Adoptees to Pa.: Birth certificate access a 'human right'

When Erin Campbell, of Delaware County, gave birth to her first child six years ago, the newfound responsibilities of motherhood shed light on a problem she'd never given much thought: As an adoptee, she knew nothing about her birth family's medical history.

"When you have children, you’re asked a thousand times by your doctor about your background and your medical history, and I realized I didn’t have any of that," Campbell told PhillyVoice. "If something were to happen, God forbid, I don't want to scramble for that information."

In March, Campbell launched a Facebook campaign in hopes of discovering her birth mother -- she's managed to find a name, she says, but can't be sure if the spelling is correct, proving to be a simple-but-major wrinkle in her search efforts. Campbell is one of many playing the role of Internet sleuth in an attempt to keep her kids healthy.

For her, finding her mother is not about a grand reunion. She's emotionally detached from the notion of a made-for-television reunion, the kind that tends to dominate the adoption narrative. Quite simply, Campbell just wants to know her medical history.

And the key to unlocking that history? Her birth certificate.

Why a Birth Certificate?

Understand this: Pennsylvania's adoptees aren't muddling through life without a birth certificate, but they are doing so without their original birth certificate.

Under Pennsylvania law, an adoptee's original birth certificate is sealed away by the commonwealth the moment the ink settles on adoption paperwork. An adoptee is then issued a new, altered birth certificate containing the names of the adoptive parents. That piece of paperwork is used as the official certificate of birth. The reason is innocent enough: It's comforting to the adoptive parents who feel the child is their own and, in practice, prevents endless questions from, say, an elementary school when registering a child with different parents listed on a birth certificate.

The problem is, those little kindergarteners grow up.

The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services told PhillyVoice that about 90,000 birth records remain sealed in the commonwealth. Many of those belong to adult adoptees.

To gain access to those original certificates, folks like Campbell are challenging a law passed in 1984 that disallowed adoptees from requesting their original birth certificates. The legislation was largely an experimental measure spearheaded by anti-abortionist and then-Delaware County Rep. Stephen Freind. His reasoning was that increasing confidentiality for birth parents would encourage adoptions over abortions. Advocates of open records say that re-opening access to the certificates is merely a corrective measure to a failed, decades-old social experiment.

Now, advocates are taking to the Pennsylvania Legislature to make that correction.

House Bill 162

House Bill 162 is legislation reintroduced in February by state Rep. Kerry Benninghoff that would, in one fell swoop, open original birth certificates for Pennsylvania's adoptees. It includes a "contact preference" system that, in an effort to be sensitive to the concerns of nervous birth parents, gives them the ability to indicate whether they welcome direct contact from the adoptee, are willing to communicate through an intermediary or prefer no contact at all.

Regardless of their communication preference, parents are required to submit updated medical information.

The most recent effort to modernize adoption law in Pennsylvania, Act 101, was signed into law by Gov. Tom Corbett in 2010 and set out to streamline the longwinded search for birth parents and adoptees through a registry. The registry, the Pennsylvania Adoption Information Registry (PAIR), requires agencies to submit medical information for future access from today's adoptees. However, for older adoptees, the registry has proven less effective: As a volunteer-only system, it depends on both the birth parents and the adoptee to submit paperwork to the registry, as well as pay fees that can range from $25 to $600 by the time the intermediary process ends -- with no guarantee of a match.

According to data from the Department of Human Services, dated March 9, PAIR has had 338 adoptees register, along with 312 birth parents. Intermediaries, which consist of agencies paid to do Campbell's type of do-it-yourself detective work, have facilitated a mere 15 matches since the registry's inception in April 2011.

The system in place just isn't working. And, setting aside the debate over medical records, advocates cite an even more powerful reason for House Bill 162's passage: Human rights.

A Right to Your Roots

"It's a human right to know who you are and where you come from," Izzy Faden, an adoptee from Northeast Philadelphia who's spent 15 years looking for his birth parents, told PhillyVoice. "If you decide to give birth to a child, you sign away your right to privacy. If you [want privacy], you should have had an abortion. And that sounds cold and callous, but the point I’m making is that you can’t say, ‘I’m not going to allow that person to know who he is, because I don’t want my secret out.' It’s just wrong."

