Susan Perry, RIP: How Lucky We Were to Have You

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Maureen McCauley

I never met her in person, but I consider Susan Perry a friend, and I mourn her death today. Like me, she was a mom, a grandmother, a teacher, a writer. Unlike me (an adoptive parent), she was an adopted person, denied her original birth certificate and her medical history. Had she had access to her medical history, perhaps we would not be grieving today. That, to me, is a sobering reality.

She wrote a wonderful blog, Nanadays.blogpost,com. She wrote about her beloved family, two children and 6 grandchildren. She wrote about finding her two sisters just last September. She wrote about the basic human right all people should have to their own birth certificates. She testified about the adoptee birthright bill in New Jersey, writing about it in her blog: “Every adopted child is worthy of truth and respect, and, as an adult, should certainly be entitled to equal treatment under the law.” She was a vital voice with Lost Daughters, who called her “our friend, our colleague, and, most importantly of all, our sister.” She was involved with the New Jersey Coalition for Adoption Reform and Education (NJCARE), and with the Adoptee Rights Coalition. So many people will miss her.

In recent weeks, Susan’s daughter wrote on her blog, expressing eloquently the vibrancy and depth with which her mother lived her life. I wrote about Susan last October, in my post Information and Access: An American Civil Right Denied. I send my condolences to Susan’s family. She will be missed, and many of us will carry on her legacy to provide basic civil rights to adopted people.

Information and Access: An American Civil Right Denied

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Maureen McCauley

Like me, Susan Perry is a grandmother, with children and grandchildren whom she adores. She also has many family members to whom she is not biologically related.

Susan Perry is an adoptee. I am an adoptive parent.

Unlike Susan, I have access to my birth certificate and my medical history, without even needing to think twice about it. I would take it for granted, surely, except that I know people whose lives have been held hostage, who have faced grave illnesses that could have been treated differently, who have been told to just accept the way things are–they are denied access to their own birth certificates.

And we both agree that adopted people have a basic, civil, human right to know who they are. Access to original birth certificates remains an absurd issue in this country. We saw some progress in Washington state recently, though it’s not what it could or should have been. This week, legislation made its way through the Pennsylvania legislature. Information about Pennsylvania is available here. These are glimmers of progress, some good news in an arena that has been too often met with opposition from legislators, lawyers, adoption agencies, and adoption lobbyists.

Susan writes this from her heart: I wish every adoption attorney, agency official, legislator and religious group that opposes adoptee rights would read this post and then tell me to my face why they think it is their right to deny me my own original birth certificate and make it difficult for me to ascertain the basic truths about my own life. How can they not see how discriminatory it is to treat an entire minority group differently by law than we treat everyone else — especially now that we have hard data to show that adoptee access bills without restrictions work best for all concerned parties?

I wish the same thing, as a grandmother, a mom, a daughter.

Read the rest of Susan’s powerful post here.

This is not an adoptee-only fight, though they should be the leaders. I urge my fellow adoptive parents, my fellow grandparents, all grandparents of adopted children, all siblings of adoptees, all partners of adoptees to join me in urging access to original birth certificates without restriction. The world hasn’t ended in Kansas or Alaska, where adoption records have never been sealed. In Oregon, Alabama, New Hampshire, and Maine, adult adoptees can access their records. In these 6 states, adopted adults have the right to access or not access their own records.

May Susan Perry and others be allowed to access a basic human right–to know who they are. May we all recognize that we can do better than secrecy and shame. May grandmothers (and others) not suffer through physical and other illnesses because they are denied basic truths about their own lives.

Update: I will write more specifically about this, but for those looking for ways to help improve access to original birth certificates, here’s some quick information. Essentially, this is a state issue, so you can look into what your individual state’s policy is. Check my post “OBC Outrage: Adoptive Parents?” as well. Good sources of information are the American Adoption Congress, Adoptee Rights Coalition, and Bastard Nation.

Also, DNA technology is an option for some adoptees to fill in their medical history. Certainly it’s not a substitute for firsthand knowledge, and it’s absurd (again) that an adoptee should have to pay for this information. Nonetheless, services such as 23AndMe, Family Tree DNA, and others are available. More information is available here.

