A recent tweet on the status of adoptee records legislation in 2017 in state legislatures was sent out by the Adoptee Rights Law Center, which is tracking laws with an online mapping tool.
Most adoptees do not have time to track the status of legislation at the state level that may impact adult adoptees’ access to their original birth records. Bill tracking is the work of insiders and advocacy groups who dedicate themselves professionally and personally to single or related issues.
For any adoptee who wishes to know what laws impact their legal and human right to receive copies of their original birth certificate and birth records, they can follow two websites: Adoptee Rights Law and Bastard Nation.
Both are maintained by adoptee rights advocates who share a simple and unswerving commitment that all adoptees have basic human rights and the legal right to their original identity documents, without any barrier or prejudice. Other good resources are available, and please use those too. However, these two sources work hard to keep their information current and in the larger perspective and framework of full legal and human rights for all U.S. adoptees.
I will also list two other sources (American Adoption Congress (AAC), Donaldson Adoption Institute). The AAC has just made internal reforms that put it back on the map for promoting equal rights for adoptees, as of May 2018. The institute has shuttered its doors, but still has information online that may be useful.
Adoptee Rights Law Center:
Gregory D. Luce, a Minnesota-based attorney and adoptee rights legal activist, is now publishing a resource he calls the “United States of OBC” (OBC being an acronym for original birth certificates). Luce categorizes each state and the District of Columbia by the degree of access: unrestricted, restricted, conditional, extreme fees, adoption registry requirement, date-based restrictions, redaction provisions, disclosure veto/birth parent consent, zombie veto (a veto that extends beyond a birth parent’s death), and pending or not in effect.
Luce’s OBC access maps provide an excellent way to understand the geographic breakdown of legalized discrimination against adoptees and illegitimately born people in the United States. As you can see when you click on his map page, the Jim Crow-style laws, as I like to call them, are pervasive and, sadly, mostly accepted without much widespread moral outrage. Tools such as the ones Luce and his law center are bringing to public attention help to highlight the national disgrace that is the status of equal rights for millions of adopted Americans.
Bastard Nation:
Bastard Nation is an adoptee rights advocacy group that has been instrumental in the last two decades in helping to pass legislation in Oregon, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire that restored adult adoptees’ full legal access to their original birth certificates and birth records. The group provides an unequivocal mission statement concerning adoptees’ human and civil rights for access to their original birth records, and it is committed to working with partners nationally who share its mission. The group correctly notes, “The right to know one’s identity is primarily a political issue directly affected by the practice of sealed records adoptions.”
For those interested in “inside ball,” Bastard Nation tracks all state-level legislation on its website. This page may be most useful for adoptees, reporters, researchers, and policy-makers who want to understand the current debates in real-time.
American Adoption Congress (AAC):
The AAC is an advocacy group started during the heyday of the Adoption Rights Movement (ARM) in the 1970s. In May 2018, the AAC made public its firm commitment to adoptee rights. Its new policy statement, published on its home page states: “Let it be known: It is the formal policy of the American Adoption Congress to support state-by-state legislative efforts to restore unrestricted access to original birth certificates (OBC) for all adult adoptees. This is also known as ‘clean’ adoption reform, which is in accordance with widely accepted practices in adoption.” This marks a change from previous statements from a year earlier that it would support so-called “compromise legislation” in collaboration with state adoptee advocates. This is a great development for adoptee rights advocates and adoptees in the United States.
The AAC continues to publish a summary of state laws on its legislation page that can be useful. Links to state laws are included in legislative summaries. The AAC uses these categories to laws governing birth records for adoptees: unrestricted access, access with restrictions, partial access, partial with restrictions, and sealed. There are some useful summaries of the likelihood of legislation in some states based on the national organization’s assessment of the advocacy climate in each state. I have used this site and page for my research.
Donaldson Adoption Institute (DAI):
The DAI, formerly called the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, features a map highlighting the status of adoption laws state by state. The group used fives categories to describe state adoption laws: access, access with restrictions, partial access with restrictions, partial access, and no access. The DAI announced it was ending operations in January 2018. It noted published information would be kept live online, but it is not clear how long. Its closure also ends its extremely short-lived campaign for adoptee rights launched in May 2017.
Contact Me, Please:
If anyone thinks I should provide some additional resources, please let me know and send me an email. I welcome all feedback from researchers, advocates, members of the press, and those who care about issues surrounding illegitimacy, bastardy, legal rights, human rights, and adoptee rights. Thanks.
[Author Note: This page was updated on June 10, 2018, to reflect changes during the year since it was first published. During the time the DAI closed its doors and the AAC updated its position on promoting access to OBCs for all adult adoptees as a policy plank.]
