Yesterday we posted an update about the disturbing treatment of adoptees by the Vermont House Judiciary Committee regarding H629, a bill that continues the state’s sealed and secret OBC law. The committee has refused to hear oral testimony on that bill from adoptees and prefers to get its views from politicians, lawyers, and adoptacrats. With our update was an Action Alert on how you can stand in solidarity with Class Bastard Vermont and demand that adoptee voices be heard. If you haven’t already done so, please go to that post and send an email to the committee. It will only take a couple of minutes.
Below is the email Bastard Nation sent to the committee.
Bastard Nation: The Adoptee Rights Organization
PO Box 4607
New Windsor, New York 12553-7845
bastards.org 614-795-6819 @BastardsUnite
bastardnation3@gmail.com
February 12, 2022
Dear Members of the House Judiciary Committee:
Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization is the largest adoptee civil rights organization in the United States. We support only full unrestricted access for all adopted persons, to their original birth certificates (OBC) and related documents.
We are disturbed at the lack of adoptee input in the recent hearings on H629. We received notice after our written testimony was submitted that these were information-gathering sessions, not genuine public hearings and that the information sought was from adoption “experts, ” apparently with no “self-interest.” In other words, a bill that affects adopted adults on the most intimate level was sussed not by the people directly affected by the bill, but by lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats, with supposedly no skin in the game. This makes my head spin! Who but adopted people are better equipped to be adoption experts than those of us who live adoption and its impact on us every day of our lives? As someone tweeted concerning these hearings: “If there are no adoptees speaking, there are no experts.”
It appears to us that the right of all adopted people to obtain their own Original Birth Certificate s (the right that every Not Adopted enjoys) has not been presented or framed correctly to the committee.
The concerns voiced by the “experts” and committee members have nothing to do with the restoration of our right to our own original birth certificates that the Vermont legislature took away 70 years ago. H629 is a bill that actually continues to codify favor and privilege for some Vermont-born adoptees. It does not restore the right of all the state’s adoptees to obtain their OBC.
H629 is a bad bill, created out of good intentions. Unfortunately, it is out of sync with current culture and best practice standards, much less your surrounding New England states. Even the American Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys agrees that all adoptees have a right to no only their OBC but all related documents with no restrictions or conditions.
The hearing discussions have centered on peripheral, concerns, even fears, irrelevant to the topic, while decentering adopted people and the content of the bill itself. To clarify:
- The right of all adopted people to their own birth certificates has nothing to do with open adoption, post-adoption contracts/contact which pertain only to minors; or alleged promises of “anonymity” to birthparents, which have gone unproven for 60 years, and if made were unethical and possibly illegal.
- It is not about search and reunion, which are personal choices that shouldn’t be mediated by the state.
- It is not about extended birthfamily members obtaining a copy of the OBC, though in some states they can if they can prove their lineal descent from a deceased adoptee.
- And it certainly is not about Positive Adoption Language.
Moreover, it has nothing to do with adoption agencies releasing “confidential” information since the OBC is a state-generated, held, and sealed document. I have never heard of an adoption agency being sued over such an allegation, and the only suit brought to stop a state from releasing OBCs without restriction was denied cert by the US Supreme Court more than 20 years ago. (Does v Oregon)
This, instead, is about the right of all Vermont-born adopted adults to obtain one sheet of paper–their own OBC, without state and third-party interference. This is it. One single document that belongs to them. H629 does not do this.
I urge the committee to re-think its hearing process and to hold at least one more hearing for the real experts to speak: adopted people. Limiting adoptees to submitted testimony not only denies the objects of H629 critical face-to-face communication with the committee, but it also invalidates our lived experience. It trivializes our rights. It silences adoptees and makes us invisible to the public and legislative eye. Mostly, it sends a bad message that the adopted people of Vermont don’t count. Let us speak!
We are happy to discuss this with your further. Thank you.
Yours truly,
Marley Greiner, Executive Chair
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Bastard Nation is dedicated to the recognition of the full human and civil rights of adult adoptees. Toward that end, we advocate the opening to adoptees, upon request at age of majority, of those government documents which pertain to the adoptee’s historical, genetic, and legal identity, including the unaltered original birth certificate and adoption decree. Bastard Nation asserts that it is the right of people everywhere to have their official original birth records unaltered and free from falsification. and that the adoptive status of any person should not prohibit him or her from choosing to exercise that right. We have reclaimed the badge of bastardy placed on us by those who would attempt to shame us; we see nothing shameful in having been born out of wedlock or in being adopted. Bastard Nation does not support mandated mutual consent registries or intermediary systems in place of unconditional open records, nor any other system that is less than access on demand to the adult adoptee, without condition, and without qualification
New York Adoptee Rights Coalition
