an adoptee’s biological mother or father is revealed. People who had gone down many alleys only to find a dead end are finding family as more individuals spit into a small tube and mail off their DNA. Mothers – and fathers – who thought they might never reveal the existence of their adopted-away child are finding their secret is not so safe. But whether DNA reveals family or not, the basic injustice of sealed birth records remains just that – an injustice. And even if there are women who have not shared the story of a child they relinquished for adoption with their families, their desire for anonymity loses all moral authority stacked against an adopted individual’s right to his or her own, true identity. Difficult conversations can be withstood. Most people will be forgiving of the long silence on this major life event if they can grasp the sense of shame and scandal that unwed births generated in another era. But whether they do or not, no one should have to deal with the question that sometimes pops up at three am; “who was I before I was adopted?”.
Unsealing records and the reunions that follow do not mean that every story has a happy ending. But finding answers about one’s history is an ending of its own. Years ago, someone posted this on an internet message board: “Everybody wants to know where they come from, even if it doesn’t turn out like you wanted”. The right to know one’s heritage should be a given, not something to be asked for as a favor. It should – in a free society, it must – belong to all individuals by the very act of being born.