Human Rights in Adoption: Blog Action Day 2013

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Maureen McCauley

Courtesy of: http://www.blogactionday.org

As part of a global community connection, Blog Action Day (today, October 16) means that over 2000 bloggers from 126 countries are posting today about Human Rights. I am participating for the first time, and I encourage you to look at the Blog Action Day website and the Blog Action Day Facebook page: lots of fascinating, provocative, important posts.

Human rights–an enormous topic–resonates with me in terms of adoption for these reasons:

(1) Adoptees have the right to know who they are. Talk about a basic human right. All adoptees deserve access to their original birth certificates. Yet many, here in the United States, are denied that right. I’ve written about OBCs here, and I will continue to speak out about it.

(2) International adoptees brought to the United States for purposes of adoption should automatically be granted US citizenship. It is beyond shameful that this is not an automatic process, that our US government is still dithering over it, and that international adoptees have been deported. See my posts “Citizenship Isn’t Automatic for Internationally Adopted Children to the US?” and “All They Will Call You Will Be Deportees.”

(3) The United States should ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. According to UNICEF, “The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the first legally binding international instrument to incorporate the full range of human rights—civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. In 1989, world leaders decided that children needed a special convention just for them because people under 18 years old often need special care and protection that adults do not. The leaders also wanted to make sure that the world recognized that children have human rights too.”

Disappointingly, while the United States helped draft the Convention and signed it in 1995, we have not ratified it. The other countries which have also not ratified are Somalia and South Sudan.

I call for the US to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

(4) All children have the right to be raised in a safe, loving family, preferably the one they were born into. Adoption is an option for children, and must always be done in a transparent, ethical way, with integrity and compassion. The voices of first parents must be heard, along with those of adopted persons: it is a human right that they should no longer be marginalized or victimized in the adoption process.

A Basic Civil Right, Still Denied

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Maureen McCauley

It’s been a big week for Supreme Court judgements. We are reminded of old ones, and celebrating new ones: black people and women can vote. Asian people can marry white people, or Asian or black or whatever combo. Gay people can marry other gay people.

Those are significant civil rights victories.

How long will it take until another basic civl right is allowed? The United States continues to acquiesce to an enormous violation of civil rights: denying access to thousands of adopted adults, by refusing them full access to their own birth certificate.

No other group of citizens is denied such a basic right. As of today, only 7 states allow adopted adults to know who they are, and only 3 states allow unrestricted access.

It is way past time to allow adopted adults the right to their birth certificates.

Parents, grandparents, siblings, partners, friends, spouses, everyone: If you’ve been pleased with any of these landmark civil rights decisions, join us in insisting that adopted adults have the right to something the rest of us take for granted: our birth certificates.

Get more information here: Adoptee Rights Coalition

Standards of Practice for Adoptive Parents: It’s Time (Part One)

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Maureen McCauley

On May 21, I presented my workshop titled “Standards of Practice for Adoptive Parents: Ethics, Economics, and Responsibilities” at the annual conference of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services in New York City.

(A few disclaimers and a bit of context: I was the first executive director of JCICS, from 1994 to 2000. I have no connection with them anymore, except insofar as some of the folks from those days are good people and remain good friends. JCICS has changed a lot since I was there, from an umbrella group of international adoption agencies to a more broadly-focused nonprofit for global child welfare issues. I am guessing most of the conference attendees were adoption agency-affiliated, mostly administrative and executive staff. My workshop was a PowerPoint presentation; if anyone wants the slides, I can share them. My plan here in my blog is to share the main points, providing narrative similar to what I provided at the conference.)

There is a perfect storm in adoption right now:

* The number of children being internationally adopted has dropped dramatically, but the number of children needing families remains high.

* Adoption agencies are closing, including those certified by the Council on Accreditation.

* There is an increased volume of adult adoptee voices being heard, and their experiences and insights are becoming better known and respected.

* There is an explosion of Internet postings about fraud in international adoptions.

* There is some assent within the Christian evangelical community–recent big players in the international adoption arena–regarding fraud.

