Florence Fisher, 1928–2023. We Stand on Her Shoulders!

 

AdoptionLand lost a giant on October 1, with the passing of Florence Fisher, founder of ALMA–the Adoptee Liberty Movement Association–and author of the groundbreaking adoptee activist and search memoir, The Search for Anna Fisher.

I didn’t know Florence Fisher personally, and it’s been a long time since I read her book, so it’s a little difficult to write about her other than through the lens of admiration and gratitude.

Florence Fisher suffered the adoptive parents from hell. She learned by accident when she was 7, that she was adopted. The documentation was then destroyed and she was warned to never speak of it again.

For the next 30 years, Florence searched on and off like so many of us do. In 1969, however, she was in a traffic accident that changed everything. She recalled that just before impact she thought, “I’m going to die and I don’t know who I am.”

The spark was lit

Florence searched and located her birthparents, which is detailed in The Search for Anna Fisher. Her birthmother put her off, but she  became very close to her birthfather, and took, his surname, which also was hers at birth.

But Florence wanted more. She wanted more for us.

I take a small batch of letters and begin to open them one by one,each bit of another human being’s soul. The first and last of them say simply: “All I want to know is what everyone else knows–and takes for granted: my roots.

ALMA was on its way! It incorporated as a nonprofit.

Adoptee Rights was afoot!

Writer and first mother Lorraine Dusky, who sat on the original ALMA board, recalls that Florence had a great talent for making people comfortable.  That comfort carried over to ALMA which she made a safe space for adoptees.

In its heyday, ALMA had 50 local chapters and an incredible 50,000 members. Its search and reunion registry contained the names of 340,000 adult adoptees, birthparents, and other family members searching for each other.

Politically active, in 1976, ALMA supported a bill in New York State to unseal OBCs, When lawmakers attempted to water down the bill and make it prospective only, Fisher and ALMA pulled support and the bill died. Subsequent bills suffered the same fate for decades after:  adoptees say– unacceptable. Finally, in 2020 Florence’s early efforts in New York came to fruition when OBCs were opened there with no conditions or restrictions–and Florence received her OBC 85 years after learning about her adoption and nearly 50 years after ALMA was born.

In 1978,  ALMA filed Soc  Inc v Mellon, in the US District Court Southern District New York, arguing that sealed records violate the 1st, 4th, 9th, 13th, and 14th Amendments.

The arguments:

1) the interest of an adoptee in learning the identity of his or her origins is a fundamental right protected by the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; 2) adult adoptees are a suspect or “quasi-supsect” class protected by the Equal Protection clause from discrimination; 3) sealed records violate the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition against slavery because, in abolishing parental relations, they impose on adult adoptees a “badge of slavery”; (4) sealed records deny adoptees the right to privacy accorded certain aspects of family life and procreation; and (5) sealed records deny adoptees the right to acquire useful information, which is a corollary to the right of free speech protected under the First Amendment. ALMA also lost at all judicial levels. ALMA Society Inc. v Mellon, 459 F.Supp 912 (S.D.N.Y.1978), aff’d, 601 F.2nd 1225 (1979), cert. den. 444 U.S. 995, 100 S.Ct. 531, 62 L.Ed.2d 426.

The defeat at all judicial levels led to the realization that state-by-state legislative change, not judicial dictate, was the way to restore records rights and an over-all acknowledgment that adopted people have the same right to their birth records as the not adopted.

ALMA’s political activism gradually faded, but it remained a viable and respected search and support organization. Though health issues plagued Florence in the last few years of her life, she never lost the fire. She continued to support clean bills and celebrate our victories around the country.

ALMA closed a few months ago.

New York State activists Annette OConnell (Bastard Nation treasurer) and Tim Monty-Wohlpart (Citizen Petition and the American Adoption Congress legislative director) knew Florence. Tim writes:

At the AAC, we recognize Florence as the founder of our human and civil rights movement. She will never be forgotten and will always have our love and deepest respect, and thanks.

Annette’s eulogy reads:

Rest easy, Florence. You  paved the way for all adopted people to search by placing that classified ad in the New York Times in 1971 looking to connect with other adoptees.  I have been proud to “stand on your shouldlers” as they say. Your badassery lit a fire that will never be extginguished. “We Pass this way but once. We make a mockery of life if we do not pursue our dreams, if we hedge against reality and know but half of what we are.”

Some Thoughts

I read The Search for Anna Fisher in 1980, shortly after I received my own OBC, which was never sealed (from me) since I was a pre-1964 Ohio adoptee. I believe I learned about Florence when I attended a Reunite adoptee search and support group meeting in Columbus, The meeting was huge. At least 35 adoptees with a handful of birthparents mixed in,(Birthparents search?) I believe until then I had known only one other adult adoptee–at least who was willing to admit their unhappy status. Now there was a whole room full of us!

It was fully understood back then that the personal couldn’t be achieved without the political. The meeting, then, was exciting and invigorating, with its three-pronged agenda, based on the model of the personal and the political: search and reunion and rights. Individuals telling their stories, sharing “underground” search advice, and group plans for legislation and other political actions.

This was, of course, before therapists with their Primal Wound Theory, healing exercises, affirmations, and weird adoptee retreats, with the sound of Ka-ching! dancing in their heads, hijacked much of the nascent political movement and severed adoptee rights and the systemic rot it sought to expose and destroy from the other two prongs.

Adoption-competent therapists (who could actually have been helpful) were few and far between. I can think of no more than  5 in the entire country in those days. Adoptee issues and “dysfunction,” defined by the non-adoption-competent therapeutocracy as “personal” not systemic problems, were targeted for treatment. Individual “solutions” (whatever therapists flung out) were the favored nostrum and adoptees were directed and even manipulated away from considering much less building a class-driven political movement that could demand and win blanket changes and give adoptees their own voice. Adoptee rights, then, became identified by adoptees and the public alike as a  “nice”  (at best) search and reunion movement PG stand alone, not a component of the larger civil rights movement  defined as full of ungrateful and angry adoptees.

To hear some people talk today, especially gasbag politicians and their gasbag special interest donors and friends, who have nothing to do with adoption, the adoptee rights movement is something new and (gasp!) radical, as scary to them as it was to the NYT ad-taker 52 years ago.

Class Bastard moves forward, but we can’t let the history of the movement and its pioneers be obscured and hidden like our own histories, identities, and records are.  We can’t let that work and history of fighters like Florence Fisher slide into the memory hole.

Annette wrote that we stand on Florence Fisher’s shoulders.

I add to that: those who come after us will stand on ours.

Bad assery, indeed!

Readings 

• Florence Anna Fisher Eigenfeld, 5/28/28-10/1/23 by Tim Monty-Wolhpart, Citizens Petition, October 1, 2023
• RIP: The Firebrand Behind Adoption Reform, Florence Fisher by Lorraine Dusky, Birth Mother/First Mother Forum, October 3, 2023
• Florence Fisher Advocate for Opening Adoption Records Dies at 95, by Clay Risen, New York Times Blog, October 10, 2023