Bastard Nation Letter to Texas House. HB 2725 – Restore right of Original Birth Certificates to Adoptees—Please Vote Do Pass AS WRITTEN

May 7, 2019

HB2725, an inclusive bill. It restores the right of all Texas-born adoptees (and other qualified and designated family if the adoptee is deceased), at age 18, to obtain non-certified copies of their own original birth certificates upon request. It also contains a genuine contact preference form (CPF) that allows birthparents to voluntarily submit a statement of preference regarding contact, but does not veto the release of the OBC or permit redaction or other clerical changes or alterations to the OBC

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Good News from New York

May 1, 2019

Monday (April 30) the New York House Health Committee voted A5497/S3419, the Weprin/Montgomery bill, out of committee with a Do Pass recommendation 24-2 with two absences. The bill has over 100 sponsors with more signing on weekly. This is a huge first step in the decades-long campaign to restore OBC rights in New York. The bill now goes to Codes.

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Bastard Nation Press Release, April 30, 2019: Bastard Nation supports the restoration of adoptee civil rights in New York with A5494/S3419

For over 80 years New York’s adoptees have endured a humiliating, frustrating, costly, and rarely successful process when they request their Original Birth Certificates (OBC). The state’s access system, established when Franklin D Roosevelt was president, is clearly antiquated, illogical, and discriminatory, and keeps nearly all adoptees unable to acquire their own OBC. The law sends a message that adoption and adoptees are shameful secrets.A5494/S3419 recognizes the absurdity of this practice and archaic social ideology It restores the right of OBC access without restriction that all New York adoptees once enjoyed, The bill is simple, inclusive, transparent. It follows the process that nine states have successfully implemented.

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Bastard Nation Letter: Texas: HB2725 Substitute Bill. Please kill it!–Restricted Original Birth Certificate access for adoptees

April 29, 2019

These amendments ignore genuine access and continue to gut the rights of an estimated half million Texas adoptees to their own OBCs. These numbers (the size of the population of Corpus Christi or Arlington) include newborn, older foster care, and step-parent adoptions. These supposed amendments are an insult to every Texas adoptee They perpetuate the assumption that adult adoptees are untrustworthy and even dangerous and cannot be trusted to handle ownership of their own state-generated and held birth records or even their own histories. These amendments represent Big Government supervision over adoptees’ own publicly-held legal records and their personal relationships.

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Don’t Let Yourself Be Redacted! Tell AdoptionLand that Redacted OBCs are not acceptable

Under this obscene scheme, birthparents are granted a special right that no one else has–the right to require the state to remove identifying information from your state-generated and held birth certificate. In other words, the government, as a favor to a parent with a cramped comfort zone censors your own birth certificate turning it into mini- Mueller Report and rendering you invisible, even to yourself.  This black-blocking is done under the rubric of “the most good for the most, people” ‘ or similar garbling.  They forget to mention that once redactions (or their first cousin’ Disclosure Vetoes) are placed in law, no state has come back to remove them.  Redactions create a permanent underclass of adoptees. Left behinds. But, hey!  A state-mutilated OBC is better than no OBC! And, if you are really upset, you always go into therapy.

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Bastard Nation Letter to Iowa Senate: Please Vote No on Redactions/Restrictions on SF621

astard Nation gave full support to SF621 until late last week when proponents announced that they were willing to accept a reported amendment that would restrict OBC access. Specifically, an amendment that authorizes the government—upon request of a birthparent– to censor the OBC by redacting identifying information from the document before it is released to the adoptee. This is a special right that no third party in Iowa, including parents, otherwise, possess.

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