* Increasing numbers of adoptive parents are searching for their internationally adopted children’s first/birth families privately, after adoption, without agency assistance or knowledge, and while their children are little.

* Awareness and connections with birth/first families are increasing.

Given all this, given this perfect storm, where do we begin?

These are, to me, the minimal Standards:

1. Citizenship. All adoptive parents–whether they adopted in 1956 or in June 2013–must ensure that their internationally adopted children are citizens of the United States. It is an ethical outrage that this is even necessary to discuss (again and again, still). Read here for more information.

2. Access to Original Birth Certificate. All adoptive parents should make every effort for their children to have access to their original birth certificate. Whether a child is adopted within the US or internationally, they should have access to their original birth certificates. I realize that this is difficult (if not impossible) for genuinely abandoned children. Some children don’t arrive in the US with birth certificates because their birth was not recorded in any official way. Many children however do have birth certificates. Still. All of them deserve access to this basic, too-often-taken-for-granted legal information: the birth certificate that non-adopted people have, that provides them with basic, vital information about who they are. It’s a human right.

3. DNA Testing. All adoptive parents should be aware of options regarding DNA testing, and offer these options to their children. DNA testing is relatively cheap these days, and provides an astonishing amount of information. Most non-adopted people have a decent medical history, a good sense for what runs in the family. Adoptees often do not. DNA testing would fill in some of those missing blanks at the doctor’s office. DNA testing can also connect adopted people to their birth family, or to more distant relatives. DNA testing also can let people know if they are Sudanese, Irish, German, Colombian, or a combination thereof.

4. Role Models/Mentors. All adoptive parents should make every effort for their adopted children to have role models around them who look like them, as well as mentors and friends who are adoptees. Real people, real friends, folks who are over to the house for coffee, parties, barbecues. Ideally, these people are in the adoptive parents’ lives and community prior to adoption. Access to role models and to adoptees as mentors can be especially important when kids become teenagers; it’d be great to have them while they’re still in elementary school.

The last two items from my PowerPoint slide above, Guidelines for Connections with First Families and Consideration of New Paradigms in International Adoption, will be the subject of an upcoming post. I will also add additional Standards of Practice.

Advocacy in Olympia, Part 1: The Value of the OBC

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Maureen McCauley

Adoptees, birth mothers, adoptive parents–rallying together for OBC access 3/21/13. I’m on the far left.

Washington State is known to be progressive: gay marriage, legalization of marijuana, more recycling buckets than you can shake a stick at (Yard Waste). So it’s surprising, in some ways, that the debate over allowing adult adoptees to access their original birth certificates (OBC) still swirls.

Around the world, most industrialized nations allow adult adoptees unrestricted access to their OBC as a matter of civil rights. (My daughters from Ethiopia arrived here with their OBC.) That’s not the case here in the US. Two states, Alaska and Kansas, have never sealed adoption records, meaning that adopted people have always had the right to obtain their OBC. New Hampshire, Maine, Alabama, and Oregon currently allow adult adoptees to get their OBC, without restrictions. Most other states allow some sort of access, often fairly complicated, subject to some sort of veto (by the first/birth/biological mother)–and that is unfair.

No legislation exists (or has ever existed) by the federal government or any state government that guarantees privacy to birth parents following an adoptive placement. None.

Adult adoptees are the only group of Americans that are denied the right to know who they are, a basic human and civil right.

Whether they choose to exercise that right is highly individual, but there is no doubt in my mind that they should have the option. Adoption is undeniably complex. Adoptees and birth families should have support and resources available to them, if and when they decide to search. A fundamental right, though, is access to one’s identity.

Last Thursday, I drove from Seattle to Olympia, Washington’s state capitol, about an hour and a half away. The Senate Human Services and Corrections Committee was holding a hearing on 2 adoption-related bills, and, as an adoptive parent, I testified about both. The OBC legislation generated a lot of interest and testimony, from a few adoptive parents (older than me, even), several adoptees who ranged in age from mid-20’s to 70, and several birth mothers. We (adoptive parents, adoptees, birth mothers) were on the same page, urging legislators to allow adult adoptees unrestricted access to their original birth certificates. It’s overdue.

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