Faden, 53, has felt grief over his lack of identity. Like with Campbell, it's not necessarily about a glorious reunion, but a filling-in of holes -- for her, it's more about the medical history; for him, however, it's about so much more. He feels, in short, like a second-class citizen -- the commonwealth's "dirty little secret," he says.

"I’ve had a lot of mental anguish over this through the years – it screws with your head," he says. "It’s a major identity crisis. When you have no idea where you came from and you’re taught all your life to just be grateful that somebody adopted you, that’s a real mind-f---."

Family therapist and adoption specialist Abby Ruder, based in Wyndmoor, Montgomery County, told PhillyVoice that denying access to an original birth certificate belittles the experience of an adoptee - the implicit message from the commonwealth being that they're perpetual children who can't handle the information. It insists that there's a secret worth sealing.

The consequence, then, is the "anguish" adoptees like Faden report.

"I’ve had a lot of mental anguish over this through the years – it screws with your head. ... It’s a major identity crisis. When you have no idea where you came from and you’re taught all your life to just be grateful that somebody adopted you, that’s a real mind-f---," Izzy Faden, adoptee from Northeast Philadelphia.

"There used to be this old adage that 'What you don't know won't hurt you,' and what we've learned over the years, is that's simply not true," Ruder says. "It’s a fundamental human right that we all have the ability to know how we got into the world, how we got here, and it’s a very integral part of our identity development. There’s no reason to have these kinds of secrets and mysteries."

Much of why this issue is rising to the surface, says Ruder, is because the stigma associated with women having children out of wedlock has diminished in recent decades -- no one's sending Little Susie to Florida for six months on "vacation."

That sort of shame, she says, was long perpetuated by agencies that, in decades past, were happy to have influence over the moral conundrums faced by birth parents.

"Agencies used to enjoy playing the role of God by moving a family from one place to another," she says. "And thank God we've moved on from that."

The Opposition

Yet, it's not exactly clear that everyone has moved on from that mindset.

The staunchest opponent of the bill has been the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference (PACC), the public-affairs arm of Pennsylvania's Catholic dioceses, which advocates confidentiality for birth parents and stands by the unproven claim that opening birth records will increase the abortion rate. For perspective, states like Illinois, Ohio and New Jersey have opened their records in recent years. So far, there's no obvious correlation between abortion rates and open birth records laws, and the little evidence available suggests a decrease in abortion rates.

The PACC issued this statement to PhillyVoice to explain its stance on the legislation:

Our concern about HB 162 is the unilateral release of identifying information without the consent of all parties involved in an adoption. ... Many, many more abortions occur in Pennsylvania than infant adoptions, but Pennsylvania does not ask women why they make that choice. Our agencies have worked with rape victims and sex trafficking victims who want to give a good life to their babies, but want to heal and move on from the crimes committed against them. I’ve heard about at least two instances where rape victims chose adoption over abortion because of the confidentiality. The intermediary system gave them peace of mind. Parents wishing for privacy in an adoption are unwilling to come forward to testify against a proposal like HB 162, so their stories are often untold.

To be clear, there is no documentation of the abortion-to-adoption ratio because adoption agencies, in general, aren't actually required to report successfully placed adoptions to the commonwealth, making the math a guesstimate at best. Moreover, it's difficult to track an adoptee at all after their birth certificate is altered.

The conference representative also clarifies that, despite PACC's focus on preserving confidentiality for birth parents, it does not necessarily discourage those seeking their birth parents from doing so, but does value the use of "skilled counselors" who serve as intermediaries and allow for a more "positive experience" and "happy" connections.

Pennsylvania's Catholic Charities Counseling & Adoption Services charges a fee for adoptees who seek identifying information about their birth parents. PACC told PhillyVoice those services "usually" operate at a loss, but advocates argue that the conference would lose money from the passage of House Bill 162.

The Birth Mother

The glaring hole in all of this is the casual mention of birth parents in the abstract.

"I get really upset when I hear agency personnel try to speak on behalf of all birth mothers," Carolyn Hoard, birth mother and Delaware representative for the American Adoption Congress, told PhillyVoice. "I don't think they have the right to do that. They say there are a lot of birth mothers who don't want to step forward, but we speak to a lot who do want their names released to their son or daughter."

What organizations like the Catholic Conference presuppose, she says, is that all birth parents want privacy -- especially people like her, who faced shame and feared tarnishing her family's reputation when deciding whether to give up her son.

