Page 12
Street Roots • Nov. 17-23 2017
Commentary
The Adoptee Rights Initiative, 20 years on
BY HELEN HILL
CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST
the emotional morass of hit or miss
registries. Meeting after meeting involved a
roomful of discouraged members tearfully
wenty years ago, a rag tag team of
lamenting the difficulty of obtaining
political neophytes came together to
information. There were a few searchers
make Oregon legislative history. In
the process, they ignited a firestorm of with smuggled DMV databases and an
underground search network of strategically
controversy in Oregon and across the
placed clerical moles, but it was expensive,
country, challenged decades of secrecy and
unreliable and, to be honest, humiliating.
shame, and unlocked the long sealed birth
Why should we have to beg, buy or steal our
certificates of thousands of Oregon adult
own vital information, information that is
adoptees.
readily available to every other citizen? Why
The sealing of adoptees’ birth certificates
should our true identity be a State secret?
began back in the 1950s as a way to protect
Can we not be trusted with our own
children born outside of marriage from the
information? Instead of complaining, it was
stigma of illegitimacy. “Bastard” was often
time to act.
the word stamped across the original
When we formed the political action
certificate that listed the name of the true
committee, we decided to take a radical
birth mother and father. An amended
departure from the usual emphasis on the
certificate was created at the time the child
was adopted into a conventional family. The
amended certificate stated the names of the
adoptive parents as the true biological
parents. The original birth certificate, or
OBC, was then deep-sixed in the State
archives in Salem to be opened only, and
rarely, by court order.
The sealing of the OBCs of illegitimate
children was originally intended as a
compassionate gesture of protection from a
life-long stigma that could prevent them
from marrying, getting a decent job or being
accepted in society. Through the years,
however, our views of birth outside marriage
have drastically changed. According to 2015
T
and other social network sites revolutionized
how we organize to find each other. Bastard
Nation was perhaps one of the earliest
activist organizations to form exclusively on
the Internet, using the Usenet newsgroup
alt.adoption. Those were heady days as we
realized the embryonic possibilities of online
political activism. It might take three hours
to download a song, but sitting in our homes
across the country we could brainstorm
strategies at light speed on actions such as
mass burnings of amended birth certificates,
building solidarity with adoptees in other
countries and framing letters to newspapers
and legislators. The process of toppling the
closed record system and ending years of
shame and secrecy had begun.
Using the direct route of the initiative
system had never been tried before, but it
d ata from th e P ew R e se a rc h C en ter, b irth
rates for unmarried women are now over 43
percent, compared to 5 percent in 1960.
Even though the disgrace of birth outside
marriage has largely diminished, (although
to this day, the word bastard is still a
stinging insult), the birth certificates of
adoptees continue to be sealed in most
states.
In November of 1997, a loosely organized
coalition of Oregon “bastards”, birth
mothers and adoptive parents (known as the
adoption triad) decided to use the initiative
process to overturn the Oregon statutes
that required the sealing of adoptee’s OBCs,
and allow adult adoptees age 21 and older to
access them without a court order. I was
the Chief Petitioner for that ballot initiative,
which came to be known as Measure 5 8 .1
was adopted as an infant, my OBC is still
sealed somewhere in Missouri.
There had been many failed attempts
nationwide to introduce a bill to open the
sealed records of adoptees, but it proved
impossible to ask a legislator to carry water
on a largely unknown but potentially
contentious issue advantageous to so few
constituents. The public generally views
adoptees’ desire for the OBC as an invasion
of the birth mother’s privacy at best, at
worst, a ticket to hunt down a defenseless
woman and expose a wasp’s nest of secrets
that should remain hidden.
