Of Riders, Amendments and Other Sneaky Things

As adopted people across North America fight for the right to their original birth certificates, we see the usual arsenal being brought out in an attempt to shoot these ADULTS down. It is a simple fact that an adopted person's civil rights are being abridged by the unavailability of these simple, legal records. Of course, the first salvo of the closed records warriors is "barfmuggle privacy." WE are the villains of the piece.

Yeah, right. Let's look at it as it really is. On one side, you have a few, unnamed mothers who just happen to be available to the anti-open records attorneys and who will call the reappearance of their adult child in their lives their "worst nightmare." On the other side, we have mothers, thousands and thousands of them, whose fondest wish is to see their child again. These are the brave ones, because, believe me, reunion isn't for the faint of heart. Never the less, maternal instinct outweighs adoption rhetoric by a huge margin. That shoots down THAT particular nonsensical, illogical argument.

As that fails and once they see that the bill to open records might have greater support that they figured, they start adding things...veto options, riders that require a bureaucratic intermediary, enough forms and jumping through hoops to form a circus, and anything else they can sneak in there that might rock the boat. One such thing was the idea that they could violate the HIPAA laws by requiring mothers to present personal medical and counseling information to the adoptee. Sorry, Children, but that is something I will do on my own as I see fit. My raised children don't know everything about my records and I intend to keep it that way. That put us mothers in the uncomfortable position of having to oppose the bill that carried this specious little rider and made us look very anti-adoptee when we are anything BUT.

Here's an idea. Why don't we give these original birth certificates to both the adopted person AND the mother (who was still the legal parent at the time these documents were filed) and let us take care of the rest? It's about time that we moms were treated like the mature women we are, rather than the vulnerable teens that were grist for the adoption mills, and our children are treated like adults with civil rights rather than eternal children and the possessions of the purchasers. Left alone, we can manage to exchange information and create a relationshiop (oops...that's what the facilitators and adopters fear the most) quite well.

Oh, and maybe the bureaucrats could correct one little flaw on the OBC's of quite a few of our children. You see, even though many of us named the fathers with little hesitation, just because we didn't have that male creature's last name and a ring on the third finger of our left hand, the almighty social worker put "father unknown" in that slot on the document. Not cool...not cool at all. MOST of us DID know who the fathers of our children are and had no problem identifying them. It seems that our word had very little value. How better to make us look like irresponsible sluts than to say that we didn't even know who fathered our child?

The social work hierarchy of that era, the government toadies and a lot of doctors, attorneys and even members of the clergy have a lot to answer to for what happened. A good start would be to give us and our children those OBC's. It's really not a lot to ask for unless a lot of people have a lot to hide...hmmmmmmm?