But the reality, according to a 2011 analysis of data from five states with open birth records, is that only one in 2,000 birth parents make a no-contact request with their child under modern open access laws.

If birth parents are hiding from their children, it's not obvious.

"As a birth mother, you want to make sure that after all those years your son or daughter is OK -- you never knew if they were sick or safe," Hoard explains.

She gave birth to her son in 1964 in Florida, which has birth certificate access restrictions similar to those in Pennsylvania. In the '90s, after attending an adoption conference in Philadelphia, she decided to try and find her son through Catholic charities that had worked on her adoption case decades earlier; the charities notified her that her son had tried reaching out to her, but by the time she realized as much, her son had died of meningitis.

"His wife got in touch with me and told me she thought our contact was something he needed, that he was troubled in some ways about being adopted, but he passed away before anything happened," she says. "I don't want to see adoptees have to go through what he had to go through."

A Tumor in the System

Amanda Woolston, a licensed Kennett Square-based social worker, founder of Pennsylvania Adoptee Rights and adoptee, is the horror story Campbell likely imagines when worrying about not having medical history for her kids.

Woolston was diagnosed with a benign tumor under her neck at age 21 and, scared to death, sought out her birth family for medical records; upon finding them, she was immediately enlightened that her situation -- though frightening -- was not all that unusual.

"The first question they asked me when I found them was, 'So, when was your first tumor?'" Woolston says.

Woolston was fortunate to have been born in Tennessee, one of 13 states that offers open access to birth records. But had she been born in Pennsylvania, she emphasizes, she would have been pulling a Campbell -- circulating a Facebook photo in an uphill climb to find her birth parents.

States with Open Birth Certificate Access Laws
Alabama -- 2000
Alaska (always open)
Colorado -- 2014 (effective 2016)
Delaware -- 1999
Illinois -- 2010
Kansas (always open)
Maine -- 2009
New Hampshire -- 2005
New Jersey -- 2014 (effective January 2017)
Ohio -- 2014 (effective March 2015)
Oregon -- 2000
Rhode Island -- 2011
Tennessee -- 1999

That she can access her records and Campbell can't, then, is an issue of inequality and an indication, she says, of larger failures in the adoption system that get overlooked. Some agencies, she says, might not want legislation like House Bill 162 passed out of fear that less-than-ethical past practices might be found-out.

“So many adoption issues get swept under the rug because they’re not pleasant to listen to. … No one wants to believe we have work left to do with children and adults' rights post-adoption, and it’s uncomfortable to think that this institution that has a great, shining reputation in society actually has work left to do," Woolston says. "But children, adults and families depend on us to be uncomfortable and listen to those stories."

Looking Ahead: Will it Pass?

Benninghoff, the sponsor of House Bill 162, has made an effort to explain the legislation as simply as possible to his legislative colleagues.

"Fundamentally, it’s about getting all Pa.-born citizens the same right. It’s as simple as that," Benninghoff told PhillyVoice. "I’m bewildered that, in 2015, we would want to jeopardize someone’s health -- future generations' health -- when we can be very non-descriptive and discreet in providing medical information."

"No one wants to believe we have work left to do with children and adults' rights post-adoption, and it’s uncomfortable to think that this institution that has a great, shining reputation in society actually has work left to do," Amanda Woolston.

Certainly, efforts will still need to be made after any legislation is passed to organize reunions and, more importantly, educate birth parents and adoptees alike that the law is even in place. Advocates like Woolston and Benninghoff are careful to say that access to a birth certificate isn't a one-way ticket to your birth parents or your medical records.

As for the Catholic Conference's latest argument against the bill, Benninghoff cites it as one of many made in recent years to delay legislation.

“Obviously, we are empathetic to anyone in those [sexually violent] situations -- those of us who are put up for adoption do not always know what situation we were conceived under, and we are all also cognizant that someone made the choice for us to have life, and we're very respectful of that," Benninghoff says. "But part of me questions in my mind, after the amount of years we’ve been working on this, that we haven’t heard from one person in that incident. With the ability to communicate -- I get a lot of anonymous letters in my office from a whole array of issues -- I can’t imagine with today’s technology that we have not heard that, and the only group of individuals who’ve raised that is the Catholic Conference."

Benninghoff is optimistic that the bill will pass through the House and says he plans to loop in Gov. Tom Wolf sooner rather than later.

Because, he says, "It would be nice for Pennsylvania to not be the last state to act on this."