Michelle Edmunds knows the problems that adoptees can face gaining access to their birth certificates. She was born in Illinois and currently lives in Toronto and wanted to retrieve her birth certificate after her mother died. When she attempted to access the document, she was told that she would need to prove her mother’s death with a death certificate in order to receive her birth certificate. However, she was unable to gain access to the death certificate without proving that she was her mother’s daughter, something she could only do with her own birth certificate.
“It’s validation of my existence on earth,” said Edmunds, a member of the Adoptee Rights Coalition. “It entitles me to learn about my ancestry, my ethnicity and my family.”
On May 21, Gov. Pat Quinn signed a bill that guarantees a birth certificate to adoptees, who have long been denied this document. However, some adoption rights groups believe the bill does not go far enough in giving adoptees access to desired information.
The law allows people born before Jan. 1, 1946, to access their birth certificates immediately and people born after that date will have to wait until Nov. 15, 2011. Edmunds doesn’t think the law goes far enough. She says it should be repealed in favor of legislation that would give adoptees unconditional access to their birth records.
“It means I’m not segregated from the rest of the population,” Edmunds said. “Everyone in the world gets to know their identity except adopted people.”
The law has drawn attention from some adoptee rights groups for a clause that allows the adoptees’ birth parents to file for anonymity, showing a wish not to be contacted. The provision allows no access to their personal information. The birth parent can be petitioned every five years to reconsider their anonymity, but if they refuse, the only way to gain access to a complete birth certificate is after the parent’s death, if the adoptee can present a death certificate.
Ann Wilmer, a member of the Green Ribbon Campaign for Open Records, thinks that the law does not do enough to give adoptees the truth about their identities.
“If you’ve got a birth certificate with everything blacked out but your name, what do you have?” Wilmer said.
Wilmer believes that the law unfairly defends the anonymity of birth parents and shouldn’t have passed. She thinks that many of the problems with the law have to do with the politics and believes that the legislation’s sponsor, Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, was trying to pass the bill quickly.
“The governor should have vetoed it,” Wilmer said. “Our best hope is in a shift in power. The sponsor seemed to be desperate to pass it.”
For Edmunds, the decision to allow parents to effectively remove their identity on their children’s birth certificate equates to the government denying people access to their own past.
“You can’t legalize secrets,” Edmunds said. “When is secrecy a good thing? We want to know the truth of our lives. These questions are unanswered.”
Contact Jackson Adams at jadams@illinoistimes.com.
What we, adoptees, want is what every other non-adopted citizen in this country has: our original, unedited, unsealed, birth certificates.
Treating adopted persons differently is discrimination. This discrimination is perpetrated by the government in the form of sealed and falsified birth certificates.
We are tax-paying citizens, we are NOT second class citizens.
I want the truthful documentation of my birth. I was born to a woman named Colleen, not Maria.
I want my original identity, my ethnicity, my heritage BACK.
I'm a current Illinois resident, born in Nebraska and adopted by my step father at age 6. When trying to search for my birthfather in my early 20's I was surprised when the state of Nebraska told me there was no way I could ever access my original birth certificate unless I had the signiture of my birth parents. It didn't matter if I was 20 or 80...I am treated as a child in the eyes of the law, not deserving to know my past, heritage or medical history without parental permission.
Although I was able to locate and develop a good relationship with birthfather, I still find it infuriating that millions of people have no access to their original identity. The state of Illinois, amongst other states, are putting millions of people at risk by denying them the right to find out their original identity, and therefore their medical history. It makes me ask in whose interest is the adoption industry REALLY for?
Thank you for drawing awarenes to this issue. Bottom line? Everything we do has consequences and will come into the light. Adult aces to OBC's is no diferent. I am almost 50. I don't want mommy's permission to have my orinal property and my medical records that could potentially save mine or my children's lives.
No state has ever guaranteed, by law, the anonymity of relinquishing parents. But all states do have laws to protect every individual's privacy, which is a different thing entirely from anonymity. The vast majority of birth parents and adoptees do not desire anonymity from each other anyway, yet most states mandate it by law.
Whose best interests are being considered here?
The idea of sealing the original, and issuing an ammended birth certificate was devised as as means to shield the "illegitimate" person from public scorn. With single parenthood now common and single parents adopting children, it has lost any need to exist. The exploding popularity of "open" adoptions is testiment to this.
Despite claims from certain opponents to birth certificate access equality, anyone willing to look can verify for themselves, with official state data, that states which make birth certificates freely available to all adult adoptees have steady to increasing rates of adoption and steady or reduced rates of abortion.
There are no claims made by opponents to adoptee access which cannot be wholly and factually refuted. They will, on occasion, quote a birthmother who wished to remain anonymous but no one outside the federal witness protection program has that priviledge. What they do have is the right to privacy, already guaranteed coast to coast, in every state, with existing laws.
But truly, the best argument presented by adoptees is the claim of discrimination, that they are treated as a sub-class subject to special restrictions based on arbirtrary criteria over which they have no control.
It's hard to argue that point. These are adults, past the age of need for public shielding, past the age of need for parental control, and expected to assume all the responsibilities of adult life. Why shouldn't they be afforded all the liberties others enjoy without question?