Behavior: Unsealing the Records

“I think it ranks as an even more exciting day than my wedding day or the days I gave birth to my two children.”

So wrote a young California woman who had been adopted at birth, about her first meeting at the age of 25 with her natural mother. Her experience was very unusual—the vast majority of the 3 million to 5 million adoptees in the U.S. do not know who their natural parents are because the laws in virtually all states require that their original birth records be sealed. Behind these laws is the still widely held presumption that all parties involved in an adoption—the usually illegitimate child, the typically unwed teen-age mother, the adoptive parents —need the protective mantle of anonymity about the adopted person’s origins as they start their new lives.

Lately that presumption has come under increasing assault, mostly from grown-up adoptees with a deep-seated need to know who they are. One of them, New York Housewife Florence Fisher, who wrote a book about her ultimately successful 20-year hunt for her natural parents (The Search for Anna Fisher), in 1971 organized a group called ALMA (Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Association) to help in searches for parents and to try to change existing statutes. Based in New York City, with branches in Los Angeles, Chicago and Fort Lauderdale, ALMA now has 1,800 members, mostly people looking for their original parents and natural mothers looking for the children they gave up for adoption.

Now a new research project, although not yet completed, seems to make another case for cautious liberalization of the laws. The inquiry was begun in late 1972 by U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Arthur Sorosky, who noticed that those of his patients who had been adopted tended to have special identity problems. Enlisting the help of Social Workers Reuben Pannor and Annette Baran of the Vista Del Mar Child-Care Service, Sorosky solicited opinions on the open-records question from adoptees, as well as from natural and adoptive parents. The trio received 600 letters, many of which they followed up with interviews. The response of the natural parents was often passionate. Wrote one mother: “No cross given us on this earth is worse than not knowing what your baby is like.” Reaction of those few adoptees who have managed to find their original parents ranged from “disillusioned” to ecstatic. The majority felt “that they had personally benefited from the reunion, no matter what the outcome was.” But adoptive parents were often deeply hurt that their children, even as adults, wanted to seek out their origins. The grief and rage shown by one adoptive mother, wrote her daughter, “were the same feelings a betrayed wife might experience toward her husband.”

In a jointly written paper presented by Pannor last fortnight at the annual National Conference of Jewish Communal Service in San Francisco, the researchers offered an overview of the pilot study and suggested that “adoptive agencies should begin to re-evaluate their position in regard to the sealed record,” at least as far as adult adoptees are concerned. This may still be minority opinion. The Child Welfare League and its 400 member agencies continue to support the sealed-record policy. But Florence Fisher, now off on a promotional tour for the Fawcett World Library paperback edition of her book, says that “People today are finding secrecy evil. They are more open and they want to know the truth.” She sees a “tremendous” change going on in adopted people’s desire to learn about themselves. If this is true, the reasons may be the new hostility to secrecy and the lessening stigma of illegitimate birth, along with the welling up of a natural human desire to answer the question: Who am I?