What Price Adoption Security?

When both Planned Parenthood and Right to (Interfere in Your) Life agree on a policy, you know it's a sign of the apocalypse.

From the CBS station in Newark:

It’s a big step forward for a historic and controversial adoption bill. Lawmakers approved a plan Tuesday to unseal birth records for adoptees in New Jersey.

But some critics said it could encourage abortion, reports CBS 2’s Tony Aiello.

“Every time my kids did something for school, they’d ask me what nationality are we. I’d have to say, I don’t know. It was a good experience growing up with the parents that I had, but I still think it’s owed to me to know where I came from,” adoptee Patti Spiegel said.

Like many who were adopted Spiegel is anxious to learn about her biological parents.

“I would say it’s a burning curiosity,” she said.

And it might be satisfied by the Adoption Rights bill just passed by the New Jersey Legislature, which would allow adults who went through so-called “closed adoptions” to see their birth certificates, learn the names of their parents and begin tracing their family medical histories.

“So if somebody has a family history of glaucoma they know what to check for and that could be very good for them,” said Assemblyman Vincent Prieto, D-Hudson County.

Opposition to the bill came mostly from New Jersey’s Catholic bishops and right-to-life groups, who feared the loss of anonymity would sway some pregnant women against adoption.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark spokesman Jim Goodness said Catholic charities arranged thousands of adoptions, promising anonymity.

“There are women and men who have been involved in the adoption process for generations who are now having their privacy taken away from them,” Goodness said.

The bill provides a mechanism for biological parents to have their names blanked out, as long as they provide cultural and medical history details.

Bastard Nation dissects the opposition:

Most ideological opposition organizes the debate around central issues which are actually peripheral to adoptee rights. Both Planned Parenthood and Right to Life oppose open records because they feel that access to or frequency of abortion will be affected by changes in the law. Planned Parenthood and other feminist organizations have asserted that permanently sealed records are a reproductive choice equivalent to the medical confidentiality of abortion. The state chapters of the ACLU that have come out against open records have used a tortured argument based on non-existent privacy rights that neither the general public nor legislators have taken very seriously. Concerted outreach and education is effective in neutralizing this opposition, both with the general public and within the oppositional organization itself.

Hat tip to emailer Wil, who writes:

"My birth father was only able to contact me because my birth mother had kept detailed records of my whereabouts. I have been communicating with my birth father weekly for almost 30 years now. It has been invaluable for me to know my birth family's health history. I have also learned that many of my interests are genetically based.

One must question the motives of The National Council for Adoption, Planned Parenthood and the other anti-freedom of information groups that are against open access to birth records."

I am not an adoptee, nor have I been a principal on either side of an adoption. As a First Amendment absolutist, I demand disclosure, but as a civil liberties activist, I defer to personal privacy. I have to hope that any adoptee disclosure law manages to thread the needle of giving adoptees needed information while protecting birth families.