When I drove into Albany pulling a U-Haul with most of my worldly possessions, I was 23, and I was already on the run from my past. I'd had a child in Rochester and given her up for adoption. Now I was desperate to keep that part of my life secret when I began my new job at the late Knickerbocker News. When the doctor giving me a physical for the company insurance asked if I'd ever been pregnant, I lied and said no. Shame surrounded me like an aura. The year was 1966. In the two years I worked at The Knick, I only revealed my secret to one friend — and then with a racing heart.
I never forgot my child. I looked for her in the faces of children her age wherever I saw them — at the mall, in a restaurant, at a family picnic. How was she? Was that little blond girl before me somehow magically her?
The laws that governed adoption decreed that we were never supposed to meet. But by the time she was in her teens, a stranger I never met located her, and soon after that, we met. The day was one of sweet, blessed relief. A veil of grief had been lifted. My daughter, at 15, said she was relieved that she hadn't had to search for me. Because of her epilepsy, her parents had already tried to find me.
Our story is one of millions. Most of us who relinquished our children want to know what happened to them, and how they fared. But the 1935 law in New York that sealed the original birth certificates of the adopted still stands today, because of a false sense that women like me must be "protected" from allowing our children to know our names, the ones on their original birth certificates.
Our opponents are not adoptive parents who fear change — a Cornell University survey found that most favor it — but judges, lawyers and legislators whose image of a relinquishing mother is a tearful, scared teenager, desperate to stay anonymous from the prying public. They imagine that we have made lives holding the secret within and that our lives will be ruined if our children can obtain our names.
But that false protection comes at a great cost to the very individuals adoption is supposed to be for: the adopted. Their birth certificates were sealed without their consent or their will. Yet they are consigned to living without the roots that inform their ancestral histories, medical data and complete knowledge of who they are. They can do everything that the rest of us can — go to war, vote, marry, divorce, have children — but they cannot fully answer the question that looms in the 3 a.m. of the mind: Who am I?
While states such as New York cling to their sealed-records statutes, whole industries of searchers and some shysters have grown up to seek and find natural mothers and fathers for adoptees, adoptees for mothers, at no small cost — in my case, several months' rent.
While states drag their heels, adoptees are often reduced to ridiculous acts like taking pictures of themselves holding up posters with their information on Facebook. Surely this is not what lawmakers who passed the closed-records statues anticipated. But the movement to reform these old laws stays mired in legislative committees as years pass, people die and adoptees end up reuniting with a grave.
Besides New York, other states dealing currently with this issue are Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. New Jersey's only awaits the governor's signature. For the very few women who would want to remain anonymous, there is a solution. In the six states that unsealed birth certificates since 2000, mothers may file a no-contact preference that will be made known to the adoptees if they should request their birth certificates. For every 1,429 birth certificates for adoptees, only one parent asks to have it sealed.
It is human nature to seek people we are connected to by birth. Yet if the records are unsealed, not everyone will ask for his, and not everyone who does will search out his birth parents. But to let another year pass without allowing them that right is a singular crime against their humanity.