The technical issues are different in adoption, because the courts dealt with covenants by refusing to enforce them, and because real property, unlike people, last forever. So, preventing people from falsifying birth certificates into the future would mean something independent of fixing the past (even if old records are not fixed). Preventing covenants in the future wouldn’t have fixed the existing contracts, and could have grandfathered them into the future.

Politically, though, I fear that the absolutely justifiable right to unseal past records will delay the fixing of the injustice in the future. And, I speak as a bystander, who gets to hear from the average person, since I am uninvolved.

I am not ashamed of my daughter and I have no reason to accept anything less than compassion for what I went through.

PhoenixRising is quite right, it does happen. It sometimes happens from people you didn’t expect it from. It’s important that we stand strong and don’t let that shame make us vulnerable. After all it was partly that shame that made me feel I had to relinquish her in the first place.

I am proud to be L’s mother. She’s a beautiful girl. I’m deeply sad that I didn’t get to raise her but I am also overjoyed to have a second chance to know her. I will not be destroyed by this. I fight to be happy. I love her and want her to have a strong and vibrant mother.

Unlike Mirah, I HAVE known a birth mother who was shamed and rejected when she revealed the pregnancy and placement, just as she knew she would be shamed and abused had she chosen to raise her son. It does happen.

But as sad a story as that is, and I could go on, it has nothing to do with states’ sealing original birth records from adoptees and only adoptees.

Sealed records are a human rights violation. There is no right to be free from the consequences of what we do, but there is a right to know who we are and where we came from.

All this legal hooha contract talk is just that. Hooha. Urban legens. Myths.

As a mother who surrendered her child in 1986, I have always expected and wanted her to find me and for her to have knowledge of her birth. In fact, that knowledge was used as a stick to beat me into surrender with. I was told my daughters adoption would forever be “semi-open”. I trusted the agency. I believe them. I later learned it was a bogus outright lie told to me to get me to sign, to give me hope and allow me to believe that I mattered and that my existence would be shared with my daughter.

As anyone who knows my story can tell, this was not the case.

Wholeheartedly agree with LisaV, when does adoption stop becoming in the best interest of the child and in the best interest of the adoptive parents and the industry at large? Most likely as soon as those TPRS are signed.

Grrrr.

I think that first mothers who don’t want this are probably few and far between (it’s not like they had a choice about it when they placed and they chose sealed records), but as with other basic, civil rights, it isn’t about who WANTS what or what the popular vote says, it’s just about rights plain and simple. There is no excuse for restricting any adults’ access to their own legal and biological history when it is available.