Word: birth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cindy now lives in Oregon, where voters last fall approved a two-sentence initiative called Measure 58. If it goes into effect, it will radically change traditional adoption law by allowing adoptees the unfettered right to see their birth certificate when they turn 21. Today those papers are sealed. But since the biological mother's name appears on a birth certificate, the law would mean adoptees like Cindy's daughter could easily find Mom's real name--and perhaps track her down. A group of birth mothers has sued Oregon, arguing that state statutes promise them confidentiality and that breaking...
More than an hour south of Portland's suburbs, where Cindy has kids in school, lives another woman, Mary Inselman. Mary is angry about adoption law, but for another reason entirely. She turned 77 in December, and has never seen her birth certificate. While everyone else can see such a document without fuss, adoptees must petition a court for their records, and petitions cost money (Inselman is on a fixed income) and, more important, dignity...
...women, Cindy and Mary; two lives in turmoil because of adoption laws written in another era. Before the late '60s, states thought they were doing birth mothers a favor by confining their identities to dusty registrars' books. At the time, only "bad" girls got pregnant out of wedlock, and they were cloistered with fake names until they gave birth. Today, of course, that attitude seems quaintly outmoded. What's more, we have become sensitized to the rights of adoptees, who as they grow up want to know what everyone else already knows: who they are. "We are besieged by ghosts...
Several states have tried to devise workable new laws to help answer those questions without treading on the rights of mothers. It's a tricky legislative game. In 1996, for instance, Tennessee legislators gave adoptees--except those who were the product of rape or incest--access to their birth certificate while also allowing biological mothers to tell the state they never want contact with their kids. As in Oregon, birth mothers have sued to overturn that law, saying they were promised nothing short of lifelong confidentiality (and wondering why, if adoptees can be prevented from contacting their mothers, they would...
...likely to choose abortion over adoption. While most adoption groups support some kind of compromise plan, the National Council for Adoption, a buttoned-up Washington coalition of agencies that arrange confidential adoptions, would require that extraordinary measures be taken by the state to find, counsel and get consent from birth parents before adoptees could even learn their names--to say nothing of meeting them. At the other extreme is the Internet-based Bastard Nation, which wants no exception whatsoever to open records and arouses activists' ire on its irreverent bastards.org website ("Rush for Our Records!" the site proclaims...