For those of us in the early adoptee
rights movement, however, the desire for
access to the OBC was never about
exposing identities or forcing contacts, but
about rewriting an archaic statute held over
from a repressive era when illegitimate
births were shameful. Many of us had long
been frustrated with the “pass the Kleenex,”
hand-wringing culture of adoption support
groups focused on search and reunion and
A R T W O R K B Y H E L E N H IL L
need to know birth facts for medical,
made sense to take the issue out of the
emotional and psychological reasons, and
hands of reluctant elected representatives
present the measure as a pure civil rights
and bring it straight to the people. However,
issue. We were warned this would be a
we had no idea how much work this would
grave mistake, but we persevered and, in
involve. There were the massive piles of
retrospect, I believe this was the reason we
signatures which proved impossible to get
succeeded. It was clearly an abrogation of
on our own steam (we ended up paying for
civil rights to deny a class of citizens access
most of our signatures), inscrutable filing
to their own vital
rules and
information based on
regulations,
the circumstances of
fundraising,
What we as adoptees wanted
their birth, but would
snore than anything was ass end publicity and an ad
the voting public see it
campaign to
to the era of shame and secrecy,
that way?
organize and, our
All we needed was
both for on rselw s and for the
most difficult
120,000 signatures for
women who here ns.
challenge,
our simple measure to
combatting a
be placed before the
negative media
Oregon voters. It seemed doable; it was
image.
1997, the miraculous World Wide Web was
Once we succeeded in turning in our
brand new, and there was already a network
signatures and were officially on the ballot,
of triad members connected through this
print, radio and television media insisted on
thing called the internet. We optimistically
presenting the issue as a sensational
hoped it would help us assemble an instant
struggle of adoptees hellbent on destroying
statewide army of signature gatherers.
the privacy of their birth mothers. As the
Adoptees and birth mothers had been
voting deadline drew near, even Governor
among the first to recognize the potential of
“Dr. No” Kitzhaber came out against
the web as a tool for matching those
Measure 58, as did the Oregon Civil
searching for each other. With the
Liberties Union, Catholic Charities,
privatization of the internet in the mid
numerous adoption agencies and adoption
1990s, triad members seized and filled the
attorneys. The issue seemed to explode
ponderous mIRC and HTML chat rooms
overnight and we were unwittingly, and
that were springing up long before Facebook sometimes unwillingly, placed in the glare of
the media spotlight. There was a constant
whirlwind of press both in Oregon and
across the country and in Europe as well.
Rolling Stone Magazine, the New York
Times, Newsweek, Time, France’s Le
Nouvelle Observateur, Talk of the Nation,
The Today Show; it was hard to keep up
with the frenzy of interviews. And nearly all
wanted to frame the debate as one of birth
mother privacy versus adoptees desire to
know.
The issue was and is much more
complex. At stake in a closed record system
is not only the falsified history of adoptees
and the sexual shaming of birth mothers,
but also the collusion of the State in
protecting the secrets a long dominant
patriarchal structure wishes to hide. Deep
sixing the record of an unwanted pregnancy
can absolve responsibility for the man, but it
increases the lifelong shame and burden on
the woman. What we as adoptees wanted
more than anything was an end to the era of
shame and secrecy, both for ourselves and
for the women who bore us.
The debate grew unexpectedly bitter and
dangerous. I received death threats and also
anonymous, dark warnings that the Catholic
Church would stop at nothing to end our
effort in order to protect the secret
identities of the many “priestly babes;”
babies fathered by priests. It was a time for
strength and fortitude. In the end, Measure
58 won a convincing 53 percent of the
popular vote in the 1998 gubernatorial
election, but it took a year and a half of
challenges that played out in the Court of
Appeals, the Oregon Supreme Court, and all
the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court until
it was finally allowed to go into effect.
As of June of 2000, Oregon adoptees age
21 and older have been able to obtain their
original birth certificates, with no
exceptions. Birth mothers may attach a
Contact Preference Form if they wish,
stating if they do or do not want contact or
if they want contact through an
intermediary. As of 2017, there have been
12,512 sealed birth certificates requested,
11,953 have been opened and issued by the
Oregon Bureau of Vital Statistics.
Sometimes, as in the case of foundlings,
there is simply no original birth certificate.
There have been 699 Contact Preference
Forms submitted by birth mothers. Of
these, 575 requested contact, 37 asked for
contact through an intermediary, and 87
requested no contact. Since Oregon’s
successful Measure 58, seven more states
now have open records; Alaska, Alabama,
Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Rhode Island and
New Hampshire.
And for all the controversies and dire
warnings, it has been peaceful since
Measure 58 went into effect. Nearly twelve
thousand adult adoptees and counting have
been restored the civil right to their vital
information, and all parties now have the
freedom to make their own respectful
decisions regarding contact, or no contact,
and the nature of their personal
relationships without the State in the
middle.
That is how a free society works, and it
works well that way.