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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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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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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The bill has been transmitted to the House, where it faces skeptical Republican leadership and may not even be brought up for consideration. We need to let the Iowa House of Representatives know that this bill does not work and should not be brought up for debate. We particularly need to get that point across to House Republican leadership.
Continue readingGreg Luce, director of the Adoptee Rights Law Center hit another one out of the ballpark today with The Truth about Florida. The truth about Florida is this: no OBC access bill will get through …
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Bastard Nation is a proud partner organization in the New York Adoptee Rights Coalition, along with the Adoptee Rights Law Center and the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York. Plus strategic partner Reclaim the Records
Bastard Nation is a proud partner in the Texas Adoptee Rights Coalition, along with Equality for Adoption, Gladney Adoptees for Rights and Equality, and the Adoptee Rights Law Center. Plus strategic partner Reclaim the Records